Those adjectives notoriously admit of various meanings. Let’s apply some common uses of the terms conservative, liberal, and moderate. The Catholic Church has a “conservative” attitude toward fundamental human institutions, values, and ways of behaving—to human dignity, marriage and family, social life, and government, for example. The Church is rightly said to be “conservative” in its defense of these basic human realities because it wants to conserve them.
At the same time, Catholic social teaching is an aspect of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel involves radical conversion and liberation from sin. All is not right with man. Sin deeply affects human life and social institutions. If “liberal” is a word used to refer to someone who favors change in order to “liberate” people from social evils, then we can say there is a deeply “liberal” dimension to Catholic social teaching.
And, of course, we can think of a “moderate” as one who stands between extremes. Catholic social teaching moderates between an inappropriate conservatism, which holds on to attitudes, values, ways of acting, and institutions that ought to change, and inappropriate liberalism, which doesn’t promote genuine liberation but undermines or outright attacks things that ought not to change.
Whether a given teaching of the Church is conservative, liberal, or moderate depends on the values, activities, and institutions of a given society. What would be conservative in one society might be liberal or moderate in another. Insisting that marriage is a social institution uniting one man and one woman in an exclusive, permanent, life-sharing relationship ordered to children is a conservative idea in our society today. But the same idea might be liberal in a culture where polygamy and concubinage are common and longstanding practices.
Sometimes when people claim that Catholic social teaching isn’t actually conservative or actually liberal, they mean that the proper understanding of Catholic teaching, and the best application of it, won’t lead to conservative or liberal positions. Yet it can happen that Catholic teaching properly understood and applied will result in relatively conservative or liberal (or moderate) stances on key issues in a given society at a particular time.
To take a fanciful example: in the fictional totalitarian society of Orwell’s 1984, a Catholic who wanted to alter society radically to respect human rights and freedom would be a liberal. A Catholic living in Orwell’s world before the rise of its totalitarianism who resisted the emergence of Big Brother would take a conservative position, because he would seek to conserve the good in the world of his time and oppose changing it.
In the real world, when the Church opposed racial segregation in the U.S. during the 1960s it adopted a relatively “liberal” stance. When today the Church insists that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and thus opposes treating same-sex union as “marriage,” she takes a relatively conservative position.
Catholic teaching can, therefore, be described as conservative or liberal based in part on the values of the society in which the Church finds itself. The Church can also be deemed liberal on some issues in a given society while characterized as conservative on others. Thus, the proper understanding of Catholic teaching can sometimes lead to conservative or liberal stances on particular issues in a particular historical situation. In this sense, the Church’s teaching is not “above” or “beyond” being accurately characterized as conservative or liberal (or moderate), even if it remains true that Church teaching doesn’t as a whole require alignment with conservative or liberal (or moderate) positions.
Finally, we must note that sometimes good, informed, and equally committed Catholics may legitimately disagree about how properly to apply the Church teaching they both affirm, with someone taking a more liberal approach while another person adopts a more conservative stance, and someone else embraces a moderate position. Committed Catholics aren’t always going to agree. It’s not always going to be clear whether there is a single Catholic position on an issue, much less whether the Catholic position is liberal or conservative (or moderate). Nevertheless, sometimes there are settled Catholic positions, and Catholics ought to embrace these positions, regardless of whether others deem the positions as conservative, liberal, or moderate.
This is an excerpt from Mark’s new booklet, 20 Answers: Catholic Social Teaching, on sale now from Catholic Answers Press.