On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law
By F. Russell Hittinger.
The Catholic University of America Press, 2024.
Paperback, 490 pages, $39.95.
Reviewed by Rev. Joseph Scolaro.
The Church needs a strong leader now more than ever. The dignity of the human person is under attack, with untethered capitalism and atheistic socialism vying for supremacy in instrumentalizing humanity. World war seems to loom on the horizon. The Church and the Holy See are beset on every side, seen as the enemy of progress and all that society values, particularly in Catholic Europe itself. After decades of confusion and intellectual false-starts, Catholic theology is primed for a renewal. Pope Leo rises to the chair of Peter, and the faithful are filled with hope that he will be the leader the Church needs. Pope Leo XIII, that is, for the year is 1878.
Doubtlessly recognized by Pope Leo XIV in choosing his papal name, the challenges he must address today in 2025 in many ways reflect those seen 150 years earlier in the reign of his nominal predecessor. In explaining his choice, the newest pope spoke explicitly of how, among the many reasons, the most important was his desire to follow Leo XIII’s legacy regarding Catholic social teaching. Faced with the first industrial revolution, Leo XIII was an important voice, challenging the contemporary affronts to human dignity with encyclicals such as the momentous Rerum novarum. So, too, Leo XIV hopes to be a similar voice in the face of what he describes as the second industrial revolution, attempting to deal with developments like artificial intelligence and a comparable degradation of humanity.
The publication of On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law, therefore, could not be timelier. A collection of essays by one of the pre-eminent authorities on Catholic social teaching, F. Russell Hittinger, the work comes together as a whole that captures both Leo XIII’s foundational importance and the magisterial developments that have followed to the present day. Covering the modernist controversy in the early-twentieth century, the development of Leo XIII’s thought by three successors with the name Pius, the Vatican II “springtime of the Church” years of John XXIII and Paul VI, through John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis, Hittinger manages to provide a comprehensive survey while in each essay addressing more focused topics. He thus offers a succinct and valuable resource on Catholic social teaching that contextualizes the modern period as framed by the two Leos.
As the title suggests, his primary goal is to address the question of human dignity, not at the level of the individual, but at the level of society, arguing that the two are inextricably united. Human beings are fundamentally social, seeking their end with others in communities at the levels of family, society, and the Church, such that it only becomes possible to defend the dignity of the individual when they are understood in the social context.
The parallels with the present that become evident as he explores the challenges faced by Leo XIII in this area are of particular value. Hittinger shows how the social question was especially important in the nineteenth century following the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, as the Church needed to find a new way to function in a world where the throne and altar were no longer united. As a truly secular society arose from the ashes of a millennial Christendom in Europe, Leo XIII was the first to begin sketching out what it looked like to be a society within a society, albeit a supernatural society within a natural one.
What Leo XIII faced then at its inception, Leo XIV in many ways faces at its consummation. While the twentieth century was still sporadically marked by remnants of Christian influence and dominance, the twenty-first has seen the final divorce of the secular and sacred, and the consequences are evident. What Leo XIII warned of, the evils he battled, have been let loose, paradigmatically captured by Artificial Intelligence which poorly imitates and devalues that which makes us essentially human.
We would do well then to read Hittinger’s book in reflecting on how to face these challenges. Rather than nostalgically looking to recreate a world long gone when faith had political power, and avoiding the pessimism that plagues those who consider the world to be lost and inspires quietism or withdrawal from society, he provides the principles that support a robust engagement in the public square by people of faith who can sanctify the secular without needing to make it sacred. Following the Gospel, he provides the path not to a kingdom of this world, but to a world in which the kingdom breaks through and shines into the darkness of human brokenness and restores man to his proper dignity in the context of a well-ordered society.
In his final essay, Hittinger quotes Hegel, “Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.” He highlights this aphorism as capturing the reality that it is often not until the proverbial evening of an age or society, before the complete darkness, that one can come to understand it: “Just when things are complete enough for us to take their measure and consider ‘what the world ought to be,’ but not so complete that wisdom itself slips into the oblivion of darkness.” Fittingly, Hittinger has himself provided us a work in the dusk of the modern age that can finally put it in perspective and allow us to understand how best to confront it and move on from it. And as the modern world consumes itself in its errors, leaving so many searching for meaning and healthy community, we look to Leo XIV, that perhaps he may be the St. Benedict who can lead us to a new and brighter ecclesial summer.
Rev. Joseph Scolaro is professor of theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary, New York.
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