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C h a p t e r 2 Problems Facing Catholic Rulers Desmond Fitzgerald Desmond Fitzgerald (1888–1947) was born in London, and was briefly associated with a group of young English poets known as the “imagists.” He moved to Ireland in 1913 where he became active in the revolutionary politics of Irish nationalism. He participated in the Easter Rising of 1916, and was one of the editors of the underground Catholic Bulletin. He later served in the Irish Free State as its first Minister for External Affairs, Minister for Defence, and senator in the Seanad Éireann. A devout Roman Catholic, Fitzgerald frequently gave lectures on Thomism in the United States, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught political philosophy. Fitzgerald considered the Catholic ruler’s central problem to be the question of how to promote the common good without impeding greater good or creating evil. His solution was to advocate political moderation and practical wisdom in statecraft. When a ruler inherits authority he inherits a responsibility for ordering the relations of living people whom he has not created himself, and therefore has not formed with a view to the order that he conceives as most suitable. Moreover he inherits an existing order in which the relations of the members of that society operate. That order, the result of a long historical process, has itself conditioned the people who live within it to suit its requirements, and those people have themselves given to it a certain mode which they, wittingly or unconsciously, have evolved as best suited to give them the conditions that they desire. Let us note the peculiar complexity that this implies. Society is a living thing differing from all other organisms in this respect—the parts of which it is composed are intelligent autonomous beings each directed to a personal end that 44 Problems Facing Catholic Rulers 45 transcends the end of society itself. Those autonomous beings are ordained to live here in time, to live human lives for which society is necessary. Their outlook on things, their way of life, their needs have been determined to some extent by an historical development. They and those who went before them have made society as it is, and society, through its development and as it is, has to a large extent made them to be as they are; for it has determined the conditions in which they live. And the ruler inherits the responsibilities for the ordering of that society in such a way that its members will be able to live the good human life. But he cannot change the people who form that society except through the order that he imposes upon that society. But that order is a most complex interrelationship between society and its members, between those members and society and between those members among themselves. He sees that his work to create conditions that will be favorable to their leading the good human life requires a change in the totality of society including a change in those who constitute it. But he knows that when he exercises his authority to bring about a change directed to the elimination of certain obvious evils, he must also take responsibility for any other effects that may flow from his action by repercussion, and those other effects may more than counter-balance the good that he anticipated—they may even be disastrous. The existing evils may be obvious for the very reason that they are evils, just as a pain may make us aware of some abnormality in our body. But if that abnormality has developed through slow growth, it may well be that the organ involved has adapted itself to thatabnormality,andnowitsdrasticandsuddenremovalwouldaffectthewhole body adversely. If the order in which we live, or those elements of it that we are conscious of as evil, as detrimental to the true human good, had been suddenly imposed in one bloc and immediately observed to be so detrimental, then it might be possible to bring about a simple solution by merely removing what had been so imposed . But that is not the case. If we look over the development that the flux of time has brought about during the last four hundred years, say, we can see that in a general way, each change was welcomed in its aspect of good. After the decay of scholasticism the new learning was ushered in as calculated to enrich the lives of men. Scientific...

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