3 ways conservative Catholics dissent from Church teaching (often without even...

...realizing it)

Three Strategies for Evasion


In his 1965 book, Christianity and Social Progress, Fr. John Cronin wrote as follows:
Although fifty years after Fr. Cronin wrote no longer does everyone “speak in terms of awe and reverence of the great encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI,” still his words are helpful reminders that Catholics have not always had that docility toward the teaching Church which one would expect from those presumably convinced that the Church speaks with the voice of Christ. And in fact today dissent from those teachings is far more common and more open than was the case when Fr. Cronin wrote those words. While one is hardly surprised to find dissent from Catholic teaching among liberal Catholics, it is just as common to find it among conservative Catholics. These latter, however, since they see themselves as faithful adherents to Catholic doctrine, necessarily must create some strategy of disguising their dissent from Catholic teaching. There are, it seems to me, three main strategies used by conservative Catholics to justify their dissent from papal social teaching. Let us take a look at each of them in turn.

Our first type is the most bold, and in a way, the most honest of the three. This is the strategy of a straightforward denial, an outright rejection of social doctrine. This is the strategy common among Catholic adherents of the Austrian school of economics, for example, those associated with the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Let us review some of their statements. First Thomas Woods:

The primary difficulty with much of what has fallen under the heading of Catholic social teaching since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) is that it assumes without argument that the force of human will suffices to resolve economic questions, and that reason and the conclusions of economic law can be safely neglected, even scorned… This attitude runs directly counter to the entire Catholic intellectual tradition, according to which man is to conform his actions to reality, rather than embarking on the hopeless and foolish task of forcing the world to conform to him and to his desires.
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Moreover Woods rejects as “perfectly nonsensical” the claim that his position “involves himself in ‘dissent’ from Church teaching.”Why? Because,

In the absence of any attempt to address these issues [i.e., the alleged conflict between Catholic teaching and reason], it is difficult to see how the economic claims of the social encyclicals can actually constitute authoritative Catholic doctrine binding upon the consciences of all the faithful.4
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And he further states:

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Continued- http://distributistreview.com/mag/2011/08/three-strategies-for-evasion/