OVERVIEW OF "TROUBLE WITH CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT" & TEXT OF ESSAY: "According to Fortin, Tierney...[& Maritain are] wrong because you cannot separate a 'vocabulary of rights' from its 'anti-teleological philosophy'. An ethic of virtue assumes humans are designed by God for a specific purpose (holiness, communal harmony). An ethic of rights assumes individuals have no fixed natural end and must therefore be given maximum autonomy to define their own purpose"
Google AI overview: Jacques Maritain and Brian Tierney both trace human rights to Christian and medieval roots, but Maritain approaches them through 20th-century Thomist personalism while Tierney uncovers their origins in 12th-century canon law . [ 1 , 2 ] Fr. Ernest Fortin ’s famous 1988 article, "The Trouble with Catholic Social Thought" . In that text, Fortin targets the modern Church—specifically modern bishops—for eagerly adopting the language of liberal individual rights to address economic and social issues. [ 1 ] By analyzing the broader paragraph where this quote appears, you can see exactly how Fortin uses this distinction to attack Tierney’s historical continuity thesis: The Missing Teleology (The "Why" of Human Life) Immediately following that sentence, Fortin argues that the true originators of the rights doctrine are Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . He states that rights talk emerged as a radical departure from premodern Chri...