DEMOCRACY AND CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING: CONTINUITY, DEVELOPMENT, AND CHALLENGE

My topic is the relationship between two phenomena that have been of long-standing interest to Jude Dougherty as scholar and public intellectual. They came together rather dramatically during the main years of his career, the time he served as dean of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. The University’s birth certificate, as it were, was the 1889 encyclical Magni nobis, promulgated by Leo XIII ten years after Aeterni patris, which initiated the Thomistic revival, and two years before Rerum novarum began the modern tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The founding of the university and, in 1895 its School of Philosophy, was of a piece with Leo’s initiation of a confident address to the modern world in the wake of the political and social turbulence unleashed by the French Revolution. Leo’s project was one of vigorous intellectual engagement in which philosophy had an important role to play. No subsequent pontiff embodied this more than St. John Paul II, who had visited Catholic University at Dean Dougherty’s invitation as the cardinalarchbishop of Krakow and then again as pope, a pope identified not only with the principles of the Gospel, but as a champion of both reason and political freedom. His papacy represented the culmination of a process by which the Church’s social teaching assessed with increasing nuance the character of democratic politics, moving from a diffidence rooted in the