The Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et Spes(§4, §16), declares that the Church must “scrutinize the signs of the times” and interpret them “in the light of the Gospel,” speaking “in language intelligible to each generation.” What appears to be an invitation to interpretive humility quickly recedes before an appeal to the moral law inscribed in human nature, spoken as if this inscription were immediately legible and stable across contexts, accessible through a universal reason untroubled by historical contingency. One might argue that this posture is characteristic of Catholic Social Teaching more broadly. It is, in some significant sense, indicative of a persistent tendency to stabilize what ought to be provisional. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church(§140), for instance, understands natural law as “the light of intellect infused within us by God” through which “we know what must be done and what must be avoided.” Natural law is apprehended as already within, universally accessible, and reliably directive, effectively precluding discernment beyond application.
Critically, this is not a rhetorical affectation. We may view it as constitutive of the underlying theological framework. Rerum Novarum(§11)establishes its indictment of economic injustice by grounding its normative claims in natural law and divine authority. It treats these as axiomatic warrants that derive their binding force from nature. Across magisterial discourse, natural law operates as a constitutive moral framework, understood to be foundational and prescriptive. The primary concern of this essay is to determine what regulative moral grammar is left to discipline the exercise of power once the pretensions of innocence, immediacy, and finality have been rendered untenable.
The prominence of such stabilizing deployment realizes what Vincent Lloyd (2012: 7) terms as the “pretense of universality,” a universality that occludes the contingent histories and power relations constitutive of allegedly impartial moral frameworks. Insofar as natural law serves an institutional role within which magisterial pronouncement can be legitimated, such operationalization might reify vertical authority and effectively veil the hermeneutical struggle and deliberation inherent in political judgment. The central problematic of the issue resides in how CST operationalizes the concept.
To be clear, the animating concern of CST is not incidental. It rightly seeks to preclude the reduction of political authority to proceduralism or the dissolution of justice into sovereign voluntarism. The issue, however, is whether this resistance necessitates the epistemic closure that CST’s stabilizing confidence privileges. In presenting natural law as an inscribed a priori, CST circumvents difficult questions about whose reason discerns this law, which historical mediation informs its articulation, and what constitutive exclusions its putative universality has required.
Jean Porter’s account is instructive here. For Porter (1999: 34), natural law is best understood as a practical process of reflection through which communities reason about human flourishing. When deployed as a pre-formulated doctrine, this process is foreclosed. What should constitute communal moral reasoning is subsumed by magisterial pronouncement, and institutional authority supplants the arduous, situated labor of discernment across difference. The inquiry becomes whether natural law can be retrieved otherwise, this time, as a fragile normative framework capable of binding authority and at the same time retaining its vulnerability to historical challenge.
Recognizing the fraught legacy this tradition bears, some may advocate its abandonment. I find such orientation to hold certain theoretical appeal, but I do not find it persuasive. Catholic moral theology has long engaged the historicity and contestability of natural law. Charles Curran, for example, traces the development of the tradition through mediated strands that require ongoing critical retrieval. Christina Traina’s feminist engagement with natural law likewise shows how appeals to “nature” must undergo revision through serious attention to gendered exclusions. The intractability of disputes internal to the tradition, as Lawrence Cunningham’s volume makes clear, positions natural law as a contested field of argument, contrasting any range of thoughts that view it as a closed deductive system. Even ecumenical and interfaith dialogues, as gathered by John Berkman and William C. Mattison III in Searching for a Universal Ethic, test natural law’s universal claims under pluralism.
Contributing to these intra-traditional commitments, I retrieve natural law within its Thomistic lineages as a fragile moral grammar that maintains a self-critical memory of its misuse even as it circumscribes the exercise of power, and a liminal order that is provisionally open to contestation as it binds moral judgment. As a point of clarification, this retrieval does not resolve every tension natural law carries, nor does it claim to exhaust the generative possibilities of the tradition. It proceeds along three disciplined interrelated movements, reconceiving natural law as rationally intelligible without false universality, renewing it through historical accountability, and democratizing its discernment so that it remains contestable without surrendering normative force.
In the first place, natural law can be understood as rationally intelligible in concreto, before any abstract notion of universality in advance of historical judgment. This begins with the recognition that reason has a constitutively embodied or situated quality. Consistent with MacIntyre’s approach, natural law is situated within a tradition of moral inquiry that possesses contingent provenance but a universal aspiration (1988: 348). The goods it names, for instance, human dignity, justice, solidarity, and rights, are neither arbitrary constructs nor immediately transparent to unencumbered reason. Their apprehensibility is conditioned within the ongoing practices of moral deliberation, realized in communities formed by distinctive histories, and at the same time, they remain open to recognition and contestation across diverse traditions.
