SEE: A Puzzle That Won’t Go Away

Here is a tension that has quietly bothered philosophers and believers for centuries: How can God be completely other — infinite, unchanging, beyond the universe — and yet somehow be intimately present inside every blade of grass, every human heartbeat, every atom of matter?

This is not a fringe question. It is the central riddle of philosophical theology. And it has split thinkers into two seemingly opposed camps.

On one side stands Classical Theism, associated above all with Thomas Aquinas. God is transcendent, immutable, and self-sufficient. He does not need the world. He is not changed by it.

Panentheism holds that the universe exists within God and that God and the world are intertwined. Modern versions, like Process Theology, add that God grows with the world and needs creation to be fully God.

Textbooks call these views opposites, but Aquinas’s account achieves panentheism’s intimacy without its main flaw. Some even call Thomism “Classical Panentheism”—a label worth examining.

JUDGE: What Does Aquinas Actually Say?

Now that we’ve framed the philosophical tension, we turn to Aquinas himself: how does he resolve this ancient puzzle?

1. God Is Literally at the Center of Everything

The most startling passage in Aquinas on this topic comes from the Summa Theologiae (I, Q. 8), where he asks, quite directly: Is God in all things?

His answer is unequivocal — and more radical than many Christians realize:

“Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things... Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.”

Read that again. Not near all things. Not governing all things from a distance. Innermost in all things.

Aquinas says God, as pure existence (Ipsum Esse Subsistens), continuously causes all things to exist. Nothing exists independently, even for a moment; God sustains all beings at every instant.

Aquinas uses a vivid analogy: light and air. A room is bright only because sunlight is streaming in. The moment the sun withdraws, the light vanishes instantly — not gradually, but instantly. Creation works the same way. If God were to “pause” his sustaining act of love for even a moment, the entire universe would not slowly decay. It would simply cease — drop into absolute nothingness without a trace.

This means that God is not a cosmic clockmaker who designed the universe like a Swiss cuckoo clock, wound it up, and stepped back to watch. He is more like the light itself: the reason anything is here at all.

2. The Threefold Presence

To make this still more precise — and to distinguish his position from outright pantheism, where God is the world — Aquinas identifies three distinct ways in which God is present in all things:

* By Power: Every creature exists under God’s sovereign governance. Nothing acts outside his causal reach. Don’t confuse this with humans and free will to do evil.

* By Presence: Every creature is entirely open, bare, and immediate to God’s knowledge. Nothing is hidden from him, because nothing exists apart from him.

* By Essence: God is present as the direct, immediate cause of being. Aquinas argues that a cause must be in contact with its effect — not merely at the beginning, but continuously. God’s own essence, therefore, “touches” the inner fabric of every existing thing.

If you define panENtheism, not to be confused with pantheism, as the view that the divine presence completely saturates, fills, and sustains every corner of reality, then Aquinas, on these three points alone, satisfies that definition.

3. Where the Roads Diverge: Asymmetry vs. Interdependence

Here is where Classical Theism and standard panentheism part ways — and the distinction is not minor.

Feature

Standard Panentheism

Aquinas’ Classical Theism

Feature: Relationship

Standard Panentheism: Mutual and symmetrical: God affects the world, and the world affects and changes God.

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: Asymmetrical: God creates and sustains the world, but the world cannot change God.

Feature: Divine Need

Standard Panentheism: God needs the world to fully realize his nature, express his love, or grow through experience.

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: God is entirely self-sufficient ~ Pure Actuality, with no unrealized potential and no need.

Feature: “World in God”

Standard Panentheism: The universe is ontologically inside God, sometimes described as God’s “body.”

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: The universe is “in” God because it is held within his knowledge, power, and sustaining will — not as a physical container.

Modern panentheism, especially Process Theology (think Richard Rohr, Teilhard de Chardin, and others), sees God as evolving and affected by creation. This appeals to some: a God who changes and feels with us.

Aquinas rejects this: if God could change, he would not be truly God but another becoming being. For Aquinas, God is Pure Act—fully realized, lacking nothing, unaltered by the world.

Aquinas calls God immutable and impassible. For him, these traits assure us that God’s love and sustaining presence are unchanging, not a response to us, but are.

4. The Synthesis: “Classical Panentheism.”

If panentheism means God fully sustains the universe, Aquinas fits. He describes God as innermost in everything: a radical intimacy often missing in panentheism.

If panentheism entails mutual vulnerability—suggesting God and the world are truly codependent—then it offers a different picture entirely. His God is intimately present, even more so than panentheism often claims, but is wholly free, needing nothing from creation to exist, to love, or to be complete.

The label “Classical Panentheism” captures this synthesis well: all the immanence, none of the mutual dependence.

ACT: What Do We Do With This?

Having traced the debate from tension to solution, it’s time to consider practical implications.

This is not merely an academic debate. It has direct consequences for how we pray, how we suffer, and how we understand the world around us.

If Aquinas is right, then everything you experience—ground, air, your own awareness—is actively maintained by God right now. God’s presence is not distant or abstract. Yet, unlike in some versions of panentheism, this intimacy does not entail God needing creation. Contemplative traditions that seek God “within” are, in light of Aquinas, making a metaphysical—not merely metaphorical—claim.

But God’s presence is not a dependency. This matters enormously. A God who needs creation to complete himself would be a kind of cosmic codependent — codependent for us would carry a shadow of self-interest. Aquinas’ God needs nothing. His sustaining presence is therefore a pure gift, given with complete freedom, from a fullness that cannot be diminished.

Three practical implications follow:

1. Prayer becomes less of a long-distance call and more of a turning inward. If God is already innermost in you, prayer is less about reaching upward and more about becoming aware of what is already, always, there.

2. Suffering can be faced without the conclusion that God is absent. The God who is impassible is not indifferent — classical theology is careful about this distinction. Rather, his sustaining love does not waver depending on circumstances, which is precisely what makes it reliable when everything else is falling apart.

3. The material world deserves reverence. Every created thing — every person, every ecosystem, every seemingly insignificant corner of existence — is being directly held in being by God. That is a foundation for genuine care of creation, not as a sentimental add-on, but as a metaphysical reality.

A Final Question Worth Sitting With As You Scratch Your Head About What I Have Said So Far…

Does the distinction between God being innermost in things and God being interdependent with things change how you understand the lived experience of divine presence? (Don’t jump to a conclusion here, sit with that question)

Does it matter, in your prayer or your daily life, whether God’s closeness to you is a gift from infinite fullness — or a mutual need you and God share? Or do you really care?

These are not merely philosophical puzzles. They are questions about the kind of God we actually believe in, and the kind of life that belief makes possible.

Now ask yourself, are your mind, heart, and gut all in sync?

*************************************************************************************

References I used in this blog post: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 8 (translation from New Advent); on Process Theology, see Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929) and Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948): Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, all of Chardin’s works.

The Podcaster Who Can’t Figure Out His Own Tools

Ezra Klein has never claimed to have AI figured out. On a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, he admitted something familiar to many: even though he sees AI as powerful—able to reshape the economy, disrupt creative fields, and alter how we value work—he struggles to use it effectively in daily life.

To work through this, Klein invited Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, co-author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with A.I. Mollick argues AI is less a calculator or search engine, and more a collaborator. This shift matters. It means choosing the right tool, learning how to prompt, and accepting that even creators of these systems lack a manual for every use.

Klein also pushes these talks past practical advice. At the Center for American Progress IDEAS conference, he questioned whether “artificial intelligence” is accurate, suggesting we are building distributed human-machine collaboration more than independent machine intelligence. It’s a subtle distinction that raises larger questions about our creations.

The Pope Who Called for AI to Be “Disarmed”

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a similar destination from a very different starting point. Where Klein describes and interprets AI’s societal implications through pragmatic, secular questioning, Leo approaches with clear moral prescriptions rooted in religious doctrine. The encyclical is explicit that AI is not morally neutral — it cannot be treated as just another tool — and that its development must be ordered toward human dignity and the common good rather than efficiency, profit, or the concentration of power.

Leo is urgent on points Klein often leaves open. The encyclical warns against giving machines the power to make irreversible or lethal decisions and calls for AI to be “disarmed”—free of domination, exclusion, and death in automated systems. This is a stronger stance than most secular commentators, grounded in the Catholic tradition of asking not just what technology can do, but who it serves and at what cost.

Where They Meet

The overlap is real and worth naming. Klein’s instinct that AI must be understood as a relationship — something co-created, not merely operated — closely aligns with Leo’s insistence that AI must serve the human person rather than replace human judgment or sideline human responsibility. Both are worried about the same gravitational pull: the tendency for economic logic or institutional inertia to let efficiency override human goods.

Klein’s phrase “strange, delightful, and slightly unnerving” echoes Leo’s concern that technological progress can dazzle people, leading them to lose sight of what it means to be fully human.

Where They Diverge

The real difference is not in what they observe, but in what they bring to it. Klein is a gifted diagnostician — he maps the terrain, names the tensions, and asks the right questions. Leo offers a moral criterion for answering them. The encyclical asks not just how humans and machines will co-create the future, but also what kind of humanity that future serves, and whether it protects or erodes the person made in the image of God.

This is a different claim. It is more than an ethical guideline; it’s the argument that some uses of AI clash with human dignity.

Why Both Voices Matter

It would be easy to treat these two perspectives as ships passing in the night — secular pragmatism on one side, religious moral framework on the other. But that would be a mistake. Klein helps us understand the experience of living inside this technological moment: the confusion, the possibility, the sense that something enormous is happening, and nobody quite has a map. Leo helps us ask what we owe each other as that moment unfolds, and where the hard limits should be.

Read together, they make a stronger case than either alone: AI is not just a productivity or policy question. It’s a question about what we value, and whether our institutions — technological, political, and moral — are up to the task of protecting it.

Ezra Klein’s episode “How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?” is available on The Ezra Klein Show. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was issued on 25 May 2026.

A See–Judge–Act Study Module for Ordinary Christians

There is a moment in Joseph Cardijn’s life that never ceases to strike me. He was a young Belgian priest at the turn of the twentieth century, watching working-class teenagers — barely more than children, really — swallowed whole by factories, stripped of dignity, left without community or faith. His response was not to write a pastoral letter and file it away. He sat down with those young workers and asked them three deceptively simple questions: What do you actually see happening around you? What does faith say about what you’re seeing? What are you going to do about it?

That is the See–Judge–Act method. Cardijn gave it a formal name, but he would have been the first to say he didn’t invent it. He recovered it from the Gospels, from the prophets, and, I would argue, from the great social preachers of the early Church whom he deeply admired. Basil of Caesarea thundered in the marketplace about grain hoarded while children starved. Augustine of Hippo dissecting the lies that hold disordered societies together. John Chrysostom refused to let his congregation leave the Sunday liturgy without looking into the eyes of the poor waiting outside.

These three men lived in a world of brutal inequality, mass displacement, collapsing civic trust, and spiritual confusion. In other words, they lived in something that looks very much like our world.

This module invites you: Read these texts together, and let them do what they were made to do—identify what is real, judge it honestly in the light of faith, and move from awareness to committed action. Let the process lead you to tangible change, not just reflection.

A note before you begin: Thomas Merton, writing from his monastery in Kentucky in the 1960s, warned that the deepest problem of modern life is not that people are cruel but that they are absent — absent to themselves, absent to each other, absent to God. He called it “the sickness of alienation,” and he traced it not to any single social failure but to the way modern life systematically prevents the kind of interiority from which genuine love flows. Keep that in mind as you work through these texts. The Fathers are not just social critics. They are physicians of the soul, and they understood — as Merton did — that social transformation without interior conversion produces, at best, better-organized injustice.

How to Use This Module

Use this module in a group of four to ten people—such as a parish group, campus ministry, book club, or family. Read each excerpt aloud slowly, then work through the See, Judge, and Act questions in order.

• Start with the See questions. Give specific, concrete examples from your own experience.

• Next, discuss the Judge questions. Let faith offer insight and guidance.

• Finish with Act questions. Decide on one realistic commitment together.

• After all three texts, use Group Synthesis to agree on what you heard and what you will take forward.

Follow the order: See, Judge, Act. Skipping any step weakens the outcome. Reflect, discern, and then act—always in sequence.

Text 1: Basil of Caesarea on Wealth and Poverty

“The bread you are holding back belongs to the hungry. The coat you keep locked up belongs to the naked. The shoes that are rotting in your possession belong to the barefoot. The silver you keep buried in the ground belongs to the needy. You are thus guilty of as many injustices as there are people you could have helped.” — Basil of Caesarea, Homily 6 on Luke 12:18 (c. 369)

Basil preached this during a famine. He was not speaking metaphorically. People were dying in the streets of Caesarea while grain merchants hoarded their stores to secure better prices. He had already sold his own family inheritance to build what historians now call the first comprehensive hospital in the Christian world — the Basiliad, which included wards for the sick, housing for travelers, workshops for the poor, and food distribution. He was not interested in sentiment. He was interested in logistics animated by love.

Basil’s main point is clear: what we have is not ours alone. For him, private property comes with a social obligation. What is “extra” in my life morally belongs to those who lack what is necessary. This is not a political stance but a theological one: God gives the earth’s goods for all. Any system that leaves some people without what they need, in Basil’s view, is a theft of God’s intention.

This reflects what Catholic Social Teaching identifies as the universal destination of goods—an often overlooked pillar of CST in parish life.

See

• What forms of poverty, precarity, or exclusion are most visible in your community right now? Think concretely: food deserts, unhoused neighbors, people working two jobs, and still behind on rent.

• Where do you see waste and surplus coexisting with unmet need in the same zip code, the same block, sometimes the same building?

• Who is most likely to be invisible in your parish, your neighborhood, your workplace — the person whose suffering goes unnamed because naming it is uncomfortable?

• How do economic pressures generate not just material hardship but also isolation, anxiety, and the corrosive competition of comparing yourself to everyone around you?

Judge

• How does Basil challenge the widespread assumption that private possession carries no social obligation? Where do you feel the force of that challenge — and where do you resist it?

• Which principles of Catholic Social Teaching feel most alive in Basil’s preaching: the dignity of the human person, the option for the poor, solidarity, the universal destination of goods?

• What would Basil say about a lifestyle that normalizes Amazon Prime returns, food waste, and a second storage unit, while a neighbor’s family skips meals? Not as a judgment of persons, but as a diagnosis of culture?

• How is Christian stewardship — the sense of holding things in trust — different from ownership understood as unlimited control?

Act

• Commit to one clear, specific way to simplify consumption this month, so you can give or share more. Take a realistic and visible step together.

• What local need could you meet through direct service, financial support, or advocacy in the next four weeks? Name the organization, the need, and the day.

• Identify one habit of waste—food, clothing, energy, or time—that your group will actively reduce together.

• Translate “extra” time, money, or space into genuine hospitality: choose to host a neighbor, fund a food pantry shelf, or open your home to someone lonely this month. Decide and act together.

Text 2: Augustine of Hippo on the Two Cities

“Two loves therefore have given origin to these two cities: self-love in contempt of God unto the earthly, love of God in contempt of self unto the heavenly.” — Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 28 (c. 426)

Augustine wrote The City of God in the aftermath of the sack of Rome in 410 — an event that felt, to his contemporaries, like the end of the world. His response was not a political program but a theological rereading of history: every human community is shaped by what it ultimately loves, and any society that places something other than God and the neighbor at its center will eventually turn on itself.

This is Augustine, the psychologist and Augustine, the political theologian, at his most incisive. He is not saying that earthly society is evil or that Christians should withdraw from it. He is saying that earthly society is disordered to the degree that it organizes itself around false goods — around the fear of loss, the hunger for status, the appetite for domination. And he is saying that the Church, which is itself a pilgrim community and not yet the heavenly city fully realized, carries within it both the seeds of renewal and the same temptations toward self-enclosure.

Merton would have recognized this immediately. In New Seeds of Contemplation (1961) and especially in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966), he described how the mass media, consumer culture, and ideological tribalism of his era were producing people incapable of genuine encounter — people whose inner life had been so colonized by noise and image that they could no longer love anything that didn’t immediately serve their self-image. Augustine’s amor sui — disordered self-love — had simply found new delivery mechanisms. Merton’s answer, like Augustine’s, was not political withdrawal but conversion: the slow, costly reordering of desire from the inside out.

