STEUBENVILLE, OH—Catholic scholars from across the U.S. gathered October 27-28 at Franciscan University of Steubenville for the 25th Anniversary Conference of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.

In 33 sessions featuring 66 presenters, the conference addressed a wide range of issues, including a session on “The Importance of Marriage for Children and Society.” Patrick Fagan, director of the Marriage and Religion Research Initiative at The Catholic University of America, presented matrimony as the foundation that upholds political society. Politics, defined as those goods that draw a people together, must be judged by its ability to foster and safeguard communal goods, including matrimony, he said.

“The job of politics is to tend to those conditions, those political goods such as order, liberty, justice, and equality before the law, which cultivate … the common good,” said Fagan. “A politics that can cherish matrimonial belonging is a politics that can cultivate belonging in general.”

In matrimony, husband and wife imperfectly live out what is perfectly authored by God, and so participate in the eternal, said Fagan. Because of this, a society that respects and follows the example of matrimony will more fully lead its members to the order of being God intends.

A roundtable on “Religious Freedom and the Future of the Catholic Church in the American Public Order” also dealt with the importance of the state respecting and upholding the values of the Church. Chaired by Kenneth L. Grasso, chair of the Political Science Department at Texas State University, its panelists were: Steven Brust, assistant professor of political science at Eastern New Mexico University; Gary D. Glenn, a distinguished teaching professor emeritus of political science at Northern Illinois University; and Robert P. Hunt, professor of political science at Kean University of New Jersey.

The panelists discussed the role religion has played in American public life and the evolution of the state’s relationship with the Church. They agreed that the values of the state must always be measured by the values of the Church

Said Grasso, “A new type of public order is taking shape in the United States, and this new type of public order is incompatible with not only the Catholic vision of man in society, but also incompatible with the freedom of the Church, which the Second Vatican Council identified as the fundamental principle governing the relationship between the Church and the temporal order.”

Glenn said that from the First Constitutional Congress, the federal government’s power to define a religious establishment has threatened freedom of religion. This gives rise to possible infringement of religious liberty. It allows federal judges to define religious orders as establishments, which makes them subject to matters in opposition to the Church, such as offering birth control in insurance plans. Glenn stressed the importance of appointing federal judges who respect Catholic beliefs in order to uphold religious liberty.

At the conference, the Pope Pius XI Award for Contributions Toward the Building Up of a True Catholic Social Science was awarded to F. Russell Hittinger, the Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa. Hittinger spoke on Catholic social doctrine as an area of moral theology, explaining that it is a study of the “rectitude of human action in light of duties to our neighbor.”

The conference celebrated the silver jubilee of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, which was founded in 1992 by Franciscan University political scientist Dr. Stephen Krason and sociologist Dr. Joseph Varacalli and is based at Franciscan University of Steubenville. The society aims to bring together Catholic social scientists for professional fellowship and to examine political, social, and economic reality in light of empirical data, the Church’s social teaching, and the natural law. Learn more about the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at their website.