Same Roots, Different Flowers: How one Catholic Social Teaching led to radically opposed prudential judgements

A chapter in a book published by Ethics Press:  The COVID-19 Pandemic Collection: Ethical Challenges and Considerations, edited by Eleftheria Egel and Cheryl Patton 

1. Introduction

In March 2020, I obeyed and defended the newly announced anti-COVID-19 lockdowns. The endorsement should have surprised me, as my study of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) had led me to be cautious about assertive modern governments. I had even given talks and written an essay (Hadas, 2019) on the topic.[1] However, when this crisis arrived, I was no different from most of my frightened compatriots. I trusted the government.

The trust did not last. By June, preliminary reading had persuaded me that the principal mandated “non-pharmaceutical interventions” – lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, travel restrictions, and mandatory masking – had little or no scientific support, were contrary to the previously accepted canons of public health, and were causing significant harm. Subsequent study and events have only strengthened my convictions, while the list of public policy aberrations has lengthened to include a reckless and divisive approach to vaccines. [2] I am now a strong proponent of what I call the massive misjudgement narrative of the response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

I believe that CST supports my conclusion. I see in this worldview a rejection, implicit but unequivocal, of the standard heroic narrative of the anti-Covid policies. Some students of CST share my interpretation.[3] However, many others do not. Indeed, the disagreement starts at the top. Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church, has steadily called for faithful obedience to all government-ordered restrictions and mandates related to COVID-19.[4] The bishops who report to him have almost all followed their boss’s lead.

One exception was Daniel Fernández of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, who told his flock that “what the pharmaceutical companies or drug regulatory agencies say is in no way a dogma of faith”. The Vatican hastily removed Fernández from his office. (Catholic News Agency, 2022).

That sort of treatment is likely to discourage episcopal rebellion. However, strict enforcement hardly seems necessary. There are no signs of major Catholic discontent with the Vatican line. On the contrary, the near-unanimity of the hierarchy has largely been mirrored in Catholic academic and media circles.[5] Even Catholics who are generally critical of Francis have mostly accepted this part of his teaching.

My dissent puts me in the difficult position of claiming a deeper understanding of the social teaching than most of its authoritative interpreters. Am I really more Catholic than the Pope? The current essay is an effort to answer that question.

I will proceed as follows. In the next section, I introduce some basic principles of CST. The third section discusses how the social teaching responds to modern technology and the fourth discusses how much obedience the governed owe to their governments. The fifth section goes over four divergences in Catholic responses to the anti-pandemic policies. I conclude with a brief defence of the enduring practical value of CST.

2. Pandemic-relevant Catholic Social Teaching

Catholic Social Teaching is the Catholic Church’s official response to the political, social, cultural, and economic innovations of the modern world.[6] Its most authoritative expression is a series of encyclicals, which are documents written by popes (or at least issued with their signatures). The first CST encyclical was Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891, and the most recent is Francis’s 2020 Fratelli Tutti.

A great deal has changed in the world since 1891, and the Catholic Church has learned from those developments, more or less willingly and more or less completely. As should be expected from a teaching that aims to respond to current challenges, it has evolved in both emphases and practical judgements. As should be hoped for a teaching that claims to be based on the unchanging truths of human nature and God’s Creation, its fundamental principles remain constant.

Before listing five of those principles, I want to mention the claimed sources of CST’s authority. Christian revelation, aided by human reason, provides the fundamental understanding of human moral nature as all at once good, sinful, and essentially and ultimately oriented to the divine. A combination of Christian revelation and Aristotelian philosophy anchors the recognition that human nature is essentially social, essentially but imperfectly oriented to the common good of human communities. Finally, the understanding of individual virtues and of human flourishing in this life (as compared to eternal life) is largely Aristotelian, as distilled in the theological alembic of Thomas Aquinas.[7]

The Catholic Church teaches that there is a fundamental harmony of faith and reason, so, in that view, the social teaching’s reliance on divine revelation does not make it irrelevant to non-Catholics or non-believers.[8] Many non-Catholics have in fact been inspired by the ethical and political principles that are at the core of the teaching.[9] In my judgement, CST can help all policymakers and citizens respond well to “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted” (Vatican Council II, 1965, 1).