See

• Where do you see social life marked by polarization, distrust, and the collapse of shared purpose — in your city, your country, your parish, your family?

• What “false goods” seem to organize people’s deepest hopes right now: security, status, ideology, partisan identity, relentless consumption, the curated self of social media?

• How does loneliness — and the digital simulation of connection that often substitutes for it — weaken real friendship, civic participation, and the sense of belonging to something larger than yourself?

• What makes people feel that society is a competition to be survived rather than a shared home to be built?

Judge

• How does Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris — ordered love — help diagnose what has gone wrong socially? What would it mean for your loves to be rightly ordered?

• What is the difference between civic peace (the absence of conflict, a workable truce) and the deeper peace that flows from justice and charity? Can a society have one without the other?

• How do CST themes — the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, human dignity — illuminate the tension between legitimate self-protection and genuine social responsibility?

• In what ways does Augustine remind us that no political arrangement, however just, can substitute for conversion of heart? What does that mean for how Christians engage politics?

Act

• What practice could help your group resist polarization — listening circles, shared prayer across political difference, a discipline of speaking charitably about people you disagree with?

• How can you build one relationship across age, class, race, or political difference this month? Name a specific person or context.

• What daily habits in your own life feed disordered love — the scroll, the comparison, the anxiety about status — and what habits could begin to reorder your desires toward God and neighbor?

• What one public issue could your group approach not from fear or tribal loyalty but from hope rooted in the Gospel?

Text 3: John Chrysostom on Almsgiving and the Poor as the Body of Christ

“Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk only to neglect him outside where he suffers cold and nakedness. He who said ‘This is my body’ is the same one who said ‘You saw me hungry and you gave me no food.’” — John Chrysostom, Homily 50 on Matthew (c. 390)

Chrysostom — the name means “golden-mouthed” — was perhaps the greatest preacher of the ancient Church, and he was eventually exiled and killed for it. His preaching on wealth and poverty was so fierce that Empress Eudoxia, who is reported to have enjoyed dancing in jewels while people starved outside the palace walls, arranged his removal from the see of Constantinople. He died en route to a remote exile, worn out, in 407.

What made him dangerous was not just his rhetoric but his theological precision. He refused — absolutely refused — to allow his congregation to separate their reverence for Christ in the Eucharist from their treatment of Christ in the poor. For Chrysostom, this was not an analogy or an aspiration. It was a liturgical and doctrinal claim: the same Lord present in the bread and cup is present, in a real if different mode, in the person of the poor at the door. To walk past one and kneel before the other is not piety. It is a kind of practical heresy.

This connects directly to what CST calls the preferential option for the poor — not a preference for the poor over others in terms of their human dignity, but a claim that the poor have a special claim on Christian attention because they most transparently reveal the face of Christ.

See

• Who in your society is most vulnerable to neglect right now — the unhoused, the elderly in isolation, the recently released prisoner, the immigrant family, the person with a disability without a care network?

• Where do you see “relational poverty” — not just the absence of money, but the absence of anyone who knows your name, notices your absence, or would come if you called?

• How often do people around you have basic material support but still lack companionship, belonging, or the sense that they matter to anyone?

• What happens when charitable concern is replaced by the managed sympathy of institutions — the form to fill out, the case number, the referral that goes nowhere?

Judge

• How does Chrysostom challenge any clean separation between devotion and mercy — between what we do in church and what we do on Monday morning?

• Why does CST insist that love of neighbor must include both material aid and human solidarity — not just a check or a food box, but presence, dignity, relationship?

• How do the principles of human dignity and the preferential option for the poor shape our response not just to economic hardship but to loneliness and invisibility?

• What would it mean, practically, to treat poor and marginalized people not as projects or recipients but as brothers and sisters whose gifts the community needs?

Act

• What specific act of mercy can your group do this week? A visit to a nursing home. A meal train for a neighbor. A monthly donation. Accompaniment at a food pantry. Name it. Put it on the calendar.

• Who in your parish or neighborhood might need a phone call or a visit more urgently than they need a donation?

• How can your worship — Sunday Mass, Morning Prayer, whatever your practice is — become the beginning of mercy rather than a substitute for it?

• What regular system or habit could your group build so that care for the vulnerable becomes woven into the week rather than saved for special occasions?

Group Synthesis: The Closing Exercise

After working through all three texts, gather your observations and ask these questions together:

1. Name the challenge. What is the one shared social challenge that surfaced most consistently across all three conversations — the wound that Basil, Augustine, and Chrysostom each, in their own way, were pressing on?

Examples that often emerge: the invisibility of the poor; the loneliness epidemic hiding behind digital connection; the way affluence and destitution occupy the same neighborhoods without touching; the collapse of common life into tribal competition.

2. One insight from each Father. Go around the group and complete these three sentences:

• From Basil, I am taking away the conviction that…

• From Augustine, I am taking away the conviction that…

• From Chrysostom, I am taking away the conviction that…

There are no wrong answers. What you are doing is letting ancient wisdom become personal.

3. One action to begin immediately. Not next month. Not eventually. This week. The group names one concrete action — a visit, a donation, a conversation, a habit changed, a commitment made to a real person — that directly responds to the challenge named in step one.

Write it down. Assign names to it. Agree on when you will report back to each other.

A Final Word: On Not Ending in Abstraction

Cardijn used to say that the greatest danger of social Christianity is that it becomes social without becoming Christianity— a set of sympathetic feelings and progressive opinions that never disturb anyone’s actual life. He was equally worried about the opposite error: a Christianity so focused on personal salvation that it mistakes the poor for an inconvenience rather than a revelation.

Merton saw the same trap from the contemplative side. In a letter written in 1966, he warned a young activist that a person who has not found something true and stable at the center of their own life will burn out in the work of justice — not from exhaustion, but from the secret discovery that they were working not for the poor but for the image of themselves as someone who works for the poor. The cure, he said, is not less action but deeper prayer — prayer that is honest enough to name our disordered loves and spacious enough to be changed by them.

Basil, Augustine, and Chrysostom are not historical curiosities. They are physicians. And like all good physicians, they are not interested in making you feel enlightened. They are interested in making you well, which, in the Christian tradition, is another word for making you free enough to love.

Begin with one text. Read it slowly. Ask what you actually see. Ask what your faith actually says about it. And then — please — do something.

This module is based on the See–Judge–Act method developed by Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967), founder of the Young Christian Workers (YCW/JOC), and draws on the social theology of Thomas Merton (1915–1968). It is designed for parish small groups, campus ministries, and adult faith formation programs. It may be reproduced freely for non-commercial use.

The Gospel for the Feast of Pentecost is, in fact, a shorter version of the Gospel for the First Sunday after Easter, which is also known as Divine Mercy Sunday. On that occasion the Gospel Enquiry focused on the theme of peace – that reflection can be found here: https://reflections.josephcardijn.com/p/gospel-enquiry-what-if-peace-is-a . On this occasion, the focus will be on the somewhat opposite poles of fear and joy which are both prominent themes in this text.

The setting of the Gospel is the day of the resurrection. Not surprisingly, the disciples are in hiding, afraid that, having killed Jesus, the authorities would now come after his followers. The symbolism of closing themselves in a room call to mind the paralysis of fear where the sufferer is simply unable to act, even for their own good. The appearance of the risen Jesus among them is a transformative moment for the disciples. The text tells us that they ‘were filled with joy’ (Jn 20:20). Immediately after, following his second greeting of peace, Jesus bestows the Spirit on the disciples and commissions them with the gift of forgiveness.

The transformation from a state of fear to one of joy and from a disposition of paralysis to one of mission are profound indicators of the Spirit at work in the lives of the disciples. It is a very pertinent reminder, to today’s disciples, on this Feast of Pentecost, that the Holy Spirit can transform human experience from fear to joy and can impel individuals and communities to act, in the name of God’s Kingdom.

Gospel Text: John 20:19-23

In the evening of the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’, and showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw the Lord, and he said to them again, ‘Peace be with you’.

‘As the Father sent me,

so am I sending you.’

After saying this he breathed on them and said:

‘Receive the Holy Spirit.

For those whose sins you forgive,

they are forgiven;

for those whose sins you retain,

they are retained.’

See

How does the greeting of Jesus, to the disciples, compare to their original disposition?

What is the impact of the presence of the risen Jesus on his disciples?

How is the relationship between the coming of the Spirit and the idea of mission shown in this text?

Judge

What situations lead to a ‘paralysis’ due to fear in my own experience?

How can the actions of others lead some people to experience fear?

What does it mean to have joy in a world which is so often characterised by cynicism and mistrust?

Act

How can I respond, in my own circumstances, to the call to mission from the coming of the Spirit?

How can I contribute to overcoming fear and in others?

In what ways can I bring joy to others?

Image: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/8Ce3yZNERXrZsAcKe8mcU

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/john.htm

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING · PATRISTICS · THOMAS MERTON · SEE-JUDGE-ACT

What if the most urgent voices for our fractured, violent, consumption-driven world aren’t modern commentators or social media theologians — but men and women who lived between roughly A.D. 100 and 600? The Church Fathers — those early Christian writers, bishops, monks, and martyrs of the patristic era — grappled with division, empire, poverty, war, and the question of how believers should actually live together. Sound familiar?

Using the See-Judge-Act method — a classic framework in Catholic social teaching for reading reality through the Gospel — let’s explore why the patristic period still matters, what it demands of us, and how Thomas Merton helps us bring it into the twenty-first century.

SEE

What was the patristic period, and why should we care?

The patristic era — named for the Latin patres, or “fathers” — spans from the generation just after the apostles to somewhere around the sixth or eighth century, depending on whether you mark its close with figures like Gregory the Great, the Council of Chalcedon, or John Damascene. It includes the Apostolic Fathers, the great doctrinal and pastoral writers of the fourth and fifth centuries (think Augustine, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Basil the Great), and the early desert and monastic traditions.

Historically, this was the Church’s first sustained attempt to think, pray, worship, and organize itself after the New Testament era — without the apostles in the room, but also without centuries of settled tradition to lean on. These were people figuring out what the Gospel meant in real life, under real pressure, in a real empire that was by turns hostile and seductive.

From a Catholic social teaching (CST) perspective, the patristic period matters not because the Fathers used that phrase — they didn’t — but because they were the first to articulate the social consequences of the Gospel: human dignity, solidarity, justice, peace, care for the poor, and the common good. Long before papal encyclicals, they were doing CST by another name.

JUDGE

Why the Fathers are essential, not optional, for Catholic social teaching

One of the most important things the patristic period demonstrates is that Christian faith was never meant to be merely private or purely “spiritual.” For the Fathers, how you treated your neighbor, how your community cared for the poor, how Christians related to state power — all of this was inseparable from worship, theology, and prayer. The inner life and the public life were one and the same.

The Fathers helped form the Church’s understanding of the human person as created in the image of God (imago Dei) — a conviction that grounds everything in CST, from human dignity to workers’ rights to the condemnation of torture. They also envisioned society as ordered toward communion rather than domination — a direct challenge to the logic of empire then, and to the logic of unchecked power and inequality now.

In CST terms, the patristic inheritance gives depth and historical roots to themes like the universal destination of goods (John Chrysostom was withering on the subject of hoarding wealth), the preferential option for the poor, the ethics of war and peace, and the formation of conscience. Without the patristic layer, CST risks looking like modern policy commentary dressed in religious language. With it, those themes are revealed as ancient, hard-won, and spiritually serious.

“The Fathers give the Church its early grammar for holiness and social life. Catholic social teaching develops that grammar in modern form. And Thomas Merton re-presents it as a way of seeing through the illusions of modernity and acting with mercy, justice, and peace.”

ACT

What does this ask of us — and where does Merton come in?

For our world today, the patristic tradition is a direct challenge to individualism, consumerism, political tribalism, and the persistent temptation to keep faith safely private while our public lives follow entirely different rules. The Fathers remind us that Christian witness means forming communities that are truthful, merciful, disciplined in prayer, and attentive to the poor — not as social programs, but as expressions of who we are in Christ.

This is where Thomas Merton enters so naturally. Merton — the Trappist monk, prolific writer, and one of the most widely read Catholic voices of the twentieth century — drew deeply from the desert and patristic tradition, especially on contemplation, silence, and what he called the “true self” in Christ. These themes echo directly in figures such as Athanasius, Evagrius, John Cassian, and the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt and Syria.

But Merton didn’t retreat into antiquarianism. He brought that contemplative tradition into pointed social critique: his writings on peace, nonviolence, race, and the dangers of nuclear war are not departures from his monastic life — they are its fruit. For Merton, a person genuinely formed by contemplation cannot remain indifferent to systemic evil. Silence and justice are not opposites; they are companions.

In this sense, Merton doesn’t just borrow from the Fathers — he translates them. He makes their wisdom legible for a nuclear age, a technological age, a spiritually fragmented age — which is to say, our age.

Bringing it together

In See-Judge-Act terms: see the patristic age as the Church’s foundational social and spiritual memory — the place where the Gospel first got its moral legs. It is judged as essential to Catholic social teaching because it holds contemplation and justice together, refusing to let either dissolve into the other. And act by reading Merton and the Fathers together, as guides for Christian witness in a world that is, in so many ways, still the world they were navigating.

The problems haven’t changed that much. Maybe neither has the wisdom needed to meet them.

9 September 1930 — 18 May 2015

Monk, Historian, Priest — and Friend

There are people who change how you see the world, and there are people who change how you see yourself within it. Cyprian Davis, OSB, did both — for me personally, and for the Catholic Church in America.

I knew him as “Cyp.” For several years, he was my spiritual director, and professor, and in that quiet, unhurried way of his — sitting and talking as he stocked his pipe, he would start every conversation in his raspy voice, “So what do you want to talk about?”…the way of a man long schooled in Benedictine listening — he opened my eyes to racism in the Church, in myself, and in our society in ways I had never confronted before. He did it without judgment. He did it with the patience of a scholar and the tenderness of a pastor. He showed me the meaning of justice, solidarity, and what the common good is for all humans. He was, above all, a friend.

On this day, the anniversary of his death, I want to remember not just the historian the world knew, but the man.

The Man Behind the Name

He was born Clarence John Davis in September 1930 in Washington, D.C., the son of Clarence W. and Evelyn (Jackson) Davis. That a Black child born in the segregated capital of the United States in 1930 would spend his life restoring the memory of Black Catholics to the Church — insisting on their dignity, their centrality, their belonging — has the shape of a vocation written from the very beginning. We would often laugh that his birth name was my second or middle name, one we shared.

He died on 18 May 2015, at Memorial Hospital in Jasper, Indiana, not far from the abbey that had been his home for decades. He was 84, and a jubilarian of both monastic profession and priestly ordination — a man who had kept faith, in every sense of that phrase, for a very long time.

The Work That Will Outlast All of Us

Cyprian spent most of his priestly and monastic life at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana, where he taught Church history for decades. But his reach extended far beyond that hill in the knobs. His landmark book, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990), did something the American Church had never adequately done for itself: it insisted that African Americans were not a footnote to Catholic history, but central characters in it. He recovered stories that had been buried — by neglect, by prejudice, by the quiet violence of erasure — and returned them to their rightful place.

That work was not merely academic. It was an act of justice. He understood that a Church which cannot remember its own history cannot fully be itself.

Scholar and Witness

What gave Cyprian’s scholarship its moral weight was that he had lived through the history he studied. He marched. He was present at events that called for a witness. His footnotes carried the weight of someone who had stood in the places he wrote about — who knew that history is not only what happened, but what it cost.

He participated in the founding and growth of the National Black Catholic Congress and gave voice to communities within the Church that had too long been spoken about rather than listened to. For Cyprian, truth-telling and justice were never separate vocations.

How to Mark This Day

Because of who he was, this anniversary is a natural occasion to:

• Read a passage from The History of Black Catholics in the United States — even a single chapter is a gift

• Teach or share a story from Black Catholic history with someone who doesn’t know it

• Pray for the ongoing healing of memory in the Church, for the courage to tell the truth about our past, and for the communities whose gifts have still not been fully honored.

