In this further article on Fratelli tutti, the concept of global governance, which is a recurrent theme of papal encyclicals and other Church documents, is discussed. It is reproduced by kind permission of the Catholic Herald where it was first published.
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In his recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis was reported to be highly critical of market economics and there was a strong press response on this issue. This post argues that there is much more to the encyclical than the short sections on economics. At the same time, there is much more to the arguments for market economies than the encyclical gave credit for. This post was first published in The Tablet and is reproduced with kind permission.
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AJP Taylor wrote in his Oxford History of England:
Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman…He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter a foreigner could spend his life in the country without permit and without informing the police…All this was changed by the impact of the Great War…The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time.
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“[I]t is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (Quadragesimo anno, 79).
In the current crisis, there is much talk of “policy reset”. Some of that talk seems strange. We have the most centralised health service in the Western world and it has not obviously performed better than healthcare services in other countries. The NHS has also moved infected people out of hospitals and into care homes with disastrous consequences. Despite that, reliable sources in the UK government seem to be suggesting that, following the crisis, there will be a move to centralise political control of the NHS further and also that the NHS will take control of social care from local authorities.
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The provision of public services by the government has always raised concerns about the respect for individual liberty. And in the case of education, this issue gets even more relevant. For being a vehicle of transmission of knowledge, education contributes not only to tackle ignorance and to increase the level of literacy of the population, but also to create and promote a common set of values and behaviour patterns. In this post we analyse the perspective of Catholic social teaching on the provision of education by the government.
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Rapidly developing events and protests springing from the United States to much of the Western world (and elsewhere) have once again brought discussion about individual rights and equality – both in theory and in practice – to the forefront of public debate.
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This post by Philip Booth considers freedom of speech, conscience and religion in the context of specific laws in the UK which allow a great deal of administrative discretion in restricting those freedoms.
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In this post, Philip Booth discusses how the language we use in debates can get in the way of agreement and how Catholics interested in environmental issues should study the work of Elinor Ostrom for inspiration.
In the last blogpost on this site, I wrote about the importance of private property rights for environmental conservation. But there is more to this debate. And sometimes semantics gets in the way of reaching a common understanding on these issues. My garden, for example, is private property and nobody would doubt that. However, a community of monks might care for their (possibly very large) grounds, farm, gardens, bee hives, and so on by holding it in common – though they still hold it privately in common. Indeed, property titles can be quite complex. Under English law, there will sometimes be restrictive covenants, nested leaseholder and freeholder arrangements and property held under trust (including by charities such as the National Trust) and many of these devices will be designed to ensure good outcomes when it comes to sustainability.
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In this week’s post, Philip Booth discusses the papal encyclical Laudato Si, responding to Pope Francis’ desire for dialogue on the issues raised.
Bishop Robert Byrne of Hexham and Newcastle described Laudato Si, published five years ago next week, as a “prophetic document that has given a theological and spiritual framework to the environmental crisis facing our world”. An earlier post on this blog developed a similar point.
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I read the previous two posts on this blog with great interest, and I welcome this opportunity to bring a theological perspective to bear on some of those discussions. In this piece, I want to discuss a passing comment from Trevor Stammers’ post, in which he acknowledges the necessity of employing utilitarian reasoning when faced with the ethics of triage. This acknowledges situations whereby an ethical philosophy considered woefully problematic in normal circumstances, might be permitted due to the extreme complexity at play.
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