The quotation, from the Church’s Second Vatican Council, is general. However, CST only deals with a collection of fairly specific joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties. The limits are built into Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics, in which careful consideration of specific circumstances is necessarily part of any effort to turn unchanging true principles into current best practices.

The analysis of circumstances is one part of what Thomists call the virtue of prudence, but prudence has other elements. It is dispassionate: prudential judgements avoid both foolish hopes and exaggerated fears. It is modest; the prudent observer respects the knowledge of experts but is wary of the frequent arrogance of the half-learned. And it is wise in the ways of the world; the prudent citizen respects legitimate authority but is wary of the corruption that inevitably tempts the powerful.

Prudential judgements are often morally difficult, because they can require balancing several genuine goods that cannot all be served perfectly. In a pandemic, the good of minimising the disease’s toll of hospitalisations and deaths might conflict with the good of preserving the friendships, flourishing, and normal forms of everyday life. Like most conflicts of true goods, this one probably has no simple or fully satisfactory resolution.

When faced with a particular problem, CST teaches policymakers to proceed by evaluating the facts of the matter. There are several types of facts. For a pandemic, there are public health facts, including the likely effects of different measures on the severity of illnesses and the number of deaths from the disease in question. There are social facts such as the current economic and psychological state of the population and the likely overall health, social, and perhaps spiritual effects of particular collections of anti-pandemic measures. Finally, there will be ethical facts, including the nature of the possibly rival goods of the preservation of lives and the fullness of life.

As I just explained, the specificity and realism of CST counsels limit the availability of up-to-date counsels. When a new challenge arises, CST cannot offer an “off the shelf” answer. The CST method requires a gathering and analysis of whatever facts are relevant to this particular controversy.

“How should governments respond to a viral pandemic?” was one of the many questions that CST had not addressed carefully before 2020. This gap was neither surprising nor irresponsible, because there was broad agreement on the general pattern of pandemic facts and on the right basic direction of anti-pandemic policy.[10] The pandemic guidelines issued by various global and national public health authorities had three simple and ethically sound goals: the ill should be treated as much as possible, the spread of the disease should be slowed as much as is practical, and life should continue as normally as is compatible with the common good.

The goals might sometimes be in serious conflict. However, for pandemics there was a broad consensus that humans cannot do much to limit the spread of influenza and similar viruses. Under those circumstances, the guidelines all came to the prudent conclusion that the continuation of normal life was a greater good than anything that could be achieved by the imposition of disruptive antiviral measures.[11]

This prudent approach was abandoned in the response to COVID-19. In its place, governments around the world imposed severe restrictions on everyday life, including long-lasting quarantines of healthy people and restrictions on socialisation that were, arguably, more disruptive than anything previously seen in peacetime.[12] Pandemics suddenly became a pressing ethical issue. Five foundational principles of CST can help address this issue. On the truth of these principles, loyal Catholics all agree. As I said in the Introduction, there is discord on their implications for the response to COVID-19.

1) Human life is a God-given good, but there is more to life than being alive.

The “but” in this principle reflects the mystery of the human condition. People naturally want life, both for themselves and for others, but death always lurks. People naturally want to live as full and good a life as possible, but the fullness and goodness can sometimes bring an earlier death. And, Christians will add, people want to flourish for as long as they live, but they have a calling and a craving for a supernatural flourishing that somehow overcomes death.

The tension of the “but” can be seen in the social teaching about caring for individuals. A Vatican-approved Catholic guide to healthcare states, “Although physical life on the one hand manifests the person and takes on his value, so that it cannot be disposed of as a thing, on the other hand it is not exhaustive of the person’s whole value and does not constitute his supreme good…Bodily life is a fundamental good, the condition for all the others, but there are higher values for which it may be legitimate or even necessary to accept the danger of losing it” (Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, 2017,  89, emphasis added).

The Social Teaching has always emphasised the social responsibility to go beyond keeping people alive. An official summary explains, “It is necessary to ‘consider every neighbour without exception as another self, taking into account first of all his life and [emphasis added] the means necessary for living it with dignity’” (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2004, p. 132).