Why He Mattered — Why He Still Does

Cyp opened my eyes. That is not a small thing to say about a person. He did it not through argument but through witness — through who he was as a monk, as a priest, as a man of uncommon grace and intellectual rigor. He made the past speak. He retrieved what had been mislaid. And he reminded me, as he reminded the Church, that you cannot love what you refuse to see. Because of Cyp, I am a public historian.

He kept his vows. He kept the hours. He kept faith with the truth for more than half a century. And then, on a May afternoon in Indiana, Clarence John Davis — who had become brother Cyprian, then Father Cyprian, then a quiet giant of American Catholic life — went home.

A Prayer

Good and gracious God, we give you thanks for the life and witness of Cyprian Davis, OSB — monk, priest, historian, teacher, and friend.

Born Clarence John in a segregated city, he spent his life insisting that every name, every story, every face belongs in the memory of your Church.

May his voice continue to reach us and the generations of Catholics still to come, calling us to understand what it means to be Black and White together in the one Body of Christ.

Let his long labor for truth, memory, and justice bear fruit in a Church more willing to know itself fully and honestly.

May his example inspire us to honor the gifts and history of Black Catholics not as a gesture, but as a debt of gratitude and an act of faith.

We ask that his deep faithfulness inspire us to seek justice and to see history as living stones. Amen.

Introduction

There was a time when “Ascension Thursday” was part of my vocabulary and experience, just like fasting from midnight before going to Mass and receiving Jesus in Holy Communion. Today, we imagine that seven equals ten and we fast for just one hour before going to Communion; or we realise that the emphasis ought to be on being missionary disciples, not blindly sticking to externals.

One of my blessings that God gifts me is to be invited to join a group of young adults to help them develop their familiarity with See, Judge, Act. What impresses me about them is not their commitment to attending meetings so much as their commitment to putting their faith into action.

At a recent meeting, they reflected on actions that they have committed to and their efforts to draw others into their actions. It struck me as I listened to them, that they were living the message of this Gospel, almost two thousand years after Jesus commissioned his disciples to continue his work.

Yes, indeed, I am blessed. May this Gospel bring you God’s blessings as you engage in this Enquiry.

The Gospel

The eleven disciples set out for Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them. When they saw him they fell down before him, though some hesitated. Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.’ (Matthew 28:16-20)

The Enquiry

See

• This Gospel story is sometimes referred to as “The Great Commission.” Imagine that you hear the Gospel being proclaimed at Mass. What do you hear? What do you learn about Jesus from this Gospel?

• What has been the impact of Jesus’ directions to his disciples? How has his meeting with his disciples affected you and those close to you?

• Why do most of the disciples fall down before Jesus? What does this tell you about them? What about the few who “hesitated”? Is hesitation significant?

Judge

• How does this story fit with your experience of being a Christian? Do you see yourself as someone who has been sent by Jesus to be one of his missionaries?

• Does Jesus commission his followers to get involved in social justice situations, eg, the plight of the Lebanese in Beirut, or the people left homeless because of the cost-of-living crisis in your city, or those whose lives have been ruined by some form of addiction?

• Does meeting Jesus in this Gospel make you feel uncomfortable? What does Jesus say that challenges you about how you live your faith?

Act

• How would you describe the mission of the lay faithful (those who are baptised, but who are not priests, brothers or nuns) in the world you experience?

• What small action can you carry out to help to accomplish this mission?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Lyricmac at English Wikipedia (Creator), The Great Commission, at the Cathedral Parish of Saint Patrick in El Paso Wikimedia, CC BY 2.5

Today, 15 May 2026 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIV is expected to sign his first encyclical. Provisionally titled Magnifica Humanitas (”Magnificent Humanity”), the document is reported to address artificial intelligence, international peace, and what Vatican sources describe as a deepening crisis in international law. If the date holds, it will be one of the most deliberately symbolic moments in recent Church history.

And it’s worth pausing to understand why.

Three great documents of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) were released on 15 May, each building on the last over the past seven decades. Together they form the bedrock of the Church’s engagement with the modern world. If Leo XIV releases his encyclical today, he steps into a living tradition, not just issuing a letter.

Here’s what that tradition looks like — and why it matters to all of us, Catholic or not.

1. The “Social Question” ~ Labor, Dignity, and the Economy

Each of these three encyclicals was written to address what philosophers and theologians call the “Social Question” — the crisis of economic injustice and the place of the human person in a modern industrial economy. The answers they offered were not abstract. They were concrete, consistent, and, for their time, genuinely radical.

Dignity of Labor: All three documents reject the idea that labor is just another commodity to be purchased at the lowest possible price. A worker is not a unit of production. They are a human being made in the image of God, and that changes everything about how we should structure wages, hours, and working conditions.

The Just Wage: Each encyclical argues for a “living wage” — not whatever the market will bear, but enough for a worker to support a family in reasonable comfort. This was a direct challenge to the laissez-faire economics of the 19th century, and it remains a challenge to our own.

The Right to Association: All three vigorously defend workers’ right to form unions. Not merely tolerate it — defend it. The Church saw labor organizing not as a threat to social order but as a necessary expression of human solidarity.

2. A Middle Path Between Two Failed Extremes

Perhaps the most politically striking thing about these encyclicals is what they refused to do: choose sides between capitalism and socialism. Instead, they carved out a distinctly “catholic” third way, and I am intentionally using a lower case “c”.

Against Unbridled Capitalism: The documents criticize what they called “liberalism” — meaning the classical economic variety — for its tendency to prioritize profit over people and to generate vast concentrations of wealth while leaving workers behind.

Against Authoritarian Socialism and Communism: At the same time, they reject the socialist framework of class struggle and the abolition of private property. The problem with socialism, in the Church’s view, is not merely that it is economically inefficient — it is that it misunderstands the human person. People have a natural right to own property, and that right is bound up with their dignity and freedom.

Instead of siding with capitalism or socialism, the Church proposed class harmony and a vision of property ownership ordered toward the good of others, but never absolute. Key takeaway: The Church’s ‘third way’ aims for balance between individual rights and social responsibility.

3. The Principle of Subsidiarity

Quadragesimo Anno (1931) did something philosophically important that often goes underappreciated: it formally named and defined the principle of subsidiarity.

The core idea: social problems are best handled at the smallest competent authority level—families before communities, then municipalities, states, and international bodies, with larger institutions supporting, not overwhelming, smaller ones. Key takeaway: Subsidiarity prioritizes effective local action and support.

Mater et Magistra (1961) developed this further for a world of growing government complexity. Yes, the state has a legitimate role in the economy. But state intervention that crowds out individual initiative, local association, and community life is not progress — it is a different kind of failure.

4. Private Property and the Common Good

These documents share a nuanced ~ and often misunderstood ~ view of ownership.

The Right to Private Property is real. It is not a grudging concession or a temporary accommodation. It flows from human nature and is necessary for genuine freedom.

But the Universal Destination of Goods limits that right. The Earth’s resources are, ultimately, meant for all of humanity. That means the right to private property is never absolute. What you own, you are steward of — and the stewardship has moral consequences. Property must serve the Common Good, or it fails its own purpose.

5. A Family of Documents — Linked by Date and Intention

These three encyclicals are not simply thematically related; the Church intentionally links them by their timing and explicit references to one another.

Rerum Novarum (”On New “ings”) was issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891, amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. It is rightly called the founding document of modern Catholic Social Teaching.

Quadragesimo Anno (”In the “rtieth Year”) was used by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931 — exactly forty years later, and deliberately so. It deepened and expanded Leo XIII’s thought, introduced the principle of subsidiarity, and applied CST to the new crises of the Great Depression. The Jesuit theologian Oswald von Nell-Breuning played a significant role in drafting it.

Pope John XXIII issued Mater et Magistra (“Mother” and “Teacher”) on 15 May 1961 — the 70th anniversary — updating the tradition once again for a world grappling with decolonization, agricultural crises, global inequality, and the early stages of the technological age.

It is worth noting that other major social encyclicals extend this tradition beyond 15 May: Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in XXIII (1963), Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967), and Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991) are essential parts of the conversation. John Paul II had actually intended to publish Laborem Exercens on 15 May 1981, to mark the 90th anniversary — but the assassination attempt on his life on 13 May of that year forced a delay until September. Even that painful footnote underscores how intentional this tradition is.

May 15th: Magnifica Humanitas

If Magnifica Humanitas is signed today, it will be a notable historical moment. The Church now addresses new challenges: artificial intelligence, algorithmic labor changes, surveillance capitalism, and evolving international law. Key takeaway: The tradition adapts to each era’s biggest questions.

While the specifics of today’s questions are new, their essence remains the same: Who benefits from new technology? Who is left behind? How do we maintain human dignity as technology blurs boundaries? Key takeaway: The core challenge remains human dignity amid technological change.

Pope Leo XIV chose his name deliberately. He has said from the beginning that Leo XIII inspires his pontificate. Today, we may see what that inheritance looks like in the 21st century.

Questions to Sit With Before You Read Pope Leo’s Encyclical

As you look for Magnifica Humanitas, here are a few questions worth turning over:

1. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the nature of work itself — not just automating tasks, but transforming what it means to be skilled, employable, or economically necessary. Does the Church’s century-old deChurch’s the dignity of labor still speak to that reality? And if so, what would a “just wage” look like in an economy where AI can do more and more of what humans once did?

2. The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest effective level — the family, the community, or the local authority. But AI and digital platforms operate globally and instantaneously, with no regard for national borders, let alone local communities. Is subsidiarity even a coherent principle in a world like that — or does it need to be radically reimagined?

3. Catholic Social Teaching has always tried to chart a middle path between unrestrained markets and state control. In an era when the most powerful economic actors are not nations but technology companies, and when no single government can effectively regulate them, what does that “third way” actually look like in practice?

4. The social encyclicals have consistently addressed “all people of good will”, not just Catholics. A” As you read Magnifica Humanitas, ask yourself: does its moral framework — rooted in human dignity, the common good, and solidarity — translate into the secular, pluralist conversations happening right now about AI governance, labor rights, and global inequality? Should it?

Many Catholics today are troubled, remembering when being “pro-life” and Catholic meant caring for neighbors and inviting, not judging.

How did we get here?

How did a movement calling itself Christian come to champion exclusion over welcome, fear over mercy, and power over service? And more importantly, what are we, as people of faith, supposed to do about it?

The See-Judge-Act method provides a framework specifically designed for moments like this. Developed by Blessed Joseph Cardijn — the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement in the early 20th century — it has long been a cornerstone of Catholic social action. It is not a partisan tool. It is a way of thinking clearly, rooted in experience, illuminated by faith, and ordered toward justice.

I have created a six-step process using the See-Judge-Act method to help us, either as individuals or groups, bring about change, live the gospel, and understand the Encyclicals. Let us walk through the six steps, each building on the last. I will include a diagram at the end.

Step 1 — SEE: What Is Actually Happening?

The first step is the hardest for people of faith, because we are often trained to look away from conflict, to assume the best, to give the benefit of the doubt. But Cardijn insisted: start with reality. What do we actually see?

We see Christianity being fused with national identity — the idea that to be truly American, you must be Christian, and to be truly Christian, you must align with a particular political agenda.

We see some people treated as more legitimately “American” or more authentically “Christian” than others. Immigrants are portrayed as invaders. Racial minorities are framed as threats to a way of life. Religious outsiders — Muslims, Jews, non-believers — are treated as problems to be managed rather than neighbors to be welcomed.

We see fear being used as a pastoral tool. Congregations are told the country is being “taken away” from them. Children are told their faith is under siege. And people who have lived good, faithful lives are left anxious and angry rather than grounded and hopeful.

We also see the visible roadblocks: political leaders who exploit religious language for electoral gain, media ecosystems that reward outrage, and — we must be honest here — religious leaders who have sometimes been too silent or too accommodating when they should have spoken plainly.

This is what we see. We do not exaggerate it. We do not minimize it. We name it.

Step 2 — ANALYSIS: Now that we’ve seen what is happening, why is it happening—and who benefits?

Seeing clearly does not suffice. The second step delves deeper: Why? Who benefits from this? Where does the real conflict lie? And who suffers?

Christian nationalism — and let us be precise, because the term matters — is not simply patriotism or religious conviction. It is the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and must be governed as one, with Christians holding preferential cultural and political authority. That is a theological and political claim, and it is worth examining honestly.

Who benefits? Those who stand to gain cultural dominance, political privilege, or a sense of restored status in a rapidly changing society. When people feel left behind economically, when communities that once had clear identities feel disoriented, when the world seems to be moving faster than anyone asked for — those anxieties are real, and they are exploitable. Christian nationalism exploits them by offering a simple story: we were great, we are under attack, and we must fight back.

Where is the conflict? It lies between two deeply different visions of Christianity itself. One vision sees the Church as a community of service, sacrifice, and solidarity — a “field hospital,” as Pope Francis has called it. The other sees it as a fortress, a political constituency, a vehicle for cultural power.

And who is most harmed? The most vulnerable, as always. Immigrants fleeing genuine danger. People of color live with the daily weight of suspicion. Children in mixed-faith families who hear their classmates say their parents are going to hell. The poor, whose material needs get eclipsed by culture-war priorities. These are the people Catholic social teaching insists we center. These are the people Christian nationalism most often ignores.

Step 3 — JUDGE: With that analysis in mind, what has actually worked before, and what does the Church teach?

The third step brings in new information — wisdom, models, and teaching that can help us evaluate what we are seeing and name it rightly.

Here, Catholic social teaching is not vague. It is remarkably direct.

The dignity of the human person is non-negotiable. Not the dignity of Americans. Not the dignity of Christians. Every human person, by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God, carries inherent worth that no political movement can revoke.

The universal destination of goods — one of the Church’s oldest social principles — holds that the earth’s resources are meant for all people, not just those born in the right country or belonging to the right group.

Solidarity — a word Pope John Paul II used with great intention — means we are bound to one another across every line that divides us. It is not a feeling. It is a moral commitment.

Subsidiarity requires that we make decisions at the most local, personal level possible—which means that communities, families, and individuals hold genuine power, not just the power to vote for leaders who pledge to dominate others on their behalf.

What models have worked? History offers examples worth studying. The Civil Rights Movement, deeply rooted in Black Christian tradition, showed what happens when faith is used to expand dignity rather than restrict it. The Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day, demonstrated that radical hospitality and service to the poor are not idealism — they are discipleship. Base communities throughout Latin America used the See-Judge-Act method itself to help ordinary people name their suffering, connect it to the Gospel, and organize for genuine change.

These movements did not seek dominance. They sought justice. And they changed the world.

Step 4 — REFLECTION AND DISCERNMENT: Before we act, what do our values truly demand of us?

This is the most personal step, and perhaps the most important. Before we act, we are asked to go inward. What do I actually believe? What does my faith demand of me — not as a voter, not as a political ally, but as a disciple?

For those of us who have been Catholic for decades, this step may involve some uncomfortable honesty. Have we stayed quiet when we should have spoken? Have we assumed that Christian nationalism was “someone else’s problem” — something happening in evangelical megachurches, not in our parishes? Have we confused our political preferences with the demands of the Gospel?

Thomas Merton wrote: “For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God.” That sentence is worth sitting with. Truth. Justice. Mercy. Love. These are not soft words. They are demanding words — and they do not permit the kind of exclusion that Christian nationalism celebrates. Read New Seeds of Contemplation.

What makes us uncomfortable here? Perhaps the realization that Christian nationalism has gained traction partly because mainstream Christianity — including Catholicism — has sometimes been too quiet, too institutional, too reluctant to speak plainly about power and its misuse.

Discomfort is not a signal to stop. In the Catholic tradition, it is often a signal that the Holy Spirit is at work.

This is also where we ask: How do we move from where we are to where we need to be? That transition requires honesty about our own communities, parishes, and families. It is rarely comfortable. It is always necessary.

Step 5 — ACT: Having reflected, what are we going to do?

Faith without action, as the Letter of James reminds us, is dead. The fifth step is where discernment becomes concrete.

Teach. Catholic social teaching is not well enough known among ordinary Catholics. Many people in our parishes have never heard of or read Laudato Si’, Rerum Novarum, or Fratelli Tutti. That is not their failure — it is an opportunity. Small group discussions, adult education nights, bulletin inserts, homilies that connect Sunday readings to Monday realities: these things matter, and they work.

