Contemporary Catholic Political Philosophy : A History of Catholic Political Philosophy: Volume III

Contemporary Catholic Political Philosophy: A History of Catholic Political Philosophy: Volume III considers two distinct strands of Catholic political thought arising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that were made especially urgent by two extra-philosophical factors: the forced retreat of papal authority from the temporal sphere and the rising tide of political ideologies. One strand is the formulation of Catholic social thought by the papal magisterium, which was not meant to become a philosophy; rather, it was meant to provide parameters within which Catholic political philosophy should develop. Nevertheless, as papal encyclicals added more and more detail to Catholic social thought, it often became an authoritative substitute for Catholic political philosophy. The protagonists of the other strand were laymen or priests outside the papal magisterium, and they represent various ways of conceiving Church-state relations and economic issues in light of the growth of the nat