For measures against pandemics, this two-sided principle can point in two quite different directions. Because human life is a great good, it is reasonable to expect people to make some sacrifices to delay deaths. (The usual “saving lives” is misleading, since humans cannot be “saved” from bodily death. The phrase is especially misleading for COVID-19, which predominantly causes the deaths of people who are already relatively close to death, either because of age or pre-existing ill health.[13]) Alternatively, because human life should be more than simply being alive, the common good might require giving preference to the fullness of life over the delaying of deaths.

2) Governments should support the common good.

The central responsibility of any government is to support the shared good of all the governed. This common good is inseparable from the true good of each of the governed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, an official summation of the Church’s teaching on faith and morals, explains what this support entails: “it is the proper function of authority [emphasis added] to…make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1997, 1908).

Even the best constituted political authorities often do not support the common good as they should. The causes of these failures can be seen as practical; the common good is always hard to identify and even harder to promote. More profoundly, their source is in human nature, in the sin “that clings so closely” (Hebrews 12:1) to all human endeavours.

This principle also may point in two different directions in the midst of a pandemic. One argument is that the first thing that is needed for a truly human life in a community is to be alive, so the first responsibility of political authorities in a pandemic is to protect people’s physical health. An alternative argument is that the authorities should recognise that the relevant virus will successfully resist all human efforts at control. The chief political and medical task is to minimise the pandemic’s damage to the communal and individual fullness of life.

3) All people are responsible for the good of all their neighbours.

This mutual responsibility, called solidarity in CST, is common to individuals, groups, and nations. Pope John Paul II described solidarity as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good…because we are all really responsible for all” (John Paul II, 1987, p. 38). Francis added that this determination should find “concrete expression in service, which can take a variety of forms in an effort to care for others” (Francis, 2020b, p. 115).

What forms of solidaristic action are called for in a pandemic? Perhaps all people should engage in painful social isolation to protect the strangers whom they might otherwise infect. Perhaps most people should avoid cancer screenings, face-to-face medical visits, and other routine healthcare to allow the medical system to deal with a pandemic-induced flood of critically ill patients. Alternatively, perhaps the most relevant form of solidarity is accepting some risks to everyone’s health to ensure that education, trade, and loving attention to the ill and poor continue unabated.

4) Public policy should build upwards, not impose downwards.

This is the CST principle of subsidiarity. In concrete terms, subsidiarity calls for giving as much authority as possible to smaller organisations – from the family through local businesses and churches up to regional governments – and as little power as possible to national and international governments and organisations. In the words of John Paul II, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (John Paul II, 1991, p. 48). The thinking behind this principle is that smaller organisations can generally make prudential judgements that are more suitable and more humane than orders dispatched from distant bureaucratic authorities.

The nature of global pandemics may militate against the application of subsidiarity. Linguistically, pandemics only exist when an international organisation, the World Health Organisation, declares that they do. Practically, pandemics cannot be slowed without massive coordinated policy responses. Alternatively, pandemics might offer especially good opportunities for subsidiarity. The common good might be well served if different communities find their own best ways to balance the various goods and evils of different anti-pandemic measures.

5) Public policies should favour the poor over the rich.

In CST, this principle is called the preferential option for the poor. It holds that “the poor, the marginalized and in all cases those whose living conditions interfere with their proper growth should be the focus of particular concern” (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2004, 182). For Catholics, there is little disagreement on how to apply this principle in a pandemic. Policymakers at all levels should think about how to help those least able to help themselves, whether because they lack economic resources or because they are most vulnerable to the disease. Disagreements do arise when policymakers have to balance the good of this preferential option against other social goods, most notably the delaying of deaths.

The preferential option was articulated in response to many governments’ seeming indifference to poverty. That apparent indifference remains common, but pro-poor generosity sometimes flourishes in a national crisis. There are many accounts of people helping more marginalised neighbours during the time of anti-COVID-19 restrictions. However, even defenders of those restrictions generally accept that overall they caused more pain and damage to the poor than to the rich. The sentiment that “we’re all in this together”, which was often expressed during the COVID-19 pandemic, did not lead to a transfer of either wealth or comforts from rich to poor, but “work from home” policies effectively transferred exposure to COVID-19 in that non-preferential direction.

