The crisis in student loans has grown to the point that outstanding student loan debt will likely exceed $1 trillion in early 2012. Yet employment prospects for college graduates have grown alarmingly bleak, particularly since 2008. The downturn in the world economy since 2008 is itself, in substantial measure, the outcome of the historic peaking of world oil production rates within the past six years. With the onset of permanent oil production rate declines within a few years’ time, the world economy faces an epoch of contraction destined to last decades. These broader economic developments are setting the stage for a tragic bursting of the bubble in student loan debt. The situation also raises acute moral questions revolving around a basic conflict between the interests of the institutional complex of higher education and the masses of students who financially sustain that complex.

Catholic employers and employees have been under increasing attack in the last fifty years by a growing number of public policy encroachments in the workplace that are in direct conflict with their religious convictions. In some instances, these threats have been successfully parried. Others remain a source of serious conflict. This article will summarize highlights of the last fifty years of public policy and jurisprudence as they relate to the ability of Catholic institutions to practice and enforce non-negotiable Catholic moral doctrines.

The contributions to this symposium shed light on Tocqueville’s ambiguities. His approach to political philosophy combines both ancient and modern elements, both aristocratic and democratic tendencies.

This paper describes current theoretical developments in labor economics that are likely to change how we understand the compensation of employees in a wage economy. The new theory of dynamic monopsony theorizes that imperfect labor markets where employees do not get paid their full marginal revenue product are the norm, rather than the exception. Recent empirical work published in a highly ranked, peer-reviewed labor-economics journal provided empirical support for the model. I discuss the implications of these developments in labor economics on the justice of wages within the framework provided by Catholic Social Teaching.

Since Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Catholic colleges and universities have made a conscientious effort to better embed a declaration of religious identity and its defining values and guiding principles into their institutional mission and vision statements. So too has a new wave of Catholic colleges and universities whose leadership has accused Catholic higher education of compromising faith to conform to an increasingly secular world. A content analysis of the mission and vision statements from a nationwide sample of these institutions was performed and key linguistic components found to constitute a well conceived, viable and easily diffused institutional vision were isolated. Findings reveal significant stylistic differences across religious institution types in terms of vision, clarity, complexity, pragmatics, optimism, and their use of language to unify the campus community. How mission and vision statements can better serve as guiding, governing and promotional documents is discussed.

Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is an anti-Enlightenment tract. His treatment therein of the British constitution (and constitutionalism in general) is set in critical opposition to the Enlightenment philosophical principles that animated the French Revolution. However, he often employs the very terms of Enlightenment political theory in framing his criticisms of Enlightenment principles. The solution to this interpretive problem is that Burke purposefully employed Enlightenment terminology in the Reflections precisely to signal his specific intention to criticize the key Enlightenment notion of political consent and to transform the Enlightenment theory of social compact into a theory of constitutionalism, understood as the generational transmission of prescriptive political institutions. Proof comes through a reading of the Reflections limited by the parameters of the problem of interpretation, which in turn indicates some general aspects of a Burkean theory of the political and social order.

This article is one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right but Catholic” online columns. It looks at the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, and aims primarily at drawing a comparison between them and the protests of the 1960s. It also assesses them in light of Catholic social teaching.

This essay explores the impact of the ancient principle of the freedom of the Church—identified by the Second Vatican Council as “the fundamental principle” governing “the relations between the Church and governments and the whole civil order”—on both Western civilization and the development of modern Catholic social thought. Arguing that this principle requires the articulation and institutionalization of a new understanding of society and government, it contends this principle revolutionized the structure of Western political life and helped lay the groundwork for Western liberty. At the same time, it maintains that the development in contemporary Catholic social teaching that crystallizes in Dignitatis Humanae must be seen in the context of the ongoing effort of Catholic thought to understand the nature and role of the state towards which the idea of the freedom of the Church points.

To be consistent with John Paul II’s assertion of the primacy of the subjective dimension of work—of “being” versus “having”—it is necessary to reject profit maximization as the primary objective of the firm. In its place, the author proposes instead that the firm’s foremost objective is the maximization of personalist capital. Properly understood, profits are a necessary condition for the firm’s survival but not its primary goal. The concept of personalist capital in effect incorporates the subjective dimension of work into microeconomic theory without dismissing the objective dimension entirely.

Robert Katz’s The Battle for Rome (2003) is an unfair indictment of Pope Pius XII. Through various distortions and oversights, Katz faults Pius’s “open city” strategy and his anti-communism for failing to protect the Jews and other Italians during the German occupation of Rome in World War II. In truth, the pope’s strategy was as successful as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances.

This ecological study compares 2005 abortion rates by state to a number of variables thought to be related to abortion. Higher abortion rates were observed in states having: 1) larger vote for Democratic Party candidate for president, 2) higher percent Catholic population, 3) higher black population, 4) lower income, and 5) higher number of abortion providers.

Democracy in America never mentions the Declaration of Independence. Is this perhaps a sign of hostility to the Declaration’s natural-rights teaching or to abstract principles? Or is it no more significant than The Federalist’s silence on this matter? Both are books of political science, not political philosophy; yet, when appropriate, Tocqueville addresses first principles, and endorses a natural-rights doctrine similar to Locke’s. He wrote primarily for the French, addressing issues he thought decisive for them, especially reconciling the ultra-royalists and the French Catholic Church to the new democratic order. This guided the aspects of American democracy he wanted to emphasize. Thus Jesus Christ’s coming to earth was a political turning point in human history because he “made it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” Given aristocratic dominance in ancient society, without that event the principle of equality might never have been discovered.

Questions about Pope Pius XII’s leadership during World War II continue to color Catholic-Jewish relations. While many scholars have engaged in research on the topic, a growing number argue that no conclusions can be reached until all relevant Vatican archives have been opened and reviewed. This paper argues that currently open Vatican archives, supplemented with eyewitness accounts and documents from other sources, provide a consistent portrait of the wartime pope as a champion of the victims, opponent of the villains, and inspiration to the rescuers. As such, even without opening additional archives, the documentary record supports the Holy See’s determination that Pius XII led a life of “heroic virtue.”

Two works of speculative fiction present visions of a dystopian future in which human life and human dignity are attacked in the name of pleasure and the greater good. These works, Huxley’s Brave New World and Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome, not only anticipate several key aspects of the prophetic message of Evangelium Vitae, but they help to make concrete and to illustrate the dangers that John Paul II was warning the world about in his 1995 encyclical.

This article is one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” online columns. It briefly addresses, in light of Catholic social teaching, the immigration question that has been a major public issue in the U.S.