Comparing (and Contrasting) Catholic and Jewish Reactions to the Modern Liberal Order

Nathan Shields’s essay on the misguided review in First Things of a book on the Mortara affair brilliantly places not only the affair itself but also the recent controversy about it in a larger and exceptionally helpful perspective. Others, especially my colleague Kevin Madigan, have amply demonstrated the grave flaws, even from the vantage point of Catholic doctrine, of Father Romanus Cessario’s apparent attempt in his review to justify the seizure of young Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family. For his part, Shields explores our own cultural situation in a way that complicates the discussion and suggests that both a defense of the review’s evident anti-liberalism and a univocal condemnation of it can be misleading.

As Shields shows, the deeper issue beneath both the kidnapping and the latest controversy about it has to do with the foundations of the liberal democratic order that in modern times has increasingly come to dominate the West and much of the rest of the world as well. The difference between this relatively new way of thinking and traditional Catholic teaching can best be seen in their respective views of liberty.

“In liberal thought,” Shields writes, “liberty means primarily freedom to choose, freedom from constraint, freedom from coercion. It is thus morally neutral: since the purpose of the state is, at bottom, to guarantee the liberty of its subjects, the state must remain agnostic regarding competing conceptions of the good life.” In Catholic thinking, by contrast, “liberty is not simply freedom from constraint but a real moral and metaphysical quality, with which we were endowed at our creation but of which we have been deprived by sin.” For that reason, in this latter perspective “to act wickedly is the same thing as to lack liberty; I cannot have the liberty to sin, because liberty and sin are mutually exclusive.”