Name it. When Christian nationalism appears — in conversation, in social media, in parish settings — name it for what it is: a distortion of the Gospel in service of power. This does not require anger or condemnation. It requires clarity. “That’s not what the Church teaches” is a complete sentence.

Build communities of encounter. Pope Francis uses that word — encounter — with great care. We cannot love what we do not know. Parishes that create genuine relationships across lines of race, class, immigration status, and ideology are doing counter-cultural and deeply Gospel work.

Speak up for the scapegoated. When vulnerable people are being blamed for complex problems, the Catholic response is not silence. It is solidarity. Write the letter. Make the call. Show up at the meeting. Bring a casserole and a conscience.

Address the skeptics with patience. Some people in our communities have been genuinely frightened by rapid cultural change. They have not embraced Christian nationalism out of malice — they have embraced it out of fear. Fear deserves a pastoral response, not contempt. We can acknowledge anxiety while still insisting that scapegoating is never a Christian answer.

Step 6 — MONITOR: After acting, how do we know if anything is changing?

Communities often skip this final step, sometimes because action feels sufficient and sometimes because measuring change is more challenging than talking about it.

But monitoring matters. It keeps us honest.

Watch your parish culture over time. Is the language around immigrants changing? Are more voices being heard? Are people who were once silent beginning to speak?

Challenge your own assumptions regularly. The See-Judge-Act method is not a one-time exercise. It is a cycle. What we see in 2025 may look different by 2027. New patterns emerge. New people are harmed. New opportunities arise. Return to Step 1 regularly and ask again: What do we see now?

Measure behavior, not just belief. It is easy to say we believe in human dignity. It is harder to track whether our parish actually volunteers at the immigration legal clinic, actually hires diversely, and actually shows up when a neighbor is threatened. Behavior is the honest measure.

Name resistance when it appears — and keep going anyway. Some people will push back. Some will accuse you of being “political.” The answer is simple: Catholic social teaching is not a political platform. It is a 130-year-old body of Church teaching rooted in Scripture, natural law, and the witness of saints. Standing on it is not politics. It is faithfulness.

A Final Word

Those of us who are older in the faith carry something that younger generations are still building: a long memory. We remember when parishes were the center of neighborhood life. We remember priests who preached against redlining and stood with farmworkers. We remember nuns who ran schools and hospitals and did not ask anyone’s political affiliation at the door. We remember what it felt like when the Church was not a partisan force — when it was simply, stubbornly, inconveniently for the poor and the stranger.

That Church still exists. It exists in every parish where the Gospel is proclaimed without fear. It exists in every family that takes in a neighbor. It exists in every old hand that shows up to a meeting, a march, or a meal for the vulnerable — not because it is trendy, but because it is true.

Christian nationalism offers a story about power.

Catholic social teaching offers a story about love.

We know which one we were baptized into.

See. Judge. Act. And keep going.

Sources and Further Reading To Help YOU Jump Start:

* Fratelli Tutti — Pope Francis (2020)

* Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIII (1891)

* Laudato Si’ — Pope Francis (2015)

* Joseph Cardijn, Founder of the See-Judge-Act Method and Young Christian Workers Movement

* Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (1966)

* United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship

See Jdge Act

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Most of us, if we’re honest, have to pause before answering. As you read this, use the See-Judge-Act method on yourself. Pause after points strike you, and see, discern, and think about the change you will enact.

Two very different thinkers have spent their lives circling that question, one at a Kentucky monastery and the other a research professor who turned decades of interviews on vulnerability and shame into a cultural phenomenon. Thomas Merton and Brené Brown never met, worked from entirely different frameworks, and used different vocabularies. Yet they were, in many ways, describing the same problem.

Both believed that most of us are hiding and that the way out of hiding comes at a cost.

Two people, one problem

Brené Brown spent years interviewing people about connection, shame, and belonging. What she found, over and over, was that the thing preventing genuine connection was not a lack of effort or love — it was armor. People were protecting themselves from being seen because being seen felt dangerous. Somewhere along the way, most of us learned that our real selves weren’t quite enough, so we started editing.

“True belonging happens only when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world — our sense of belonging can never exceed our level of self-acceptance.”— BRENÉ BROWN, BRAVING THE WILDERNESS.

Thomas Merton, writing from his monastery environment in the 1940s through the 1960s, arrived at a parallel conclusion through prayer and contemplation. He called the constructed, defended version of ourselves the false self — not just a social mask, but an entire way of living built on illusion. It is the self shaped by ego, fear, and the need to prove something. And Merton was clear: the false self, however convincingly assembled, is not real.

What makes these two figures such compelling conversation partners is that they describe the same wound from opposite sides. Brown is a social scientist mapping the human cost of performance. Merton is a mystic mapping its spiritual cost.

Together, they offer something neither could provide alone.

Where they walk the same road

The first place they overlap is their shared resistance to the idea that we become whole by fitting in. Brown’s research showed that people who reported the deepest sense of belonging were not those who had found the most accepting community — they were those who had stopped requiring external approval before they could feel acceptable. Belonging, she concluded, had to be rooted in self-acceptance, not social performance.

Merton’s false self is constructed from precisely the same raw materials Brown identifies: fear of rejection, the exhausting project of managing others’ impressions, and the slow self-erasure that comes from conforming to expectations. His famous description of the false self is worth sitting with: it is not the worst version of us. It may be quite polished. But it is, at its root, a mask — and masks cannot love or be loved, because they are not alive.

The second overlap is their treatment of vulnerability. For Brown, vulnerability is not weakness — it is the birthplace of courage, creativity, and connection. Avoiding it doesn’t protect us; it just guarantees a smaller, lonelier life. For Merton, the exposure of the false self is painful but spiritually necessary. Only when we see the falsity clearly can we receive what lies beneath it.

Both are saying: the thing you are most afraid to show people is probably the most important thing about you.

Where their paths diverge

The biggest difference between them is not their diagnosis but their destination — what they think we are moving toward when we finally take the mask off.

BRENÉ BROWN

The goal is wholehearted living — showing up fully in human relationships, building shame resilience, and belonging to communities where you can be honestly known. The horizon is human flourishing.

THOMAS MERTON

The goal is union with God — the discovery that your deepest identity is not self-constructed but received, hidden in the love of God from the beginning. The horizon is a contemplative transformation.

Do you see what I see?

Brown’s work is grounded in psychology and social relationships. It is enormously practical and speaks to anyone, regardless of religious belief. Merton’s work is explicitly theological and mystical: the true self is not simply the more honest or integrated self, it is the self grounded in God’s love — what he called “the self hidden in God.” It is not achieved through self-improvement; it is received through grace, meeting the living God.

Brown asks, “How do we become more authentic?”

Merton asks: How do we become real before God?

Those are related questions, but they are not the same question.

The role of contemplation

One of the most interesting points of contact between them is the inner posture each requires.

For Merton, contemplation is not a practice you add to life — it is a way of life that gradually strips away illusion. In silence and prayer, the false self becomes visible: its anxieties, its performances, its compulsive need for validation. Contemplation is where the mask is seen clearly enough to be laid down, and where the true self is received — not constructed — as a gift.

Brown doesn’t use the language of contemplation, but her path demands something akin to it. Recognizing shame, naming it, pausing before reacting, tolerating the discomfort of vulnerability, and telling the truth about one’s life — all of this requires a quality of inward attention that is not so far from what Merton describes. It requires slowing down, turning inward, and refusing to let performance run on autopilot.

Although Brown is not a contemplative theologian and would not describe herself as one, her work points toward the same interior movement. Where Merton treats silence as sacred, Brown treats it as necessary. Both are saying: you cannot know yourself while running from yourself.

True self, false self — and what the words mean

When Merton writes about the true and false selves, he is making a philosophically and theologically specific point. The false self is not merely bad habits or social anxiety — it is an entire orientation toward unreality. It is the self that lives as if God did not exist, the self that tries to secure its own worth through achievement, approval, and accumulation. The true self, by contrast, is the self that lives in God — not as a vague religious sentiment, but as a metaphysical claim about the ground of personal identity.

Brown’s language moves in the same direction, even without the theological scaffolding. When she speaks of authenticity, wholeheartedness, and “showing up and being real,” she describes the same interior movement away from performance and toward genuine presence. Her vocabulary is psychological and relational: shame, perfectionism, fear of disconnection. Her “authentic self” is more about emotional honesty and human connection than about ontological reality before God — yet for those coming from a faith tradition, the distance between her framework and Merton’s is surprisingly short.

Why this conversation matters

A way of putting it simply

Brown describes the human cost of living behind the mask. Her research gives us a clear-eyed account of what the false self costs us in our relationships, our health, and our sense of meaning. She explains why people cling to it — because vulnerability is genuinely frightening, and because shame is a powerful enforcer of conformity.

Merton describes the spiritual meaning of removing it. He points toward what lies beneath the mask — not just a more authentic psychological self, but a self grounded in something it did not create. He offers not just self-knowledge but homecoming.

Together, Brown shows us why authenticity matters so urgently. Merton shows us how deep it actually goes.

Or anyone who has found themselves exhausted by the effort of managing impressions, maintaining appearances, or being a slightly different version of themselves in every room they enter — both of these voices are worth spending time with.

Now think about how Brown will name what that exhaustion costs you, and how Merton will tell you what you’ve been homesick for.

Thomas Merton’s key texts on this theme include New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) and The New Man (1961). Brené Brown’s most relevant books are The Gifts of Imperfection (2010), Daring Greatly (2012), and Braving the Wilderness (2017). Both are worth reading together.

This text, from the Liturgy of the Sixth Sunday of Easter, is part of a long discourse in John’s Gospel, from the setting of the Last Supper. It is a discourse replete with assurances from Jesus that he will not abandon his disciples such as: ‘I will not leave you orphans, I will come back to you’ (Jn 14:18). It is also a discourse which focuses strongly on the Holy Spirit, ‘the Advocate’ (Jn 14:16) and the theme of love. Rather than calling for belief from the disciples Jesus asks them to love him, and to keep his commandments (Jn 14:15 & 21). The motif of the Spirit has been prominent in earlier parts of the Gospel including at Jesus’ baptism (Jn 1:32-33), in the encounter with Nicodemus (Jn 3:5-8) and in the image of living water with the Samaritan Women (Jn 4:10-14). Now, in the Last Supper discourse, it takes centre stage.

The Holy Spirit, in this text, is given two titles, ‘the advocate’ (Jn 14:16) and ‘the Spirit of truth’ (Jn 14:17). The meanings behind these two titles shapes the understanding of the Holy Spirit and invites reflection on the role of the Spirit in contemporary discipleship. Many claim that their discipleship is guided by this Spirit of Truth, however, the true test of this claim is in the Gospel text ‘if you love me you will keep my commandments’ (Jn 14:15) and the fundamental commandment given in the previous chapter ‘love one another, as I have loved you so you must love one another’ (Jn 13:34). If love for one another is present, then surely, that discipleship bears the imprint of the Spirit of Truth

Gospel Text: John 14:15-21

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘If you love me you will keep my commandments.

I shall ask the Father,

and he will give you another Advocate

to be with you for ever,

that Spirit of truth

whom the world can never receive

since it neither sees nor knows him;

but you know him,

because he is with you, he is in you.

I will not leave you orphans;

I will come back to you.

In a short time the world will no longer see me;

but you will see me,

because I live and you will live.

On that day you will understand that I am in my Father

and you in me and I in you.

Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them

will be one who loves me;

and anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father,

and I shall love him and show myself to him.’

See

What do we understand by the use of the terms ‘Advocate’ and ‘Spirit of Truth’ to refer to the Holy Spirit in this text?

What examples of discipleship can we see that are clearly reflective of love of God and love of one another?

Where can we see claims of discipleship which seem to be at odds with love of God and love of one another?

Judge

In our contemporary experience, what does it mean to show love, as Jesus called for from his disciples?

How do we understand the role of the Spirit in this Gospel text?

How do we see the relationship between the Spirit, love and discipleship in this text?

Act

What steps can I take to be more receptive to the urging of the Holy Spirit in my own life?

What can I do to show love to those people that I simply do not like?

How can I allow the Spirit be ‘advocate’ through my own spheres of influence?

Image: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/AKccC1nvNY8CKgXSS2LEH

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/john.htm

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

It’s uncomfortable when a Catholic hospital administrator discourages unionization while a local bishop endorses labor dignity. This contradiction can be resolved. Catholic institutions shouldn’t just accept worker organizing—they should welcome it as true to their identity.

WHAT THE CHURCH ACTUALLY TEACHES: THINK JOSEPH CARDINAL CARDIJN

Catholic social teaching does not speak in vague generalities on this point. Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, names the right to organize as a basic human right — one that must be exercised “without risk of reprisal.”

It does not say workers may organize if management permits it. It says this right belongs to workers as persons.

Think of the work of Joseph Cardinal Cardijn and organizing Young Christian Workers during the Industrial Revolution.

“Never has the worker problem experienced the dimension, significance or gravity that it has today,” ~ Joseph Cardijn.

The U.S. Catholic bishops reinforced this in their landmark 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All:

“All church institutions must also fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. No less than other employers, they must recognize the freedom of employees to choose their own representatives.” ~ U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (1986), §306

The bishops made their expectation clear: The Church must be an exemplary employer. This is a demand, not a suggestion. Yet, Catholic institutions often abandon this standard when it’s inconvenient.

A LABOR PRIEST PUT IT PLAINLY

Msgr. George Higgins, the Chicago-born priest who spent five decades as the Catholic Church’s most prominent labor advocate, had little patience for institutional evasion on this question. He argued throughout his ministry that the Church’s credibility on social justice was inseparable from how it treated its own workers. As he wrote:

“The right of workers to organize and bargain collectively is not merely a pragmatic arrangement tolerated by the Church. It is a moral imperative rooted in the nature of work and the dignity of the human person.” ~ Msgr. George G. Higgins, “The Yardstick” column

Higgins spent decades walking picket lines, mediating disputes, and insisting Church leaders practice what they preach. He warned that if a teaching isn’t enforced internally, it becomes just a slogan.

THOMAS MERTON ON WORK AND THE PERSON

The connection between labor rights and human dignity is not merely a matter of policy — it is, at its root, a spiritual one. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and one of the twentieth century’s most compelling Catholic voices, located the problem precisely in how institutions reduce persons to functions:

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Merton’s words take on uncomfortable weight when applied to Catholic employment practices. A worker who accepts that her wage is non-negotiable, that her schedule is set without her input, that her concerns will be heard only at management’s discretion — she has been invited to settle for too little.

The institution that extends that invitation, while proclaiming the dignity of the human person from its pulpits and press releases, has settled for a diminished version of its own mission.

WHY CATHOLIC WORKPLACES ARE DIFFERENT — AND WHY THAT RAISES THE STAKES

Catholic schools form children. Catholic hospitals care for the sick and dying. Catholic home care agencies support elders and people with disabilities. These are not neutral service transactions — they are acts of ministry, carried out by workers who are, in most cases, themselves people of faith or people who have chosen a vocation of care.

When workers are underpaid, overworked, or denied a meaningful voice in their working conditions, the moral contradiction is hard to skirt. The institution proclaims the common good while quietly managing labor costs. It celebrates human dignity in its mission statement while disciplining workers who try to exercise it.

The Catholic Labor Network has made this point directly: the Church’s social doctrine does not carve out an exception for Catholic employers. The labor rights it defends in the broader economy apply with equal force inside Catholic institutions — perhaps with greater force, given the Church’s public teaching role.

IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING — AND IT WORKS

Critics sometimes argue that unions and Catholic institutions are fundamentally incompatible — that collective bargaining introduces an adversarial dynamic into what should be a community of shared mission. New York’s Catholic institutions quietly disprove this every day.

• Archdiocese of New York Catholic Schools

• Teachers: Federation of Catholic Teachers (OPEIU)

• ArchCare

• CNAs & home health aides: SEIU 1199

• Catholic hospitals across New York

• Nurses: NYSNA · Healthcare workers: SEIU 1199

• Fordham University

• Clerical: OPEIU · Adjuncts: SEIU 200United · Grad assistants: CWA 1104

These are not anomalies or embarrassments to be explained away. They are evidence that union relations are not foreign to Catholic institutional life — they are already part of it.

In those institutions, the relationship between mission and employment practice can be lived honestly, because the workers who carry out that mission have a genuine voice in how it is done.

