Worldview: Volume 7 - | Cambridge Core

The Council Must Speak
Justus George Lawler
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

06 September 2018, pp. 13-15
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There is no doubt that any statement made by the Council, unless it is an utterly innocuous declaration of inapplicable generalities, is going to have the effect of penalizing the Western nations, since obviously whatever public opinion is engendered by the conciliar decrees will be ignored or suppressed within the Soviet Union. Nevertheless the Council must speak, and this for both moral and "political" reasons.

The Liberal, The Conservative, and the Pope: The Relation between Morality, Politics and Authority
Michael Novak
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

06 September 2018, pp. 13-15
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Both Catholics and non-Catholics attempt to enlist the Pope as a partisan of one or another political cause: disarmament, socialization, civil rights, aid for underdeveloped nations, the condemnation of a Hitler. The relationship between morality and politics, however, is ambiguous. Good men may well disagree about which long-range or short-range political programs are best calculated to serve man's moral interests. What, then, is the present position of the Catholic—liberal or conservative—when the Pope makes a moral-political statement about the issues of our time?
In its general lines, the traditional answer to this question is simple enough. There are three elements to distinguish: (1) moral principles; (2) political programs; (3) concrete decisions. The Pope's moral competence extends most clearly to declarations about principles. In proportion as judgments about historical facts, present trends, and the yet uncertain future are involved in political programs, the Pope's competence becomes increasingly ambiguous; his is increasingly but one of many prophetic voices “crying in the wilderness.”

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