3. The technocratic paradigm

At least hypothetically, the five principles I just discussed are not very controversial in post-Christian and other liberal societies. I now turn to two more challenging issues. The first is the technocratic paradigm, a phrase introduced by Pope Francis in his environmental encyclical Laudato Si’ (Francis, 2015,  106-110). By technocratic he means the unquestioned assumption that technologies can solve any social or individual problem. The technologies in question are not only mechanical or digital. They include the bureaucratic organisations in which people become interchangeable parts of administrative machines. By paradigm he means a way of thinking about the world that is comprehensive and exclusive. A paradigm guides and limits what we notice and think about, how we approach problems, and what solutions we consider acceptable.

By technocratic paradigm, Francis means a “tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology [emphasis added] an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society.” (Francis, 2015, 107).

The COVID-19 pandemic can help clarify that somewhat murky description. People who are stuck inside the technocratic paradigm trust numbers, so their pandemic thoughts are likely to start with statistical calculations, for example of death rates and life expectancies. When they measure a surprising increase of deaths, they do not look to God or philosophy for comfort or explanation. Rather, they instinctively use even more of the method of science. They map genetic sequences and measure viral concentrations. They create mathematical models of contagion. Equally instinctively, they turn to the aims of technology. They demand human mastery over this phenomenon of nature.

In other words, inside the paradigm, there is no reason to be fatalistic about a fatal disease. Technocratic thinking is the only thinking available within the paradigm, and it can only see disease as a problem to be solved. This thinking cannot easily – or perhaps at all – blend the desire for better physical health with the recognition that illnesses and death are conjoined, continuing, and unavoidably spiritual challenges of the human condition.

Today’s Christians are not immune from the paradigm’s seductive logic. In a pandemic, they may struggle to remember their faith’s teaching about the redemptive value of suffering for both sufferers and those who accompany them.[14] Instead, they will be tempted to join in with the technocratic chorus: “Something must be done to stop this. Science, technology, and modern governments should overpower the virus”.

In Laudato Si’, Francis does not discuss pandemics, but he writes eloquently about the distortions and damage that the technocratic paradigm has brought to modern societies. He starts with the physical environment and moves on to decry the effects of the paradigm’s de-spiritualisation on many aspects of personal and social relations. In my judgement, though, Francis has not been prudent in his judgements of the technocratic policy responses to COVID-19. He has totally ignored the possibility that some of these policies might exemplify the paradigm’s fundamental weaknesses.[15] Obviously, the pope and most thoughtful Catholics see something quite different: technical thinking used to support the common good.

4. Obedience and justice

The anti-Covid policies were designed by public health specialists, but they were imposed by governments. How closely and critically should the governed question the wisdom and justice of these or any other dictates of their governments? When one person or a group of people decide that some laws or rules are unwise or unjust, under what circumstances do they have the privilege, right, or obligation to disobey?

Such philosophical and practical questions concerning governments, justice, and obedience have been posed for millennia. They have become much more pressing in recent decades, as the number and intrusiveness of governmental rules and regulations increased. The strict anti-pandemic limits on healthy people’s normal activities can be seen as the latest deepening of that governmental expansion.

CST has three quite different approaches to what might be called the government obedience challenge. Each might be relevant to anti-Covid policies. The first approach is to assume that governments should be obeyed. In the Bible, the apostle Paul tells the Christians in Rome, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God…Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement” (Revised Standard Version, Rom. 13.1-2).

This principle clearly points to accepting without question all government decrees. If anything, obedience should be especially fervent to pandemic-related decrees, because so many lives are at stake.

The second approach starts with the universal obligation – to God, conscience, and the common good – to act justly. This higher duty points towards just disobedience of human injustice. In the Bible, the apostle Peter, whom Catholics consider to be the first pope, refused to obey the commands of the Jewish religious leaders. He explained that, “We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29, Revised Standard Version). Thomas Aquinas drew out the legal implications of this principle: “if in any point [a human law] deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law.… Wherefore such laws do not bind in conscience, except perhaps in order to avoid scandal or disturbance…” (Aquinas, 1920, II.I.95.2 corpus and II.I.96.4 corpus).[16]

This approach points to serious questioning of anti-pandemic restrictions. Do they support the common good? If not, do they create significant and unjust harm? Is disobedience prudent or a cause of unnecessary scandal or disturbance? Is some disobedience an ethical necessity?

The third approach starts with a critical suspicion of the goodness of the distinctly modern “all-encompassing welfare state” (Benedict XVI, 2009,  57). As Pope Benedict XVI explained, “The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything…” (Benedict XVI, 2005,  27).