THE MORAL CASE, STATED

Unionization gives workers a voice in the decisions that most directly affect their lives: wages, scheduling, staffing levels, benefits, and workplace safety. In a Catholic setting, that voice is not a threat to mission — it is what makes mission credible. It is the difference between proclaiming human dignity and actually practicing it.

A Catholic institution that actively resists organizing sends a message it may not intend: that the people who carry out its work are primarily costs to be managed rather than persons to be respected.

A Catholic institution that genuinely welcomes organizing says something else entirely — that the dignity it proclaims belongs to everyone inside its doors, not just the people it serves.

The Church has spent more than a century building one of the most sophisticated bodies of social teaching the world has ever seen.

The question now is whether its own institutions will have the integrity to live by it — not as a reluctant concession, but as a form of witness

Integrating Thomas Merton, Joseph Cardijn, and Mortimer Adler

with the Traditions of Greek Philosophy and Enlightenment Thought

Introduction: The Problem of Knowing and Doing

There is a temptation, in every age, to separate the life of the mind from the life of action. Some think ideas about justice can be developed in libraries and then applied on the street. Others believe urgent social problems make the luxury of reflection impossible. Catholic Social Teaching (CST) rejects this separation at its root. Its deepest conviction is that authentic social transformation is impossible without interior transformation. Genuine contemplation does not withdraw us from the suffering world. Instead, it drives us more deeply into it.

Three thinkers illuminate this integration. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, showed that the contemplative life clarifies social reality. Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who organized European workers, gave the Church the See, Judge, Act method, translating contemplation into action. Mortimer Adler, a philosopher and educator, showed how Plato, Aristotle, and their successors offer living resources for understanding humanity and justice.

Together, these three thinkers deepen and enrich the Church’s social tradition in ways that urgently matter for our moment. Comparing Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates—who emphasized rational contemplation and philosophical inquiry—with Enlightenment philosophers—who prioritized individual rights and reason—reveals CST’s distinctive vision. CST is more contemplative than the Greeks, with its spiritual focus; more communal than the Enlightenment, stressing social bonds; and more demanding than either, because it calls for the transformation not only of social structures but also of the human heart.

Part I: Thomas Merton — Contemplation as the Ground of Just Action

The False Self and the True Self

Thomas Merton’s most fundamental contribution to social thought is also his most interior: the distinction between the false self and the true self. The false self is the self we construct to gain others’ approval. It is made up of our roles, reputation, productivity, and standing. Merton argued that it is the source of both personal misery and social injustice. A person living from the false self cannot see others clearly. He can only see how they confirm or threaten his constructed identity.

The true self, by contrast, is the self known and loved by God — not an achievement but a gift, received in stillness and dispossession. Merton’s entire contemplative project was the gradual dismantling of the false self and the recovery of the true self in God. His crucial insight — which links him directly to CST’s personalism — is that this is not a private spiritual exercise. A person who has found their true self sees others differently. They see them not as competitors, threats, or instruments, but as fellow images of God, each bearing irreducible dignity.

“We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”~ Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal

This is the contemplative root of solidarity. Merton does not arrive at the unity of the human family through social contract theory or utilitarian calculation. He arrives at it by going deeper into his own silence and finding, at the center, not isolation but communion. When he stood at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, he was suddenly overwhelmed with love for the strangers passing by. He was not having a sentimental moment. He was perceiving, with the eyes of contemplation, the truth named by CST’s pillar of solidarity: we share a common humanity and a common destiny. The suffering of one is the concern of all.

Contemplation and Social Critique

Merton’s later writings, particularly Seeds of Destruction, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and Faith and Violence, show that contemplative clarity does not lead to quietism. Instead, it yields a distinctive, penetrating form of social criticism. Because he has stepped back from the machinery of modern life, the monk can see it more truthfully than those entirely caught up in it. Merton wrote with devastating clarity about racism, the logic of nuclear deterrence, and the violence latent in consumer society. He also wrote about the spiritual emptiness that makes political totalitarianism possible.

His critique directly aligns with CST’s understanding of “structures of sin” — the social arrangements that institutionalize injustice and render it seem normal. John Paul II, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, identified structures of sin as the concrete expression of personal sin writ large. The greed and desire for power of some people produce, over time, systems that oppress many. Merton’s contemplative sociology arrives at the same diagnosis from the inside: a society of false selves inevitably produces structures that serve the false self’s agenda — domination, accumulation, and the reduction of persons to functions.

What Merton adds to CST’s structural analysis is the insistence that structural reform alone is insufficient. You cannot build a just society with unjust souls. The activist who burns with righteous indignation but has not confronted his own pride, need for approval, and latent will to dominate will eventually reproduce in his organizations the very injustice he set out to oppose. This is not a counsel of despair but of realism: the transformation of social structures and the transformation of the human heart must go together.

Merton and the Greek Tradition

Merton was deeply read in the classical tradition, especially Neoplatonic mysticism, which shaped the Desert Fathers and medieval contemplatives. His relation to Plato is instructive: he shares Plato’s sense that the unexamined life is not worth living and that the journey toward truth is a movement away from illusion. For Merton, the allegory of the Cave is not merely a philosophical thought experiment but a description of the contemplative ascent from the false self into the light of God.

Yet Merton parts ways with Plato’s elitism. Plato’s philosopher-kings are the rare few who complete the ascent and return to govern. Merton’s call to contemplation is universal: every human being, regardless of education or social position, is capable of the silence in which the true self is found. The monastery is not a preserve for the spiritually gifted but a reminder to all of what every person ultimately is and is called to become.

Part II: Joseph Cardijn — See, Judge, Act: The Method That Changes the World

The Worker as Son and Daughter of God

Joseph Cardijn was born in 1882 to a working-class family in Belgium. His father died of an industrial accident when Cardijn was a teenager. From that moment, he dedicated his life to a single conviction: the working class had been baptized and redeemed by Christ, and the Church had a duty not merely to give workers charity but to form them as agents of their own liberation and the transformation of their world.

This conviction—that every worker possesses an inalienable, divinely rooted dignity—formed the personalist core of the Young Christian Workers movement (JOC) and of modern CST. Cardijn not only asserted this dignity in theory but built a movement with workers as its agents. He recognized that people learn by doing; transformation comes through engagement, not instruction. The Church’s social teaching remained abstract until embodied in the organized life of those it served.

“The greatest scandal is not that sinners exist, but that there are brilliant young people who remain unknown, unrecognized, and uncared for.”~ Joseph Cardijn

See, Judge, Act: A Contemplative Method

Cardijn’s methodological genius was the development of the See-Judge-Act process — the simple, powerful, and endlessly applicable three-step movement that became the pastoral methodology of the Second Vatican Council and of liberation theology, and that remains the operative method of CST education around the world.

See

Observe reality with unclouded eyes. What is actually happening to workers, to families, to the poor, to the environment? Not what we assume or fear or wish — but what is. This step requires the disciplined attention that Merton would call contemplative: the willingness to be present to reality without the filters of ideology, habit, or self-interest.

Judge

Evaluate what has been seen in the light of the Gospel, the natural law, and the Church’s social teaching. What do justice and love require? What does human dignity demand? This is the properly theological moment — bringing the tradition to bear on the concrete situation, not as an external imposition but as an illumination.

Act

Take concrete, organized, sustained action to change the situation in light of what has been seen and judged. Not vague good intentions but specific commitments, accountable to others and evaluated honestly over time. Adler would recognize this as the exercise of practical wisdom — the Aristotelian prudence that knows not only what is good in general but what is to be done here, now, by these people, in these circumstances.

What is remarkable about this method is that it holds together the contemplative and the active, the personal and the structural, the spiritual and the political. The “See” step is not merely sociological observation — it is the kind of seeing that Merton describes as the fruit of contemplation: clear, compassionate, free from the distortions of self-interest. The “Judge” step is not a mere application of rules but a moment of genuine discernment — the bringing of one’s whole person, including one’s faith and conscience, into contact with a concrete situation. The “Act” step is not blind activism but the fruit of the first two movements, calibrated by the wisdom of the tradition and the clarity of honest observation.

Cardijn understood that the workers of his era were not being de-Christianized primarily by argument, by atheistic philosophy, or anti-clerical literature. They were being de-Christianized by conditions: by the degradation of labor, by poverty that crushes the spirit, by the experience of being treated as a unit of production rather than as a person. CST’s response, Cardijn saw, must therefore be not primarily argumentative but transformative: it must change the conditions while simultaneously forming the persons who will sustain that change and deepen it over time.

Cardijn and the Eight Pillars

Each of CST’s eight pillars can be read through Cardijn’s method. The option for the poor is not simply a moral norm to be asserted — it is a lens for the See step: when we look at any social situation, we begin by asking how it affects the most vulnerable. The dignity of work is not merely a philosophical claim — it is a criterion for the Judge step: does this economic arrangement treat workers as persons or as tools? The common good is not a vague aspiration — it is the goal of the Act step: what concrete change, achieved by organized effort, will make it more possible for all to flourish?

Cardijn’s movement also embodied subsidiarity — the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest effective level, by the people most directly affected. The JOC was not a top-down organization that brought solutions to workers from educated elites. It was a movement in which workers themselves did the seeing, the judging, and the acting, formed by the Gospel and the teaching of the Church but empowered to be the primary agents of their own transformation.

Part III: Mortimer Adler — The Great Conversation and CST as Synthesis

The Great Conversation

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher, educator, and editor of the Great Books of the Western World, devoted his life to a proposition that sounds simple but has profound social implications: the greatest ideas in the Western tradition are not the exclusive property of academic specialists but are the common inheritance of every human being capable of reading and thinking. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa, Locke’s Second Treatise, Kant’s Critique — these are not monuments to be admired from a distance but living texts that engage us in what Adler called the Great Conversation.

The Great Conversation is the ongoing dialogue, across centuries, about the ideas that matter most: justice, freedom, truth, beauty, God, the good life, and the best society. What Adler showed, through his monumental Syntopicon — an index of 102 Great Ideas as they appear across the entire Western tradition — is that these questions are not settled. Plato and Hobbes disagree about human nature. Aristotle and Kant disagree about the foundation of morality. Aquinas and Hume disagree about the existence of God. The conversation continues, and we are invited into it.

This has direct implications for how we understand CST’s relationship to classical philosophy and the Enlightenment. CST is not an outside interloper imposing religious dogma on a secular philosophical tradition. It is a participant — a major one — in the Great Conversation. It draws on Aristotle’s account of virtue and the common good, on Plato’s conviction that justice in the city mirrors justice in the soul, on the Stoic vision of natural law accessible to all human reason, and on the Enlightenment’s insights about rights and constitutional limits. And it brings to the conversation its own distinctive contributions: the theology of the person made in God’s image, the preferential option for the poor, and the vision of a society ordered by charity as well as justice.

Active Reading as Active Citizenship

Adler’s most widely read book, How to Read a Book, is not primarily a student manual. It is a philosophy of intellectual engagement. Adler distinguishes between passive reading — in which information flows into a reader who does nothing — and active reading, in which the reader engages the author in argument, asks questions of the text, marks where she agrees and disagrees, and makes the ideas her own by genuinely wrestling with them. This distinction maps onto Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act in a revealing way: passive reading is seeing without judging; active reading is the full contemplative movement from observation through judgment to appropriation.

Adler also insisted, throughout his career, that genuine education is not vocational training. The goal of education is not to produce skilled workers but to form human beings who understand the world they inhabit, who can reason about justice and freedom, who are capable of the civic deliberation that self-governance requires. This is the Aristotelian core of Adler’s project, and it connects directly to CST’s pillar of participation: a genuine common good requires citizens who are genuinely capable of contributing to the deliberations that shape it. A society of passive consumers, formed only for economic productivity, cannot sustain the common good.

“Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.”— Mortimer Adler.

Adler’s Aristotelianism and the Bridge to CST

Adler was, philosophically, an Aristotelian. He spent decades arguing that Aristotle’s account of the good life — as the life of virtue, practical wisdom, and genuine flourishing rather than mere preference satisfaction — remains the most adequate philosophical framework for ethics and politics. He eventually converted to Catholicism, finding in Thomas Aquinas the synthesis he had been seeking: a thinker who took Aristotle seriously as a philosopher, corrected him where revelation offered deeper insight, and integrated natural reason with theological wisdom into a coherent account of the human person and the common good.

This Thomistic synthesis is precisely what CST inherits and builds upon. When Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum speaks of workers’ natural rights, when Pius XI develops the principle of subsidiarity, when John XXIII grounds human rights in the natural law, when the Second Vatican Council speaks of the human person as a social being called to participate in the common good — all of this draws on the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework that Adler spent his career defending and explicating.

Adler adds something crucial to the standard presentation of CST’s philosophical roots, however: he shows that the Great Conversation is not finished. CST does not simply apply Aristotle to modern conditions; it advances the conversation by bringing resources — scriptural, theological, and pastoral — that Aristotle lacked. The option for the poor goes beyond anything in the Politics or the Nicomachean Ethics. Solidarity as a moral virtue named and practiced across national boundaries exceeds the Aristotelian framework of civic friendship. And the inviolable dignity of every human person, grounded in the imago Dei rather than in rational capacity, closes the gap that Aristotle’s framework left open — the gap through which slaves and women and non-citizens fell.

Part IV: The Eight Pillars Reconsidered

With Merton’s contemplative anthropology, Cardijn’s method, and Adler’s intellectual framework in view, each of CST’s eight pillars can be seen in a richer light — not merely as social norms but as expressions of a unified vision of what it means to see clearly, judge rightly, and act justly.

1. Life and Dignity of the Human Person

Merton’s true self/false self distinction gives this pillar its deepest grounding. The inviolable dignity of each person is not an abstract principle but a reality that contemplation makes visible. When we see others from the false self, we see threats, competitors, and instruments. When we see from the true self — from the place where we know ourselves as created and loved — we see the irreducible worth of every face we encounter. This is why CST’s personalism goes further than Kant’s rational dignity or Aristotle’s civic worth: it is rooted in a mode of perception that transforms the perceiver.

2. Rights and Responsibilities

Adler’s insistence on active rather than passive intellectual engagement applies here: rights without the formation of the persons who bear them are empty. The Enlightenment tradition, at its weakest, produces a culture of rights-assertion without corresponding moral formation — a community of individuals who know what they are owed but have not cultivated the virtues that enable them to discharge what they owe. Aristotle and CST agree that rights are only intelligible within a community of persons who are being formed in virtue. Cardijn’s movement exemplified this: it did not merely assert workers’ rights but formed workers who could exercise those rights responsibly and sustain the organizations through which they were vindicated.

3. Call to Family, Community, and Participation

This is the most Aristotelian of the pillars, and Adler’s defense of the classical tradition illuminates why. Aristotle’s claim that the human being is a “political animal” — a creature whose full flourishing requires genuine participation in the life of a community — is not a sociological observation but a metaphysical claim about what kind of being the human person is. Merton enriches this: genuine community requires persons who have done the interior work of finding the true self, because only such persons can offer genuine presence to others rather than merely using community for self-validation. Cardijn demonstrated it: the JOC was a school of genuine participation, in which workers took responsibility for their own formation, their own organizations, and their own communities.

4. Option for the Poor and Vulnerable

Cardijn’s entire life was an embodiment of this pillar. His See step always begins with the most vulnerable: who is being left out, exploited, invisible? His experience of his father’s death from industrial labor gave this an urgency that no amount of theological abstraction could supply. Merton adds the contemplative dimension: the preferential option for the poor is not primarily a political strategy but a spiritual discipline. It requires us to look at the world from the bottom, from the margins, where the falsities of the dominant culture are most visible. The prophets and the mystics share this vantage point, and it is no coincidence that, as his contemplative life deepened, Merton found himself increasingly preoccupied with the suffering of the poor, the victims of war, and the disinherited.

5. Dignity of Work and Rights of Workers

This is Cardijn’s home territory. His founding insight — that work is a participation in God’s creative activity and that every worker therefore possesses a dignity that economic arrangements must respect — anticipated by decades the fully developed CST teaching on labor. Aristotle’s disdain for manual work reflects the assumptions of a slave economy; CST’s theology of work represents a fundamental advance, made possible by the Incarnation’s affirmation of material existence and by the dignity of the carpenter from Nazareth.

