Mr. Vance, who visited a UAW picket line last year, told me in an interview in February that he “is very aware of what Leo XIII wrote about the relationship between business and labor.” At last month's Republican National Convention, a speech by Sean O'Brien, president of the Teamsters, was a sign that those sympathies have been noticed by union leaders.
Certainly no trade policy or set of labor laws is specifically Catholic. Nor the general ideological tendency to merge social conservatism with calls for economic solidarity. Mr. Hawley, for example, is a Protestant who takes inspiration from the Dutch Reformed theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper. Jewish thinkers such as the British scholar and politician Maurice Glasman have also been important in the development of this set of ideas. Indeed, Catholic scholars have emphasized to me that the church's social teaching does not strictly dictate politics.
Others came to his defense. Sherif Girgis, a Catholic legal scholar at the University of Notre Dame who attended law school with Mr. Vance, reminded me that Mr. Vance has spoken in the past “about allowing some abortions as a matter of political reality, not moral legitimacy.” If this is what Mr. Vance meant here, said Mr. Girgis, “then it is not contradicting any general Catholic moral principle”.
But thinkers like Mr. Vance who seek to draw on Catholic social teaching today face a more basic difficulty than any specific disagreement about how to apply it. When Catholic social teaching was at the height of its influence in the first half of the 20th century, there was an impressive array of Catholic institutions that could help carry out this vision: Catholic states, Catholic unions, groups of Catholic youth and more. Now, these institutions have disappeared or only persist in a diminished form.
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