United States Catholic bishops have consistently supported government social services programs; yet,Bishops' argue against such government programs because their view is current HHS mandate is evil.
Government can only be effectively limited by that which is superior to government, an authentic doctrine of the good, which is based in God. True freedom can only be preserved when the superiority of the good over freedom is recognized.
The theories of freedom and limited government as articulated by Locke, the American founders, and the critics of the bishops is a freedom for competing arbitrary wills which is unable to give a stable foundation to true freedom and proper limits on government.
The way in which to extricate ourselves from competing arbitrary wills which is unable to give a stable foundation to true freedom and proper limits on government, is to return to an authentic philosophy and theology of the good.
In the 14th century William of Ockham proposed a theory, which constituted a complete reversal of the Catholic understanding of morality.
According to Catholic theology and philosophy: good and evil are determined by God’s nature, not by God’s free will.
God can command us which goods to choose (for example he could command marriage or celibacy) and some of these goods are mutually exclusive. But it is not God’s willing and commanding us to choose something, which makes that thing good.
It is God’s nature, which first determines what is good, and then it is God’s will which chooses, or commands us to choose, among those things, which God’s nature has determined to be good.
Because of this there are some things, which God must command, and some things, which God cannot command—though both necessities are determined by God’s nature.
Example would be that God must command us to love him and cannot command us to hate him since the goodness of the love of God and the evil of hatred of God are absolutely determined by God’s nature.
According to this theory truth and goodness (the TRUTH of God’s nature) ARE MORE FUNDAMENTAL THAN INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM.
We can now address the question of individual freedom. It was already pointed out that Catholic thinking holds that God’s will necessarily conforms to the good as determined by God’s nature.
Following on this is the Catholic understanding of the human person. Based on this the Catholic sees primarily order to the good.
The 2012 republican fundamentalists' & tea party members' belief sees God’s will as absolutely free to do whatever it wants, as opposed to being subordinate to the good determined by the divine nature.
For 2012 republican fundamentalists' & tea party members' belif is that freedom is superior to argue that the human person is primarily free as opposed to being subordinate to the good as determined by the divine nature.
This difference in beliefs manifests itself today in America's presidential politics. , today, has important implications for difference between such beliefs affecting how protestant and Catholics view their political theories.
Because the Catholic Church holds that man is primarily subordinated to an order of the good, the Church also holds that man is by nature subordinate to political authority. Pope Leo XIII taught that “God who is the Author of nature, wills that man should live in a civil society”. For this reason, as the same pope teaches, “the right to rule is from God, as from a natural and necessary principle”. Similarly, because Catholic thinking prioritizes the good, rather than freedom, Catholics hold that the purpose of the government is to direct the people to the good. According to Leo XIII, “God has willed that in a civil society there should be some to rule the multitude” and this is so because, “a society can neither exist nor be conceived in which there is no one to govern the wills of individuals, in such a way as to make, as it were, one will out of many, and to impel them rightly and orderly to the common good”. For the Catholic the purpose of government is to aid the human person to do that which is good, even to impel the people to those goods necessary for the common good.
The flaw in the 1994-2012 republican party's fundamentalists' believes in the free will of the people to do whatever they want. However, Catholic believes that man is subordinate to the good determined by the divine nature.
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