6. Solidarity

Merton’s Louisville vision — his sudden overwhelming love for the strangers around him — is perhaps the most vivid description in modern spiritual literature of what solidarity feels like from the inside. It is not merely a political commitment but a form of perception: seeing others as they are, as fellow images of God, as persons whose suffering is genuinely one’s own concern. Adler’s Great Conversation supports this in an unexpected way: the recognition that the deepest human questions — about justice, freedom, the good life, the meaning of death — are shared across all cultures and all centuries is itself a form of solidarity. We are not strangers to each other; we are participants in the same conversation.

7. Care for Creation

Merton’s contemplative vision of nature as sacrament — as the transparent medium through which the divine creativity shines — anticipates the ecological turn of Laudato Si’. His time at the hermitage, his deep attention to the natural world, his journals’ lyrical accounts of dawn and rain and the sounds of animals, all reflect the contemplative recognition that creation is not merely raw material for human exploitation but the expression of a divine generosity that calls for gratitude and stewardship. Aristotle’s teleological vision of nature supports this: if all things are ordered toward their proper ends, then to treat nature as mere matter to be dominated is to misread it fundamentally.

8. The Common Good

Adler’s lifelong argument for the liberal arts as the birthright of every citizen — not a luxury for elites but the necessary condition of genuine participation in civic life — is a profound contribution to the understanding of the common good. A genuine common good requires citizens who are capable of the deliberation that shapes it. Cardijn’s method is the practical form of this: See-Judge-Act forms persons who are capable of analyzing their situation, bringing moral wisdom to bear on it, and acting with others to change it. Merton’s contemplative anthropology grounds the whole: a common good that is genuinely common — that reaches across every class, race, and nationality — requires the transformation of the hearts that seek it.

Part V: The Greek Tradition — Virtue Ethics and Its Limits

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all assume that ethics is about forming the soul and ordering life toward the good, not merely maximizing preference or pleasure. This makes them natural conversation partners for CST, which also insists that social structures must serve human flourishing and not reduce persons to economic units. But the conversation reveals important differences that Merton, Cardijn, and Adler help us to see more precisely.

Socrates: Self-Examination and Its Limits

Socrates’ great contribution is the insistence that the unexamined life is not worth living—a principle that Merton would have recognized as a philosophical anticipation of the contemplative tradition’s emphasis on self-knowledge. But Socratic self-examination is primarily intellectual: its goal is to know what one does and does not know, and ultimately to know what justice and virtue are. Merton’s self-examination goes deeper: it is not merely the examination of one’s beliefs but the stripping away of the false self, the encounter with one’s own emptiness, and the discovery of the true self in God. And Cardijn would note that Socratic examination takes place among educated Athenian citizens; the workers of the fifth century BCE are absent from the dialogue.

Plato: Vision and Hierarchy

Plato’s Republic offers a vision of justice as the proper ordering of the soul and the city — each part performing its function, the whole harmonized by wisdom. There is something compelling in this vision, and Merton himself is drawn to the Platonic tradition of ascent, of the soul’s movement toward the light. But Plato’s city is hierarchical in a way that CST cannot accept: the philosopher-rulers see the Good; the warriors execute their orders; the producers sustain the material base. There is no option for the poor, no solidarity that crosses class lines, no recognition that the slave in the household or the artisan at the forge possesses the same dignity as the philosopher in the Academy.

Aristotle: The Most Congenial Partner

Aristotle remains CST’s most important philosophical interlocutor. His account of virtue, practical wisdom, the common good, the natural sociality of persons, and the teleological ordering of human life provides the framework within which CST’s social teaching has consistently been articulated, especially in its Thomistic form. Adler spent decades arguing that Aristotle’s ethics are not merely historically interesting but are the most adequate philosophical account of the good life available to human reason.

But Aristotle’s limits are also real. His defense of natural slavery in the Politics, his restricted circle of civic participation, and his assumption that leisure and contemplation are only possible for those who are freed from manual labor — all of these reflect the assumptions of an ancient polis economy that CST’s theology of the person and Cardijn’s theology of work definitively overcome. The worker, for Aristotle, lives at the margins of the good life. For Cardijn and CST, the worker is at the center of God’s design for humanity.

Part VI: The Enlightenment — Rights, Reason, and What Is Missing

The Enlightenment shifted the center of gravity from virtue and teleology toward individual rights, autonomy, reason, and social contract theory. This brought genuine gains — liberty of conscience, constitutional limits on power, universal human rights — but it also tended to weaken the older ideas of natural moral order, shared moral ends, and the thick moral ecology of family, virtue, and religious formation.

Locke and the Natural Law

John Locke is the Enlightenment thinker closest to CST. His account of natural rights is explicitly grounded in natural law, and his natural law is explicitly grounded in a creator God who has endowed humanity with reason and made persons equal by nature. Adler recognized Locke as a genuine conversation partner in the tradition of natural law that runs from Cicero through Aquinas. But Locke’s framework begins to separate from CST at precisely the point where the option for the poor is at stake: Locke’s natural right of property, once it has been appropriated by the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, becomes a shield against exactly the redistribution and structural reform that CST’s social teaching requires.

Kant and Rational Dignity

Kant’s moral philosophy, with its insistence that rational persons must always be treated as ends and never merely as means, is the Enlightenment’s strongest affirmation of human dignity. Merton would have found in Kant a philosopher who takes seriously the danger of treating persons as objects, which is what the false self does to others, and what industrial capitalism does to workers. But Kant’s dignity is functional: it belongs to rational agents. Those whose rational agency is compromised — the unborn, the severely disabled, the dying — receive less clear protection in Kant’s framework than CST demands. And Kant’s moral agent is strikingly solitary: the categorical imperative is addressed to the individual conscience, not to the community of persons formed in virtue through shared practices and traditions.

Rousseau and the Social Contract

Rousseau’s passion for equality and his critique of the corrupting effects of private property resonate with CST’s option for the poor. But Rousseau’s social contract dissolves natural law into the general will — a majority or collective consensus that, in practice, can justify coercion in the name of freedom. Cardijn’s method is a check on this danger: the See step requires honest attention to what is actually happening to actual people, not what the theory says should be happening. The judge’s step requires criteria that transcend the consensus of the powerful, which is why CST appeals to natural law and the Gospel rather than to democratic agreement alone.

Utilitarianism and Its Limits

Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism — the maximization of aggregate happiness — is the Enlightenment framework most directly opposed to CST’s insistence on the inviolable dignity of each person. If the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires that some individuals be sacrificed — the disabled, the unborn, the inconvenient elderly — utilitarianism has no principled objection. This is the consequence of severing ethics from its anthropological roots in the theology of the person. Adler argued throughout his career that utilitarianism fails philosophically because it cannot generate a genuine account of human flourishing — it can only count and calculate. Merton’s contemplative anthropology offers the deepest response: the intrinsic worth of each person is not something discovered by calculation but something seen, by the eyes of contemplation, in the face of the other.

Part VII: Seeing Together — Contemplation, Conversion, and the Common Good

Catholic Social Teaching, classical philosophy, and Enlightenment thought are not three independent systems to be compared and contrasted at a comfortable analytical distance. They are participants in the Great Conversation that Adler described — a conversation about the most urgent human questions, carried on across centuries, and requiring the active engagement of every person capable of thought and action. The three thinkers examined in this essay — Merton, Cardijn, and Adler — each model a different aspect of this engagement.

Merton shows us what it means to see. The contemplative life is not withdrawal from the world but the development of a quality of attention — clear, compassionate, free from the distortions of the false self — that makes genuine social vision possible. Before we can judge what justice requires, we must see what is actually happening, to whom, and why. This is not a merely intellectual skill but a spiritual discipline, requiring the ongoing conversion of the heart that Merton called the death of the false self.

Cardijn shows us what it means to judge and act. His See-Judge-Act method is the bridge between contemplative clarity and effective social transformation. It takes both the particularity of concrete situations — the actual conditions of actual workers in actual places — seriously, as well as the universality of the moral criteria that CST brings to bear on those conditions. And it insists that judgment must issue in action: organized, sustained, accountable, and evaluated honestly over time. Ideas without action are the luxury of the detached observer. Action without ideas is the violence of the ideologue. Cardijn’s method holds them together.

Adler shows us what it means to think. The Great Conversation is not a possession of the educated elite but the inheritance of every human being. Every worker on Cardijn’s factory floor, every person in Merton’s Louisville crowd, is invited into the conversation about justice, freedom, the good life, and the common good. This is CST’s most demanding claim and its most hopeful one: that a better world is possible, that it requires the transformation of persons and structures together, and that every human being — regardless of class, education, or social position — possesses the dignity and the capacity to contribute to its making.

“The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. He is a person who has been called to the desert of the spirit, not to get things done, but to be.”

— Thomas Merton

The thesis with which we began holds, and can now be stated with greater precision: CST is more Aristotelian than the Enlightenment in its concern for virtue, teleology, and the common good — and Adler helps us see why Aristotle remains indispensable to this conversation. CST is more universal and personalist than the Greek polis — and Cardijn’s option for the poor shows what this universalism looks like in practice, when it reaches the factory floor and the shantytown. And CST is more contemplative than either tradition — because Merton shows us that the transformation of the world begins with the transformation of the heart that perceives it.

A better world is not built by better social programs alone, nor by better arguments alone, nor by better intentions alone. It is built by people like you and me, who have learned to see clearly, to judge in the light of what is deepest and truest, and to act together with courage, patience, and love. This is what Catholic Social Teaching asks of us. This is what Merton, Cardijn, and Adler — each in his own way, each from his own vantage point in the Great Conversation — show us how to begin.

In ten days, we celebrate the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. More than a century ago, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum—”On the New Things”—to address the social upheaval of industrial capitalism. His central message—labor is not a commodity, workers deserve dignity, and justice is essential—remains as urgent today as ever. This text argues that revisiting the core lessons of Rerum Novarum, through the voices of Leo XIII, Cardijn, and Merton, can provide a guiding framework for responding to the challenges of work, technology, and justice in our own time.

Three figures help us hear that message today: Thomas Merton, the monk who paid close attention to the world; Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who lost his father to harsh labor and never forgot it; and Leo XIII, who wrote boldly for dignity. Their perspectives bring Rerum Novarum’s challenge into the present.

Together, they offer something we need urgently right now: a way of seeing what is actually happening around us, a way of judging it honestly in light of the Gospel, and a way of acting that is neither naive nor despairing. That, in essence, is what Joseph Cardijn called the See-Judge-Act method. And it turns out to be a remarkably good framework for navigating the “new things” of our own time.

Joseph Cardijn: The Man Who Started with a Coffin

Before exploring the method, it is important to understand the individual behind it.

Joseph Cardijn was born in 1882 outside Brussels to a working-class Catholic family. His father, Henri, was a coal gas worker — the kind of man Rerum Novarum was written about but who rarely got to read it. Henri Cardijn died young, from an illness directly connected to his labor. His son never got over it and never intended to.

Cardijn became a priest and threw himself into the lives of young workers — factory hands, shop girls, apprentices, domestic servants ~ people who left school at thirteen or fourteen and disappeared into an industrial economy that showed little interest in their souls. He founded the Young Christian Workers movement (known in French as the Jocistes, or JOC — Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne) in 1925, and it spread to over a hundred countries.

His well-known declaration continues to resonate: “Every worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.”

Cardijn was made a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1965, the evening before the close of the Second Vatican Council, where his influence on Gaudium et Spes and Catholic social thought had already been profound. He died in 1967. His cause for beatification is open. Whether or not he is eventually canonized, his method has already shaped the Church more than most people realize.

See: Looking at What Is Actually There

The first movement of See-Judge-Act is deceptively simple. Before you can judge anything, you have to look at it clearly and honestly. Not the version of it that is comfortable. Not the abstract version. The actual reality in front of you.

Cardijn was insistent about this. He trained young workers to observe their own lives — their working conditions, wages, relationships, and fears — with open eyes and without flinching. He believed that most injustice survives not because people approve of it, but because they have stopped noticing it. Familiarity is a great anesthetic.

Thomas Merton understood the same thing from a very different vantage point. From his monastery in Kentucky, Merton warned against a culture that trains us to live on the surface — distracted, fragmented, and cut off from our own deepest selves. When that happens, we start accepting a counterfeit version of progress: faster is better, bigger is better, and more efficient is better. We stop asking whether any of it is actually good. We stop seeing.

This is why contemplation, for Merton, was not a retreat from the world. It was the practice of seeing it as it actually is, without the filters of habit, comfort, or self-interest. A contemplative person is not less engaged with the world. They see it more clearly.

When we examine the modern workplace with openness, what do we find? We see algorithmic management — software that decides your schedule, monitors your pace, scores your performance, and sometimes ends your employment, all without a human being making a judgment call. We see automation quietly eliminating jobs that people depended on for decades, while the productivity gains flow almost entirely to shareholders. We see precarious, gig-based work that strips away the stability that once allowed a family to plan for the future. We see surveillance — tracking software on the work laptop, cameras on the warehouse floor — that treats employees less like people and more like variables to be optimized.

Many people today — maybe some of you reading this — feel invisible in their work. Others carry a low-grade anxiety that they could be replaced tomorrow by a machine, a cheaper contractor, or an algorithm that doesn’t need health insurance. Those in their 50s have a particular vantage point on all of this: you have watched the workforce transform over the course of a single career. You remember what it felt like before. That memory is not nostalgia. It is evidence. And Cardijn would tell you it is the beginning of wisdom.

Judge: Measuring What We See Against the Gospel

Seeing clearly is the beginning. The second movement — Judge — asks us to evaluate what we have seen in the light of something deeper than economic logic or market efficiency. For Cardijn, that light was the Gospel. For Leo XIII, it was the natural law and the dignity of the human person. They are, in the end, pointing at the same thing.

This is precisely where Rerum Novarum remains prophetic. Leo XIII defended the right to private property, but he insisted that property carries a social purpose — it is not simply yours to do with as you please if others are harmed. He defended the dignity of labor and insisted that workers are owed just wages and humane treatment. He rejected both ruthless capitalism and socialism, because both — in their different ways — can end up treating persons as means rather than ends. At the heart of the encyclical is a truth that should be embarrassingly obvious but apparently needs repeating in every generation: the economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around.

Merton brings a crucial complement to this judgment. He reminds us that clear moral reasoning requires inner freedom — the kind that comes from honest self-examination and silence. A person who has never questioned their culture’s assumptions cannot judge it. A community that mistakes busyness for virtue cannot ask whether its busyness is actually good. Before we can judge our economic arrangements rightly, we need some interior space in which to do the judging. That is not a weakness. That is basic moral hygiene.

Cardijn’s judgment was characteristically direct. He looked at the young workers of his day and said: The system is treating you as less than human, and that is a sin — not just a policy failure, but a sin. He insisted that workers were not passive recipients of the Church’s charity. They were people of dignity, capable of understanding their own situation, capable of acting on it, and called by their baptism to do so. The laity are not helpers in the Church’s mission. They are the Church’s presence in the world.

That insight plays out differently when applied to artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and automated systems. These are not inherently evil. They can be remarkable tools. But when they are used to deepen inequality, to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, or to make it easier to sort, score, monitor, and discard human beings at scale — that is a moral failure, not merely a technical one. The Church does not need to oppose technology to critique its misuse. It only needs to keep saying what should never need saying: a human being is never just data. Never just output. Never just a productive unit.

Judging our moment honestly means sitting with that statement long enough to feel its weight — and then asking where, in our own lives and workplaces, we are still treating people as productive units.

Act: Doing Something About It, Here and Now

This is where Cardijn pushes us hardest, and where Catholic social reflection most often gets stuck.

Seeing and judging are just beginnings. Acting—taking real, sometimes costly steps to change things—is where intentions often stall. Cardijn insisted faith must lead to action. See-Judge-Act is a way of life, practiced continually among ordinary people.

What does Act look like for adults who are now in their 40s,50s, 60s + — people with influence, experience, organizational knowledge, and often genuine power to shape the environments they inhabit?

