Anthony Esolen on "Real Social Justice"

A must read Op/Ed at InsideCatholic by Anthony Esolen, professor of English at Providence College and a contributing editor for Touchstone magazine:

"No human law," writes the great Pope Leo XIII,

can abolish the natural and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage, ordained by God's authority from the beginning. Increase and multiply. Hence we have the family; the society of a man's house -- a society limited indeed in numbers, but no less a true society, anterior to every kind of State or nation, invested with rights and duties of its own, totally independent of the civil community (Rerum Novarum, 1891).

That passage above reveals why I cannot accept Catholic leftism -- I hate to apply the good word "liberal" to a set of propositions that unite untrammeled sexual license with the power and boundless ambitions of a family-supplanting state. The Left, in fact, is wrong about abortion for the same reason that it is wrong about social justice: It conceives only of the state and of the individual pursuer of (usually material) goods.

[Read the whole thing]