The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, although widely noted for their clarity, are also rich and capacious enough to merit differing interpretations among scholars of good will and good faith. However, despite the noble intentions and praiseworthy work of the late Michael Novak and other Catholic neoconservatives, their marketing of St. Thomas Aquinas as the “first Whig” appears to sever elements of the Angelic Doctor's philosophy from its essential principles. Although jealously guarding the nobility of conscience and the interior life, St. Thomas envisioned a political community that was decidedly hierarchical and in which the faith was to be shepherded by the state, which itself was charged with suppressing heresy and dissident thinking. These political ideas, moreover, are rooted in the very heart of St. Thomas Aquinas's deepest philosophical and theological principles.
This chapter details the rise and fall of perhaps the most unusual bloc within the neoconservative movement: the Catholic neoconservatives. It traces how Michael Novak's best seller The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) caused Catholic neoconservatives to shift American Catholic discussion of economics to a defense of “democratic capitalism” as the purest distillation of Catholic social teaching. This argument was reinforced when another Catholic neoconservative, George Weigel, seized the public image of John Paul II for political purposes with the publication of Weigel's biography Witness to Hope (1999). Once the neoconservatives were able to speak for conservative Catholicism in America, they rallied American Catholic celebrities to their positions on foreign interventionism, support for multinational corporations, and Jewish ultranationalism. Integral to this campaign was the success of Catholic neoconservatives in fashioning an American Catholic understanding of political philosophy, starting with the social teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In The Hemisphere of Liberty, Novak dwells on a statement made by the English Catholic classical liberal Lord Acton in order to present St. Thomas as the “First Whig.” This was part of an arduous effort to reconcile medieval political philosophy with the neoconservative understanding of Anglo-American liberalism.
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