It might look like a manager who decides that the algorithmic performance review system their company uses is stripping people of their dignity — and says so in the meeting where everyone else is nodding along. It might look like a consumer who starts asking inconvenient questions about the supply chains behind the prices they enjoy. It might look like a parishioner who brings the language of Rerum Novarum into a conversation about their city’s affordable housing crisis, or a mentor who takes the time actually to see a younger worker who feels invisible.

Cardijn’s “like by like” principle is worth remembering here. He believed that workers were best reached by other workers — not by clergy or academics arriving from outside with answers, but by people who knew the reality from the inside. The same logic applies today. The person best positioned to humanize a workplace is usually someone who works there. You.

Here, Merton and Cardijn come together surprisingly. Merton insisted that authentic action flows from a contemplative foundation — that if we skip the seeing and rush straight to the doing, we often reproduce the very problems we were trying to solve, just under new management. Cardijn would agree. His small group method — what we now call the “cell” or inquiry group — was explicitly designed to slow people down before speeding them up: observe, reflect, then move. The action that follows genuine seeing and honest judging is qualitatively different from that of a simple reaction.

For Our Moment: Leo XIV and the Questions That Remain

As we enter the early years of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, this three-voice conversation feels more timely than ever. Whether his forthcoming social teaching is formally titled Magnifica Humanitas or something else, the direction is clear: the Church must speak again, and speak plainly, about human dignity in a moment of profound disruption.

The challenge today is not only how to protect workers. It is about protecting what it means to be human in a world of systems we barely understand and do not fully control. That is a profoundly Catholic question — and it is exactly the kind of question that Cardijn’s method was built for. See what is actually happening. Judge it against the dignity of the human person. Act, concretely and together, to change what needs to be changed.

Leo XIII gave us the moral framework. Merton gave us the inner life to sustain it. Cardijn gave us the method to put it to work.

In the end, the “new things” of every age are not just new machines or new markets. They are new tests of whether we will still recognize one another as brothers and sisters — whether the people we work alongside, compete with, or never see at all still register to us as fully human.

Merton helps us see that. Rerum Novarum helps us judge it. Cardijn sends us back into the world to do something about it. The Gospel gives us the reason to try.

And that reason is simple to name, though genuinely hard to live: dignity, justice, solidarity, and love.

Questions to Sit With

These are not quiz questions. They are invitations for honest reflection — the kind worth turning over slowly, perhaps in conversation with someone you trust, or in a small group willing to go somewhere real together. They follow the shape of Cardijn’s own method.

See

1. Look at your actual working life right now — or the one you recently left. What do you observe about how people are treated? Not the official version, but what you genuinely see day to day. Who feels seen? Who doesn’t? What has changed in the past decade that nobody talks about openly?

2. Technology has reshaped nearly every workplace in the past thirty years. What has genuinely improved because of it? What has quietly been lost — and have we grieved that loss, or moved on without noticing?

Judge

1. Cardijn insisted that every worker is worth more than all the gold in the world. Do the systems around you — economic, organizational, political — actually operate as if that were true? Where do they fall short, and what justifications do we use to make peace with the gap?

2. Merton warned against a culture that trains us to live on the surface, too busy and distracted to see clearly. Where in your own life do you actually slow down? Is it enough? And if not, what has filled the space that used to belong to reflection?

Act

1. Cardijn believed that the laity — ordinary people in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and families — are not helpers of the Church’s mission, but the Church’s presence in those spaces. What would it mean for you to take that seriously this week? Not in a grand sense, but in one specific, concrete situation you are already in.

2. See-Judge-Act is not meant to be done alone. Cardijn’s method works in small groups — people who know the same reality from the inside and can hold each other accountable. Do you have a community like that? A small group, a trusted circle, a parish team willing to go beyond pleasantries? If not, what would it take to build one?

3. We are at a crossroads with artificial intelligence that feels, in some ways, like the industrial revolution felt to Leo XIII’s contemporaries. What “new thing” worries you most about the world your children and grandchildren are inheriting? And what is the one action — however small — that is actually within your reach to take in response?

Rumor has it that in ten days Pope Leo XIV will issue his first Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). When the document is released, read it using the See - Judge - Act method of understanding. Get together with your small groups, parish, and social friends to discuss what the document means in today’s world. Do what Cardijn and Merton would do, and, most especially, plan how you will act and then act on what you plan.

Introduction

The See, Judge, Act method used in this and other Gospel Enquiries was developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn. He gave a series of lectures in 1949, which he titled “The young worker faces life.” His third lecture was about the “mystery of vocation.” I choose this lecture because it relates to the Gospel we are about to read.

Cardijn said to the YCW leaders who had gathered at Godinne, in Belgium,

“God calls everyone without exception … Unceasingly He goes on calling all people.” God’s call is to every person to know, love and serve God, here on earth and to be happy with God in heaven forever.

I memorised this statement when I was in primary school and I have carried it with me ever since as a prayer and as a reminder of my vocation, given to me when I was baptised.

When Cardijn addressed the YCW leaders in 1949, he said, “Witnesses to Christ are needed today in the whole of life, in all the aspects of life, in all the problems of life.” This truth of faith underpins what is often referred to as the lay apostolate: all lay people are called to give witness to Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life.

The Gospel

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s house; if there were not, I should have told you. I am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am

you may be too. You know the way to the place where I am going.’

Thomas said, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’

Jesus said: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father too. From this moment you know him and have seen him.’

Philip said, ‘Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied.’

‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip,’ said Jesus to him ‘and you still do not know me? To have seen me is to have seen the Father, so how can you say, “Let us see the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing this work. You must believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; believe it on the evidence of this work, if for no other reason. I tell you most solemnly,

whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself,

he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’ (John 14:1-12)

The Enquiry

See

• Choose one thing that Jesus says to his disciples and let that be the focus of this enquiry. Imagine that Jesus addresses this to you. Put in your own words what you hear Jesus say to you.

• Do you have any friends who do not follow Jesus, that is, they are not Christian, even though they are good people? How is your life different from theirs because of what you believe about Jesus and what he has just said to you?

• If people can be good without following Jesus, why be bothered with Church and sacraments and practicing your faith?

Judge

• What do you think about Philip’s statement to Jesus? And what do you think about Jesus’ response to him?

• How do you interpret Jesus’ words: ‘I tell you most solemnly, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’ ? Is this something that you aspire to?

• What does Jesus say that challenges you about how you live your faith?

Act

• What was Jesus trying to achieve through having this conversation with his disciples? Is this the mission given to every baptised person?

• What small action can you carry out to help Jesus achieve this goal?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Sharon Tate Soberon (Creator), “Increase our FAITH!”, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

Worth reading: “The young worker faces life” can be found in Challenge to Action: Forming Leaders for Transformation, a collection of addresses given by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn. The collection was translated and compiled by Fr Eugene Langdale and his translation edited later by Dr Stefan Gigacz. The copy of Challenge to Action used in this Enquiry was published in 2020 by the Australian Cardijn Institute. The ePub version can be downloaded from here.

If you step back and use the See-Judge-Act method, you can almost see the pattern of his life as a kind of creative tension. Benedict of Nursia gave him a structure—a grammar for living the monastic life. Francis of Assisi gave him something else entirely: a kind of poetry, a vision of radical simplicity and love for the world. And the pull toward the hermit life gave him a way to hold those two instincts together without having to resolve them too quickly, which leads me to say he would have been more himself in a Benedictine monastery in the US, maybe one just a hundred miles or so north.

As a Trappist monk, Merton didn’t reject his vocation. That would be too simple, and frankly, untrue. What he seems to have done instead is try to stretch it—gently but persistently—from the inside. His writings suggest that he felt deeply at home in a more Benedictine vision of monastic life, one that allowed for a wider, more humane engagement with the world. At the same time, he never lost that early Franciscan instinct: a desire for simplicity, fraternity, and a love that moves outward rather than closing in on itself.

You can see this especially in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, where he seems to lean toward what he understood as Benedict’s openness to the world, rather than the stricter enclosure he experienced in his own Cistercian setting. That tension never quite disappears—but it becomes fruitful.

So it may be fair to say that Merton didn’t outgrow his Trappist life so much as deepen it, even complicate it. He remained where he was, but kept widening the space—making room for Benedict’s balance, Francis’s joy, and the solitude of the hermit. And in doing so, he became more fully himself, not by choosing one path over another, but by learning how to live at their intersection.

What a Trappist Monk and Three Fourth-Century Theologians Want to Tell You About Prayer, Justice, and the Shining Sun

In 1958, Thomas Merton stepped into a shopping district in Louisville. Something extraordinary happens.

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs... There is no way to tell people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”~Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

Years of contemplation did not make Merton indifferent to the people around him. It made him see them more clearly and love them more radically. He felt for them more urgently than ever before. Going deeper in prayer sent him further out into the world.

This argument—going deeper in prayer leads outward—has deep roots.

Centuries earlier, in the high desert of Asia Minor, three friends were asking similar questions.

Three friends — Basil of Caesarea, his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their classmate Gregory of Nazianzus — were asking the same questions. We call them the Cappadocian Fathers. They shaped Christian theology more profoundly than almost any thinkers outside Scripture. They believed, with fierce conviction, that authentic faith must take visible, costly shape in the world.

Basil built what historians regard as one of the first hospitals in human history — a sprawling complex of wards, poorhouses, and a hospice for lepers at a time when lepers were treated as untouchable. He ran it himself. He served the patients himself. And he preached about wealth in terms that would clear most modern church halls:

“The bread you do not use is the bread of the hungry. The garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of the one who is naked. The money you hoard is the money of the poor.” ~ Basil the Great, Homily on ‘I Will Tear Down My Barns’

His brother Gregory of Nyssa, the quieter mystic of the three, went even further. He may be the first Christian writer to condemn slavery explicitly on theological grounds. You cannot own a person who bears the image of God. His mystical theology claimed the soul always moves toward an infinite God it can never fully grasp. That idea carried a radical social implication: If no one possesses God absolutely, then no one has absolute authority over anyone else.

The Surprise at the Heart of This Tradition

What Merton and the Cappadocians share is not a political program. It is a moral imagination — a way of seeing that keeps getting surprised by the dignity of other people.

Merton spent his later monastic years writing urgently about war, racism, and economic inequality — not despite his contemplative life, but because of it. He was, by his own account, drawn further into concern for the world the further he went into prayer. His superiors were not always pleased. He was placed under a publishing ban for a period over his anti-war writings. He found ways around it.

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ~Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Settling for too little. It could describe a spiritual life that remains safely interior, untouched by the suffering neighbor’s face. It could describe a faith that mistakes doctrinal correctness for the whole of the gospel. It could describe a church so comfortable with power that it has forgotten what it is for.

Merton and the Cappadocians resist all of it. They push us toward something harder and more beautiful. This is a contemplation that opens the eyes, not closes them, and a compassion that is rooted deep enough to last.

So what does this tradition mean for us today?

Three things, briefly.

Prayer is not an escape from the world. It is preparation for the return. If your prayer life is not, in some way, making you more awake to the suffering around you, it is worth asking: what exactly is happening in that prayer?

Charity without contemplation burns out. Action without interiority runs dry. The Cappadocians and Merton both had deep wells of prayer before they had anything to offer the world. You cannot pour from an empty vessel, and the tradition gives you permission — even an obligation — to go deep before you go wide.

The church’s credibility is in its mercy, not its power. Basil’s hospital. Gregory of Nyssa’s theology of the image of God. Merton’s letters were written from a monastery to a world on fire.

The tradition speaks with one voice: put on the apron. The rest follows, or it doesn’t. But the apron comes first.

We are living through a societal phase change right now—a fundamental reshaping of how we work, relate, make decisions, raise children, find community, and understand ourselves. This shift is driven by politics, which is being driven by artificial intelligence, social media, algorithmic governance, automation, surveillance technology, and the decline of local, face-to-face institutions that once held communities together. Politics used to be local, we would say. But if that is true, then why is all the money spent on media?

This isn’t a reason for panic. But it is a serious reason. Because phase changes don’t wait for us to be ready, and they don’t distribute their costs and benefits evenly.

What does it mean to lead for the common good when the world is being reshaped beneath us? The Catholic social tradition offers five principles crafted for this very moment. Added to the wisdom of three prophetic thinkers — Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and Mortimer Adler — they form a framework not to predict the future, but to help us navigate it faithfully.

Human Dignity

The most fundamental claim in Catholic social thought is also the most countercultural one right now: every human being is created in the image of God. The theological term is imago Dei. What it means, practically and politically, is that no person can ever be reduced to a number, a category, a data profile, or a prediction.

Emerging technology creates enormous pressure to do exactly that. Credit scores shape what families can borrow. Hiring algorithms screen résumés before any human reads them. Recommendation engines decide what news we see, what products we’re shown, what ideas we’re exposed to — based not on what’s true or good or important, but on what will keep us engaged. In the criminal justice system, algorithmic tools predict the likelihood of reoffending and influence sentencing. In schools, software flags students’ emotional states and academic trajectories before a teacher has had a chance to know them.

These systems aren’t usually malicious. Most are built by people trying to do useful work. But there is a structural tendency embedded in how they operate: they treat human beings as outputs. You are the sum of your patterns. You are, in the language of machine learning, a prediction.

Thomas Merton — writing in the 1960s, long before any of this existed in its current form — warned against what he called the “enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.” Today, some of that rubbish is the assumption that if a system runs on data, it must be neutral — that efficiency and fairness are the same thing. They are not.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, gave us an insight that a Jesuit priest, John Culkin, later distilled into a memorable phrase: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” McLuhan’s own version of this idea runs throughout his work, including his landmark book Understanding Media, where he argued that every technology extends some human faculty — but in doing so, it also amputates another. The printing press extended the reach of the written word and diminished the oral tradition. Television extended visual storytelling and shortened the attention span required for sustained reading. What does our current wave of technology extend? Speed. Pattern recognition. Global reach. What might it amputate? Patience. Presence. The irreducible human act of looking at another person and deciding: this person matters, and I want to understand them.

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher and lifelong champion of the Great Books tradition, spent his career insisting that any system — educational, economic, or technological — that treats people as means rather than ends has failed its most basic moral test. He grounded this in the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia: the full, flourishing human life. Not productivity. Not efficiency. Flourishing.

What leadership looks like: Consistently and publicly affirm that a person is always more than their data. When new technologies or political movements driven by technical change are introduced, they require review and ask specific questions: What are we optimizing for? Who evaluated this choice? If a system is wrong about someone, ensure there is a clear person they can talk to and a transparent process for addressing errors.

The Common Good

The second principle is the common good — the conviction that the good of each is genuinely inseparable from the good of all. Society must be structured so that every person, not just some, can flourish.

Emerging technology tends to work against this. Wealth and capability are concentrating at a pace and scale we haven’t seen in a century. The organizations that can afford to build and deploy the most powerful technological systems gain structural advantages that compound over time — in hiring, marketing, logistics, and capital allocation. Meanwhile, entire communities are on the wrong end of what’s sometimes called the digital divide: rural areas without reliable broadband, older adults cut off from services that have moved entirely online, and lower-income families whose children lack access to devices and learning tools that wealthier peers take for granted.

But it runs deeper than access. When the systems used to make consequential decisions — who gets a loan, whose neighborhood gets investment, which students are recommended for advanced programs — are trained on data that reflects existing inequalities, those inequalities get automated. They become faster, cheaper, and nearly invisible. The technical term for this is distributional shift. The moral term is injustice.

Social media compounds the problem in a different direction. Platforms optimized for engagement — for keeping us scrolling — have discovered that outrage, anxiety, and tribal conflict are more engaging than nuance or solidarity. The result is communities more divided, families more strained, and public discourse more degraded than at any point in recent memory. This is not an accident. It is the logical output of a system optimized for the wrong thing.

McLuhan described our era as a global village — a world knit together by electronic media. He saw it as a potential blessing, but he was clear-eyed about the risks. He noted that new communication technologies have historically widened gaps and deepened conflict before societies learn to absorb and integrate them. We are living that warning in real time.

Adler stressed that equality is foundational, not optional, in a just society. Access to the conditions of flourishing — including access to the information systems that increasingly shape economic and civic life — is not a luxury. It is a justice claim.

What leadership looks like: With every new technology or political system, ask: Who benefits? Who is left out? Act on these answers, even when it’s difficult. The common good must be a standard of accountability, not just a talking point.