Universality then becomes a goal toward which the tradition aspires. In an extensive sense, it is the capacity of moral traditions to interrogate their boundaries, engage alterity on its own terms, and revise themselves through reasoned dialogue (MacIntyre, 1988: 350). Natural law, conceived as such, serves as a normative framework that disciplines political authority by holding it accountable to genuinely common goods. These goods are discerned through the slow, arduous labor of cross-traditional reasoning.
It follows that, to function as a grammar of accountability, natural law must transition into a penitent tradition that interrogates the ways it has sanctified exclusion and reorients itself toward the suffering it previously deemed normatively insignificant. Let me briefly clarify the work “penitence” is doing here. Penitence, or as used to describe the tradition, “penitent,” denotes a structural orientation of historical accountability and epistemic restraint. It constitutes a deliberate refusal of the claims of innocence and immediacy in moral judgment.
Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of memoria passionis assists our understanding of penitence in its historical dimension, especially as a demand for accountability toward those victimizations the tradition failed to name. He argues for a “dangerous memory” of suffering that interrupts triumphalist narratives and destabilizes the current order by exposing the injustices on which current arrangements rest (2007: 105-106). It is “dangerous” because it refuses to let the past remain past. It makes the tradition vulnerable to those voices it has historically suppressed and allows their testimonies to reconstitute the tradition’s foundations and commitments.
Applied to natural law, this necessitates an interrogation of how appeals to “nature” have naturalized contingent hierarchies, sanctifying structures of dominance as manifestations of an objective moral order when they are, in fact, operations of power. Historically, the idealized subject of natural law has been constituted through the exclusion of those marked as “irrational,” thereby marginalizing voices deemed illegitimate for moral reasoning. This is a constitutive erasure. The tradition’s authority has long depended on determining who counts as a competent moral reasoner, and these determinations have consistently tracked structures of power.
A legitimate retrieval must adopt a structural orientation of radical historical accountability. This must prioritize the situated experiences of those whose humanity was historically occluded by a tradition claiming transcendental reach. A legitimate concern here might be that such a move could dissolve natural law into relativism. My sense is that subjecting natural law to “dangerous memory” disciplines the tradition and forces it to vindicate its universalizing claims through epistemic restraint. In theological language, this means earning universality through practices of repentance, listening, and epistemic humility before marginalized communities whose moral insight has been systematically discounted.
Finally, natural law must be democratically contestable. To forestall its instrumentalization as an apparatus of dominance, its interpretive agency cannot be monopolized by ecclesiastical or intellectual elites. Jeffrey Stout’s account of the democratic tradition is instructive here. Stout (2004: 3) describes democracy as a tradition that cultivates habits of reasoning, respect for authority rightly exercised, and a love of shared goods. This tradition is defined by its commitment to concrete patterns of conduct and shared ethical sensibilities.
Some may argue that such contestability dissolves natural law into proceduralism. Democratic deliberation, at its most virtuous, actualizes substantive commitments to human dignity and common goods. These are the commitments natural law seeks to protect. Within this framework, sovereignty substitutes the impulse to enforce a monolithic moral vision for a commitment to facilitate a precarious labor of communal discernment amidst irreducible plurality. Contemporary accounts of covenantal sovereignty, such as those developed by Luke Bretherton (2019: 390-392), suggest that this orientation is increasingly visible within Christian political theology.
The operative remainder of this re-appropriation is natural law reconstituted as a fragile, penitential grammar. It functions as a discursive tradition that must undergo repentance as a precondition to its pronouncements, learning from those it has marginalized before asserting its capacity to structure the commonweal. An ontological shift in sovereignty, bounded by such a grammar, reconfigures political authority. It relinquishes its claim to an absolute right of command and assumes the responsibility of curating the conditions through which persons and communities may collaboratively discern and actualize substantive goods.
What, then, does it mean to subject sovereignty to the discipline of a fragile, penitential grammar? The intervention attempted here seeks to relocate political authority across three distinct domains. First, sovereignty must be understood as a vocational exigency, closer to Maritain’s “stewardship” or O’Donovan’s “witness” to a justice that remains essentially beyond the state’s generative power. This vocational turn demands institutional forms that make power structurally accountable to communities historically excluded from deliberation.
Such accountability repositions Catholic political theology. More specifically, the tradition proffers its resources from a position of confessed particularity, offering itself as a partner in a cross-traditional dialogue that remains open to radical correction. Within this retrieval, the substantive commitments of CST are maintained, effectively positioning natural law as grammar for political contestation. In this capacity, it serves to insulate judgment from raw power while maintaining a constitutive ethical porosity and vulnerability before the voices it once elided. The complexities of this shift extend beyond what this essay can exhaust and shall be explored more fully in subsequent work.