The anti-pandemic regulations and controls that various states imposed did not extend to “everything”. However, some people might conclude that they have smothered society under a totalising and love-denying administrative blanket – a plethora of rules of how far you can travel, how many people you can see, how close to them you can get, and under what circumstances you can attend school. If that image is accurate, then the anti-Covid policies deserve especially critical moral scrutiny.

5. Four axes of diverging judgement

I hope that the discussion so far has made clear in a general way how loyal and prudent Catholics could strongly disagree about what responses to COVID-19 were best aligned with CST. In this section, I describe four specific divergences in the interpretation of the Covid-relevant circumstances.

1) The choice of narratives

Earlier in this essay, I suggested that there were basically two opposing narratives of COVID-19 and the governmental and social response to it. One is the hard but inspiring tale of heroism in a great global crisis. The other is a recounting of a long series of massive misjudgements.

My duality of narratives is undoubtedly an oversimplification. There are also many centrist narratives, substituting, for example, caution and confusion for heroism or mild misjudgements for massive ones. However, focusing on the extreme narratives helps clarify what is at stake in fitting the pandemic response into the moral framework of CST.

A Catholic heroic telling of the Covid story might go something like this: “Governments demanded great and virtuous sacrifices from citizens for the sake of the common good. The authorities acted as governments are supposed to act in a crisis equivalent to a war.[17] Yes, the choice to follow the best available scientific and public health advice undoubtedly led to suffering among the governed, but any other response would have been irresponsible. Even if the chosen measures were not very effective in reducing mortality, indeed even if they did more harm than good, they were adopted for good reasons and the popular response to them was, for the most part, morally exemplary.”

The massive misjudgement narrative sounds very different. A Catholic-tinged version might be: “The choice of anti-COVID-19 policies was imprudent in many ways, starting with the unjustified abandonment of standard anti-pandemic polices. The authorities’ understanding and analysis of the common good was deficient, as it basically ignored the social, medical, psychological, and economic effects of the various anti-Covid measures. The stoking of exaggerated health fears was a dereliction of governments’ responsibility to serve the governed, as was the governmental indifference to the preferential option for the rich that their anti-pandemic policies created.”

2) The value of life

I have already alluded to the inevitable ethical tensions between the good of delaying deaths and the good of promoting the fullness of lives. Prudential judgements about which good to favour in a particular situation will always depend on circumstances. However, there is often a fundamental preference in favour of one or the other: life itself or the fullness of lives.

The heroic narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic focuses first and foremost on the first, the good of life itself. More specifically, it barely recognises any good other than delaying as many deaths as possible for as long as possible. That judgement was encapsulated in the often repeated slogan, “If we save one life, it was worth it”.

The respect for the value of life led to such antisocial anti-pandemic policies as isolating very old people from their families and keeping children from attending schools or seeing friends. Ironically, those two policies so distressed the people affected that they might have accelerated more deaths than they delayed. Still, the principle that misery should sometimes be accepted in exchange for extra time alive is defensible, even if earthly life itself is not considered to be the greatest human good, and even if physical death is not thought to be the greatest evil.

The other approach, to focus more on promoting good lives, necessarily leads to a lesser focus on warding off deaths. Arguably, this second approach is more congruent than the first one to the Catholic understanding of the human condition. Because humans naturally desire to be good and because bodily death is inevitable, the common good includes the nurturing of good lives, which must include good deaths.[18] Because humans are naturally social creatures, the common good is harmed when lives are not lived and ended in communal love.

It is not necessary to endorse the “good lives” approach to the common good to conclude that the massive misjudgement narrative is right. The anti-pandemic measures may have been wrong simply because it was imprudent to believe that they would on balance delay deaths. However, in my judgement, anyone who does endorse this second understanding of the good of human life would be at least tempted by the misjudgement narrative.

The temptation need not lead to full adoption. A temporary suspension of normal arrangements during a pandemic might promote good lives exactly by delaying more deaths. However, in the “good lives” approach to the common good, any fullness-denying measures should be undertaken with deep regret and should be questioned constantly. Were the anti-COVID-19 antisocial policies accompanied by sufficient hesitation, doubts, reconsiderations, and regrets?