Subsidiarity

Now we arrive at the principle that may be the most urgently needed — and the most thoroughly violated — in our current moment: subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest appropriate level, the level closest to the people they affect, and elevated to higher levels only when genuinely necessary. It is a principle designed to protect local wisdom, human judgment, and the dignity of participation. It says: the people who know the situation best should be the ones making the call.

Emerging technology systematically does the opposite.

It centralizes. It takes decisions that once belonged to teachers, doctors, loan officers, local officials — people who knew the specific human being or community in front of them — and moves them to algorithms, platforms, and distant corporate headquarters that have never met the person and never will. The teacher who once said, “I know this child, and these test scores don’t tell the whole story,” now works in a system where software has already scored the child’s essay, flagged their engagement patterns, and projected their academic trajectory. The loan officer who once knew that the business owner across the desk had just weathered a family emergency has been replaced by a credit model that sees none of it. The local newspaper that once covered the school board meeting is gone, and the platform that replaced it shows residents content optimized for their existing beliefs rather than information about their actual community.

Local knowledge — irreplaceable, relational, particular — is being systematically extracted from consequential decisions. What fills the vacuum is platform control, algorithmic authority, and the assumption that aggregate data is always wiser than situated human judgment. It often isn’t.

McLuhan saw this dynamic clearly. He understood that scale changes everything. A technology that seems like a neutral tool at the individual level can, when deployed globally, erase what matters most at the local level. He called this a kind of cultural imperialism: one set of assumptions, embedded in a technology, imposed on everyone who touches it.

Merton’s entire life was an argument for the value of the local, the personal, the particular. His hermitage in the Kentucky woods was not an escape from the world. It was a witness to the idea that there are things you can only know up close — and that the contemplative, attentive mode of knowing is not less real than the analytic one. In certain respects, it is more real.

Adler spent decades defending the importance of genuine human judgment — the kind that cannot be reduced to a formula. In his Paideia framework for education, every student deserved not just instruction but Socratic dialogue: a real, responsive, irreducible encounter with another thinking human being. That encounter cannot be automated. And yet we keep trying.

What leadership looks like: Pushing decisions back down whenever possible. Designing systems that augment human judgment rather than replace it — that give the teacher, the manager, the doctor better information rather than handing them a verdict to rubber-stamp. Keeping humans meaningfully in the loop, not nominally — with real authority, real information, and real accountability. This is not anti-technology. It is pro-human. There is a difference.

Solidarity

The fourth principle is solidarity — the recognition that we are responsible for one another, and especially for the most vulnerable among us. This is not sentimentality. It is a structural claim about the nature of human society: we are bound together, and how we treat the least among us reveals who we really are.

Emerging technology can violate solidarity in ways that are both obvious and subtle.

The obvious: AI systems trained on historically biased data reproduce historical patterns of discrimination — in criminal justice, housing, healthcare, and lending. A recidivism prediction model trained on data from a system that has historically over-policed certain communities learns to over-predict risk for people from those communities. It doesn’t intend to discriminate. It has been trained to. Facial recognition software performs significantly worse on darker skin tones. Voice assistants struggle with certain accents. Medical diagnostic tools were developed on clinical data that underrepresented women and people of color, and their accuracy reflects it. The technical term for this is underrepresentation. The moral term is exclusion.

The subtler violation: technology can fragment the social bonds on which solidarity depends. Algorithms that maximize engagement tend to maximize conflict. Platforms that connect us globally can leave us more isolated locally. The bowling leagues, parish councils, neighborhood associations, and union halls that once gave ordinary people organized voices in public life have declined steadily, while the platforms that replaced them as gathering spaces are owned by a handful of corporations with no stake in the local community.

Merton, speaking in Calcutta just weeks before his death in December 1968, said something that has never been more relevant: “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.” The work of solidarity is not creating a connection that doesn’t exist. It is removing the illusions and structures — including technological ones — that make us act as if it doesn’t.

McLuhan’s global village was not a utopia. He saw that the same technologies that made the suffering of a stranger on the other side of the world immediate and undeniable could also produce cacophony and tribalism. More communication does not automatically mean more connection. It can mean more fragmentation.

What leadership looks like: Asking, with every system you rely on: Who is made invisible by this? Whose experience is missing? Whose outcomes are worse because they don’t fit the dominant pattern? Then, do something about it. Investing in more inclusive data. Auditing for disparate impact. Building real redress mechanisms for people who are harmed. Supporting the local institutions — including parishes — that hold communities together in ways no algorithm can replicate. Solidarity is not a feeling. It is a discipline.

Vocation and Meaning

The fifth and perhaps most personal principle is this: human work is not simply productive activity. It is participation in meaning. It is the expression of creativity, care, and calling. The theological word is vocation — the sense that our work is bound up with who we are and who we are called to become.

Emerging technology promises efficiency. The gains are real, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But efficiency doesn’t answer the deeper question: What is the work for?

When you remove the human being from a task, you also remove the meaning that person was making. The teacher who grades papers by hand isn’t just checking answers. They are learning how their students think. They are noticing who is struggling, who has turned a corner, and who has something surprising to say. Automate the grading, and the throughput goes up — and something essential disappears. The same is true of the nurse who used to have time to sit with a patient, the pastor who used to make house calls, the craftsman whose pride in the work was itself a form of witness.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a recognition that certain kinds of human activity are valuable not only for their outputs but for what they do to the people performing them — and to the people receiving them.

Merton warned, again and again, of a civilization full of noise but empty of depth. His deepest concern wasn’t war or poverty, as important as those were to him. It was what he called the loss of the contemplative dimension — the capacity to be present, to listen, to encounter the real. He feared we were building a world that could do everything fast and nothing well.

McLuhan argued that every medium has both content and effect, and that the effect is often more significant than the content. Social media doesn’t just distribute information; it shapes how we relate to one another. AI doesn’t just automate tasks; it shapes how we think about what tasks are worth doing at all. He called this the narcotic effect — the way technology can numb us to what we’re losing even as it delivers what we think we want.

Adler spent the last decades of his life arguing that education should not be primarily about job preparation. It should be about learning to live a meaningful life. He distinguished between schooling — the transmission of skills and information — and education — the formation of a human being capable of wisdom, reflection, and genuine happiness. He worried that without a richer vision of human purpose, we would produce generations of people who were competent at tasks but adrift in meaning. That worry has aged remarkably well.

What leadership looks like: Resisting the temptation to automate everything that can be automated. Asking whether a task involves real judgment, real relationship, or real creativity — and if the answer is yes, protecting it, even when the efficiency case for replacing it is compelling. Measuring success not only by what was produced but by whether the people doing the work find it worth doing.

Putting It Together

Our tradition gives us an ancient method for navigating exactly this kind of moment: See. Judge. Act. Look honestly at what is happening. Hold it up against the light of genuine values. Then respond — concretely, locally, specifically.

See: We are not living through a series of technological updates. We are living through a transformation of the basic conditions of human life — how we work, how we know things, how we belong to one another, how decisions are made about us, and who holds power. Most of this is happening without our explicit consent, and much of it is invisible until you start looking.

Judge: Our tradition is clear. Every person bears the image of God and cannot be reduced to their data. The good of each is inseparable from the good of all. Decisions belong to those closest to the situation. We are responsible for the most vulnerable. And work must serve human flourishing — not merely human productivity. When technology, however efficient, violates these principles, it requires not rejection, necessarily, but resistance: the kind that says we will not trade dignity for convenience, and we will not automate away what it means to be human.

Act: The action begins not at the level of global systems or national policy — though those matter — but here, in the specific roles and relationships each of us already carries.

Question the tools you are given. Ask who built them, what they were optimized for, and who they were tested on. This is responsible stewardship, not technophobia.

Advocate for those not represented. When the data doesn’t include them, when the system doesn’t see them, be the person who names it.

Keep human judgment alive. In your families, your workplaces, your parish. Don’t rubber-stamp algorithmic verdicts. Don’t confuse automation with authority.

Support the local institutions — the parish, the neighborhood, the face-to-face community — that hold something no platform can replicate.

And refuse to trade dignity for efficiency, even when the trade seems small. Because trades are rarely small and rarely temporary.

The question before us is not whether emerging technology will shape the future. It will. It already has.

The question is whether we will lead in such a way that this future remains worthy of the human person.

That begins not with grand strategy but with how we see the person in front of us. Whether we let a system define them, or insist on knowing them. Whether we ask, over and over again: Who is being left out of this story?

That is what leadership looks like in a world undergoing a phase change.

Questions for Reflection

On Dignity: Think of a time a system made a decision about you without knowing who you actually are. What was missing from that encounter? Now think of a time you reduced someone else to a category — a type, a case, a number. What would it have taken to see them more fully?

On the Common Good: What technologies does your organization, school, or parish use that you’ve never fully examined? Who benefits from those tools? Who might be quietly disadvantaged in ways you haven’t considered?

On Subsidiarity: Where in your life or work has a decision been moved away from the people closest to a situation — toward a system, a platform, or a distant authority? What was lost when that happened? And where do you have the power to push the decision back toward the human level?

On Solidarity: Whose experience is missing from the systems and structures you rely on? Who is invisible to the tools you use? Where in your community or professional life are you acting as if separation is real — and what would it take to close that gap?

On Vocation: Is there something in your work, or your life, that you’ve been tempted to automate or optimize away — something that carries a meaning you struggle to articulate? What would you lose if you never had to do it the slow way again? Is that a loss worth naming?

On Leadership: If you were to leave this reflection and take one concrete action — not a resolution, not a study group, but one specific act — what would it be? Who is the first person you need to talk to? And when will you do it?

The references to shepherds and sheep in this text is a continuation of a long used metaphor among the people of Israel that they are God’s flock and, most famously expressed in Psalm 23, that God is their shepherd. It was also common, in the Hebrew scriptures, for those exercising leadership in the community to be referred to as shepherds. The burden of the shepherd’s responsibility is immense as the very life of the sheep is in their hands. The vitriol expressed towards the ‘false’ shepherds (thieves, brigands, strangers) is probably a carry-over from the conflict of the previous chapter where the Pharisees sought to undermine the miracle (sign) of the man whose sight had been restored.

This conflict is an important backdrop to this text as is contrasts the liberating, life giving action of Jesus with the restrictive, oppressive interjection of the Pharisees. Jesus’ has come so that humanity might live ‘life to the full’, an image presented in the metaphor of the sheep finding certain pasture and restated in the famous final verse of this text. ‘I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full.’ (John 10:10).

The text raises a number of important points of reflection for us. Among these are the questions of what it means for us to live life to the full, as Jesus intended and, secondly, what does the metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep say to us about how we exercise our stewardship of those in our care. Those in our care may be colleagues in the workplace, members of our family or, perhaps, those who live at the margins of our community.

Gospel Text John 10:1-10

Jesus said:

‘I tell you most solemnly, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold through the gate, but gets in some other way is a thief and a brigand. The one who enters through the gate is the shepherd of the flock; the gatekeeper lets him in, the sheep hear his voice, one by one he calls his own sheep and leads them out. When he has brought out his flock, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow because they know his voice. They never follow a stranger but run away from him: they do not recognise the voice of strangers.’

Jesus told them this parable but they failed to understand what he meant by telling it to them.

So Jesus spoke to them again:

‘I tell you most solemnly,

I am the gate of the sheepfold.

All others who have come

are thieves and brigands;

but the sheep took no notice of them.

I am the gate.

Anyone who enters through me will be safe:

he will go freely in and out

and be sure of finding pasture.

The thief comes

only to steal and kill and destroy.

I have come

so that they may have life and have it to the full.’

See

What does the text reveal about the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd?

How is this contrasted with the image of the ‘thieves and brigands’?

What might the image of the gate represent in this metaphor?

Judge

What might the image of ‘thieves and brigands’ apply to in our world today?

Jesus says he has come that people may have life to the full. What does life to the full mean in our context?

Jesus’ actions are seen as liberating and reassuring. How does this apply to our own life situation?

Act

What steps can I take to ensure that my actions are life giving and liberating for those in my care or under my influence?

What do I need to do to ensure that I am living ‘life to the full’?

What actions can I take to assist others in living ‘life to the full’?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/john-10-1-10-2021/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/john.htm

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

But what if economics was never supposed to feel that way? What if the economy is, at its heart, a deeply human story, a story we find in the scriptures, especially the Sermon on the Mount — and one that every one of us has a role in shaping?

This is the core argument of Cathonomics—a term by Tony Annett that reframes economics through a Catholic lens. Cathonomics insists that the economy is not a neutral force: it is shaped by human values, or their absence, and that moral purpose must guide it.

“An economy divorced from moral purpose is destined to fail the human person.”— Tony Annett.

In a world marked by staggering inequality, ecological crisis, and the daily disruptions of artificial intelligence, that sentence lands with real weight. Cathonomics says: it’s the economy, people — and it belongs to all of us.

SEE · JUDGE · ACT

Cathonomics doesn’t ask us to become economists but disciples—those who pay attention, think carefully, and act faithfully. Its natural companion is the See–Judge–Act method, pioneered by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn in the early 20th century.

The method is beautifully simple. See: Start not with theory but with real life. Look around. Who is struggling? What is actually happening in your neighborhood, your parish, your workplace? Judge: Hold what you see up against the light of the Gospel and the Church’s long tradition of social teaching — principles like human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the universal destination of goods. Act: Then do something about it. Not perfectly, not all at once, but concretely.

“The young workers must be apostles to themselves.”— Joseph Cardijn.

Cardijn understood that real change doesn’t come from the top down. It rises from communities that wake up to their own dignity. Cathonomics fits like a hand in a glove — it gives us the economic literacy to see more clearly, the moral vocabulary to judge more wisely, and the practical courage to act more effectively.

VOICES THAT ENRICH THE CONVERSATION

What makes Cathonomics so rich is the company it keeps. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and one of the most beloved spiritual writers of the 20th century, reminds us that clear seeing requires more than open eyes. It requires an open heart — one shaped by prayer, silence, and honest self-examination.

“We must see not just with our eyes but with our hearts.”— Thomas Merton.

Without that inner transformation, Merton warns, our judgments become ideological rather than moral — and our actions reactive rather than redemptive. In other words, we can go through the motions of “doing justice” while still being driven by pride, tribalism, or shallow thinking.

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher who championed great books and lifelong learning for ordinary people, adds another layer. He believed education wasn’t something that ended at graduation — it was a lifelong practice of growth.

“The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.” — Mortimer Adler.

Cathonomics takes that seriously. It is not a quick fix or a slogan, but a discipline for forming adults who can engage with economic realities with critical intelligence and moral depth.

And then there’s Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist who saw something the rest of us often miss: the tools we create end up reshaping us.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”— Marshall McLuhan.

This is perhaps the most urgent insight for our moment. We live inside an economy mediated by algorithms, social platforms, and AI systems that quietly shape what we see, what we want, and what we believe is possible. Cathonomics must reckon with this. To judge wisely in 2026, we need to understand not just markets and policies — but the digital environments that are forming our moral imagination, often without our awareness.

A HOPEFUL ALTERNATIVE

Put all of this together, and you have something genuinely hopeful. At a time when economic forces can feel impersonal, inevitable, and crushing, Cathonomics says: not so fast. Economies are human creations. They can be unmade and remade. They are not fate — they are choices.

The goal of Cathonomics is not to produce better economists, but to form better disciples—people who see their neighbors clearly, judge situations wisely through faith, and act with the joyful, stubborn hope the Gospel demands.

See clearly. Judge wisely. Act justly. Let this be more than a method—it is a call to live with awareness, wisdom, and courage in your everyday economic life. You are invited to embody this approach in your choices, actions, and relationships

Questions to take home

1. Where in your daily economic life — your work, your spending, your saving — do you sense a gap between what you do and what you believe? What would it take to close that gap?

2. Think about someone in your community who is struggling economically. What do you actually see when you look at their situation — and what might you be missing?

3. McLuhan warned that our tools shape us. In what ways might your relationship with social media, online shopping, or financial apps be quietly forming your values without your realizing it?

4, Cardijn believed ordinary people — workers, students, parents — are the agents of social transformation, not passive bystanders. Do you believe that about yourself? Why or why not?

5. If your parish or community were to “act” on one economic injustice in your neighborhood right now — just one, small, concrete step — what would it be?