On October 30, 2011, Feast of Christ the King, the Directors of IHS Press sent a letter addressed to Fellow Concerned Citizens and Catholics. An excerpt follows:

Even an occasional glance at your morning paper or the evening news is enough to tell you that our American – and much of the world’s – “system” is broken. Modernism and modernity, broadly conceived, is a busted flush.

Representative government doesn’t represent. Financial institutions have no finances. Educational institutions don’t educate. News outlets report everything but real news, while “opinion” columns give free advice – usually worth what it costs – against the backdrop of a reigning social philosophy where there is no real difference between true and false, or right and wrong. Meanwhile, the very idea of public morality is long gone as both a practical force in society and as an idea in itself.

Things are so bad, in fact, that even mainstream sources are starting to clamor for a “third way,” but frequently they don’t even know what they’re asking for, except for something other than business as usual and the “bread and circuses” that the left vs. right political charade dishes up for public consumption and entertainment…

The Financial Times recently observed that socialism and organized labor are today conservative forces aiming to further entrench the welfare state…

No less a scion of Establishment journalism than Arnaud de Borchgrave has termed the so-called “Marxist mobocracy” of the ongoing Wall Street protests “the flip side of the ‘carnivorous greed’ on Wall Street,” while reminding his readers of the (no doubt rather unwelcome) reality that it was Karl Marx who predicted “that capitalism would eventually sow the seeds of its own destruction” (“Communist boogeyman,” UPI, Oct. 27; our emphasis). And New York University’s well-known economist, Nouriel Roubini, effectively completed de Bourchgrave’s thoughts by noting just as recently that this “social-welfare state” was in fact the answer proposed by “market-oriented liberal democracies” to the “frequency and severity of economic and financial crises.” But what is clear, he notes, is that the laissez-faire model “has also now failed miserably.”

It is easy to complain, however. And none of these critics, however incisive their critique, seems to possess the historical and intellectual equipment to propose a solution to the welfare-state and laissez-faire models that have – indeed – failed miserably.

But there is one hope. It’s been mankind’s only hope since the birth of Western civilization, and for a few glorious European centuries its impact was actually felt upon both public and private affairs.

The bankruptcy of modern alternatives has, at long last, given us an opening – and we’ve got to get at least the thin end of the wedge into it right now. Simply put, it’s the theoretical and practical wisdom offered by the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church.

As in generations past, Catholic Social Doctrine (CSD) offers solutions to the political, economic, and social problems that plague our nation and our world today. Consider these few examples.

Had the just-war doctrine – as articulated by Catholic saints and thinkers since at least the era of St. Augustine – been a reality in the halls of government and in voting booths across the country, thousands who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, on both sides of the fighting and as so-called “collateral casualties,” would still be alive today, as would at least some shred of American credibility around the world.

Had the Catholic economic “third way” been in play in modern board rooms and counting houses, our economic situation would be tending to enable real families to come into ownership of real property, unencuмbered by usurious mortgages, so that they could earn real livelihoods – as Leo XIII demanded in Rerum Novarum, his famous 1891 “Worker’s Charter.”

Instead, things are worse than when they were surveyed by Leo’s successor, Pius XI, during the years of the Great Depression. Pius XI’s eighty-year-old critique of finance and economic life reads like it was penned yesterday:

t is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.

This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will. (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931, §§105–6)

Finally, had the irrefutable idea – taught so well and often by Leo XIII (e.g., Immortale Dei, 1885), on the basis of an unbroken classical and Catholic tradition – that civil society must be governed with an eye towards the virtue of its citizenry, had any traction in local and national politics, we’d have seen honesty, justice, prudence, and even charity come to predominate in political discussions and actually operate in political decisions . . . instead of their opposites and the galling hypocrisy that usually accompany them.

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In August 2012 Rebuilding Christendom: The Organization held its first conference in Washington D.C. Men and women from sixteen states, Canada, and Ireland attended this first-of-its-kind conference… where eleven men of stature spoke – leading independent scholars, veteran writers, and students of social Catholicism. The entire conference, including the speakers’ roundtable discussion at the conclusion, was captured in audio and video.