New book by Samuel Gregg: Tea Party Catholic

This will probably irritate all the right people. Here's the pitch on the Amazon page.

Over the past fifty years, increasing numbers of American Catholics have abandoned the economic positions associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and chosen to embrace the principles of economic freedom and limited government: ideals upheld by Ronald Reagan and the Tea Party movement but also deeply rooted in the American Founding. This shift, alongside America’s growing polarization around economic questions, has generated fierce debates among Catholic Americans in recent years. Can a believing Catholic support free markets? Does the Catholic social justice commitment translate directly into big government? Do limited government Catholic Americans have something unique to contribute to the Church’s thinking about the economic challenges confronting all Catholics around the globe?

In Tea Party Catholic, Samuel Gregg draws upon Catholic teaching, natural law theory, and the thought of the only Catholic Signer of America’s Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the first “Tea Party Catholic”—to develop a Catholic case for the values and institutions associated with the free economy, limited government, and America’s experiment in ordered liberty. Beginning with the nature of freedom and human flourishing, Gregg underscores the moral and economic benefits of business and markets as well as the welfare state’s problems. Gregg then addresses several related issues that divide Catholics in America. These include the demands of social justice, the role of unions, immigration, poverty, and the relationship between secularism and big government.

Above all, Gregg underlines how economic freedom’s corrosion in America is undermining the United States’ robust commitment to religious liberty—a principle integral not only to the American Founding and the life of Charles Carroll but also the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. As a creative minority, Gregg argues, limited government Catholics can help transform the wider movement to reground the United States upon the best insights of the American Experiment—and thereby save that Experiment itself.

Should be interesting.

"The zone of the soul and the purview of conscience"

Here are some paragraphs from an article with which I agree:

Frankly, it is bizarre to see presidential candidates—men and women campaigning for the right to serve and guide the broad national agenda—talking at some length about the issues of contraception, pornography, sin, Satan, and sex. Those issues, which are matters of great importance to the goodness and wholeness of a person, belong to the zone of the soul, reside in the purview of conscience, and should be worked out in the realm of civil society. On the whole, these are matters that are to be handled by parents, priests, preachers, friends, and family, not by presidential candidates. Certainly a president needs to be a man of character, but the fact that government has grown so large and invaded every aspect of life explains why presidential candidates are talking, or are feeling forced to talk, about these personal topics, rather than those that pertain to the public issues that constitute the national agenda.

Conservative candidates for president need to be focusing on the size and scope of a government that has breached its constitutional boundaries and exceeded its fiscal possibilities. This abuse occurred due to a lack of constitutionally conservative government and profligate spending designed to subsidize and buy off larger portions of the populace. Those issues are within the purview of the political. One quick way to begin defusing the culture wars is to put government back within its constitutional boundaries and focus on restoring civil society to its proper—and indeed, larger—place it must occupy if America is to remain the free, virtuous, and authentically pluralistic place it has been in the past.

My faith teaches me to convince others of the validity and goodness of certain truths, person to person, forming a culture that leads to a moral consensus. That is where the true morality of a nation is formed, not in the electoral or political sphere. Until Leviathan is slain, we will continue to see presidents and presidential candidates acting as preachers, proclaiming their morality, and continue to wonder at the sight of preachers talking politics from the pulpit. Perhaps due to the unwholesome reality created by American’s present cultural, moral, and political disorder, such a chaotic mixing of roles and issues is necessary, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is a bad idea for the civil society, personal conscience, and the public square.

Wow. The author must be a secularist, or a fiscal conservative, or—horrors—maybe someone from the Mitt Romney campaign. Oh, wait...

Fr. Phillip W. De Vous is the pastor of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Crescent Springs, KY

Sorry, my bad.