Over at The Catholic Thing, John Zmirak has penned an essay entitled, "The Myth of Catholic Social Teaching." Zmirak does not argue that Catholic Social Teaching needs to be developed. He does not quibble with this application of the Church's teaching or that. No, he questions the entire idea that there is any such thing as a "social magisterium." Regular readers will quickly spot the fallacies in his argument, the most obvious of which is that just because a teaching must be applied, and that in the process of application, certainty diminishes, this process does not mean anything goes nor does it mean that application process is any less vital to the life of the Church than the easier to determine negative proscriptions of the divine law. If "thou shalt not," it is pretty easy to classify various things that are simple impermissible but the command to love one another permits several avenues for fulfillment. That does not make their fulfillment any less obligatory nor does it mean some avenues are dead ends.
But, Zmirak is really adopting the same pose here that Catholics for Choice adopts. He is not trying to refine the Church's teaching, he is trying to sow confusion among the faithful and deny the Church's right and duty to teach the truth about the human person. Zmirak may not agree with the Church's teachings on, say, the right of workers to organize themselves into unions, but that teaching is based on the exact same belief in the inherent dignity of every human being as is the Church's defense of unborn human life. He does not appear to understand this. He writes:
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