3) The need for strong controls

Governments responded to the pandemic in line with the militaristic framing of the heroic narrative. Normal democratic processes of law-making were suspended in almost all countries and the defence of such traditional civil liberties as the freedoms of speech, assembly, and worship was often treated as a near-treasonous support of the viral enemy. Such “treason” was rare. The restrictions were mostly accepted willingly and obeyed carefully.

In the heroic narrative, the controls and the obedience amount to a good example of how the Catholic call to respect legitimate political authority should work. This narrator might say something like, “Yes, the chosen measures caused some harm and injustice. But harsh and imperfect rules are necessary to deal with crises. The authorities were heroic in creating them, as were the people who suffered in obeying them.”

The massive misjudgement narrator would give a quite different speech: “The pandemic was not an emergency that required the suspension of normal political practices. The laws and regulations that took minute control of everyday life were unjust in concept and execution. The use of dishonest propaganda was a further abuse of power. The anti-Covid measures amount to a clear example of the unjust dictates that the Catholic tradition holds to be violence rather than law.”

If the critical narrator is wary of intrusive governments, she might continue, “The depredations are also a clear example of the bureaucratic smothering that Benedict XVI warned against. Many parts of governments’ extensive welfare and regulatory apparatus were turned against the users whom they are supposed to help and protect. The use of a culture of expertise to do such damage demonstrates the moral weakness of today’s almost omnipotent bureaucratic governments.”

4) The possible religion of science

One of the proudest boasts of the heroic COVID-19 narrative is that governments followed “the Science”. In the massive misjudgement narrative, this boast is frustrating, irritating, and, at least for Christians, frightening.

The claim of scientific backing is frustrating because, in this narrative, the approach was largely untouched by the critical objectivity of genuine science. Having cast aside the prior consensus of public health scientists about pandemics and vaccines, the politicians and their chosen experts engaged in “policy-based evidence-making”. They found or created dubious scientific studies to support their essentially unscientific fears and hopes.[19]

Public health was not only pandemic-relevant scientific discipline that was ignored. From the perspective of CST, the most frustrating anti-scientific decision was the refusal to heed the warnings from the scientific experts in the fullness of life. Psychologists, sociologists, and a slew of other specialists warned that the suspension of normal social interactions would seriously damage the common good. These scientists of the heart and of humanity were ignored – in the name of “the Science”.

From both a Catholic and a secular liberal perspective, the reliance on “the Science” is irritating because it shows political leaders abdicating their essential responsibility to judge and promote the common good. Instead, the legitimate authorities outsourced decisions to a group of people with no political legitimacy and often with only dubious competence in genuine science. These self-declared experts told politicians what to do, claiming the authority of a technocratic “Science”.

Finally, Christians, who condemn all types of idolatry, are frightened when science, or something given that name, is treated as a higher-than-human authority. In the misjudgement narrative, that is exactly what happened in the response to COVID-19. Political leaders proffered blind obedience to the cruel commands of the unquestionable deity whom they called “the Science”. The worldly discourse of democratic politics was replaced with a quasi-religious frenzy, including a sort of Holy War against anyone who showed signs of scepticism about the oracular teachings on masks, lockdowns, social distancing, and vaccines. These heretics were judged to threaten not only the civil order but the cosmic one. It would be their fault if the Science did not work.

6. Conclusion

The analyses provided by the two CST-based narratives are almost diametrically opposed to each other, as are their judgements of the wisdom of the anti-pandemic policies. However, they are not radically different, in the etymological sense of “radical”. On the contrary, they are both growths out of the same intellectual-moral-theological root: the human, humane, and divine principles of CST.

In a pragmatic age, the contradictions of interpretation and judgement might seem to invalidate the method, as if all that emerged from this promising root were useless weeds. Such a dark conclusion is far too hasty.

On one side, the CST reading of the heroic narrative effectively brings out what is best in that understanding of reality. The pope is certainly right to draw attention to the virtues brought out by measures that “momentarily revived the sense that we are a global community, all in the same boat, where one person’s problems are the problems of all” (Francis, 2020, 32). The spiritual lesson he draws from the pandemic may be timeless, but it could still be apt. “The pain, uncertainty and fear, and the realization of our own limitations, brought on by the pandemic have only made it all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the organization of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence” (Francis, 2020, 33)

On the other side, the CST reading of the misjudgement narrative expresses the ethical core of that understanding. What was most wrong with these measures was their disregard for the true good of human life and human communities, along with their abuse of the legitimate authority of governments.

The CST versions readings of both narratives point to two common conclusions, the need for societies that are better prepared for pandemics and the need for anti-pandemic policies that are both virtuous and prudent.

The simplest way to understanding disagreement within CST about COVID-19 is as one version of the broader disagreement between the heroic and misjudgement narratives. However, the CST debate is particularly illuminating, for non-Catholics as well as Catholics, because it never loses its focus on what is truly most important, the common good.

Finally, to answer my initial question: I am certainly not more Catholic than the Holy Father. In our disagreement over this pandemic, we are both doing what Catholics, and others, should always do – apply the Church’s great wisdom to the troubles of the world.

References

Benedict XVI (2005). Deus caritas est: Encyclical letter on Christian love. Libreria Editrice Vaticanahttps://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html 

Benedict XVI (2009). Caritas in Veritate: Encyclical letter on integral human development in charity and truth. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.  https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html

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[1] I tie this political model into the response to Covid in      Hadas      (2022).

[2] For summaries, Berenson (2021) and Kheriaty (2022). On previous practices, Heriot, G.S., Jamrozik, E. (2021) and Tognotti, E. (2013). For a sample of previous standard guidelines, with strong bias towards minimal intervention, World Health Organisation (2019). On effectiveness of measures, Lemoine, P. (2021). Miles et al (2020) gives an early cost-benefit analysis, based on standard UK National Health Service measurements. For vaccines Kostoff et al. (2021).

[3] Stefano Fontana (e.g.,Fontano 2021) has been a thoughtful critic from within the CST tradition. Monsignor Charles Pope, a popular American priest-writer, was unusual in the English-speaking world. See Pope (2020). For a more recent Thomistic argument, see Farrow (2022).

[4] For a clear statement of his views aimed at a broad audience, see Francis (2020a). See also Francis (2020b, 32-34). On vaccines Francis (2022).

[5] Examples from early in the pandemic include Johnson (2020) and DeCosse (2020). McGovern et al (2020) offers a slightly more cautious endorsement of the anti-pandemic measures. I have seen no Catholic reconsiderations of original positive judgements.

[6] In Hadas (2020) I discuss the lively debates about the contents, limits, essence, purpose, and authority (for Catholics) of the social teaching. These are irrelevant for the purposes of this article.

[7] Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (2004) provides an authoritative summary with ample references.  

[8] For the “unity of truth, natural and revealed” see John Paul II (1998, section 34). References to all Vatican documents are by section or paragraph number.

[9] Examples of non-Catholic appreciations of CST include Thomas (2019), Welby (2016) and Glasman (2020).

[10] In retrospect, the political and medical response to the 2009 swine flu was a harbinger of what happened in 2020. However, only very prudent or very suspicious observers could have anticipated the significance of this precedent.

[11] See for example World Health Organisation (2019)

[12] On quarantines, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2022). On social distancing Lipton and Steinhauer (2020). The novelty of the anti-COVID-19 techniques is disputed, but see Tucker (2021) with embedded article.

[13] Statista (2022) indicates that 74% of U.S. deaths attributed to COVID-19 were of people over 65. Office of National Statistics (2022) provides UK data, which records that 17% of people dying from the disease in the fourth quarter of 2021 had no pre-existing conditions. 

[14] For an explanation of this Christian teaching, see John Paul II (1984).

[15] I have written in somewhat more detail about this in Hadas (2021). Hanby (2015) provides a philosophical introduction to the paradigm’s reshaping of our understanding of nature and science. Cayley (2020) and Cayley (2021) bring the related approach of Ivan Illich to the particular circumstances of Covid-19.

[16] See also      Wyma (2014).

[17] Castro Seixas (2021) surveys war imagery from politicians in early 2020.

[18] Not all Christians actually use this broader understanding of life in their ethical analyses. Illich (1977, 209 fn. 62) condemns a “practical convergence of Christian and medical practice [that] is in stark opposition to the attitude to death in Christian theology.”

[19] Prasad (2022) discusses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Ioannidis (2020) discusses epidemiological forecasting.