Catholic Social Principles is a guide to the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, especially as it unfolded in the wake of Leo XIII's landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum and in the encyclicals of Pius XI, Pius XII, and John XXIII. The book is not a history of the development of this teaching, however, but rather a summary of where it stood as of the book's publication in 1961 - indeed, Dirksen does not generally differentiate between sources, instead presenting the teaching as a unified whole. Since then, additional elements have been contributed by Bl Paul VI, St John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, and the greatest weakness of the book is its understandable inability to foresee the nature of those contributions. This leads to a concentration on the conflict between capitalism and communism and a corresponding neglect of other dimensions, especially those relating to development in the third world and respect for the environment.
Dirksen proceeds by way of neither flashes of insight nor appeals to the reader but by slow, careful brick-by-brick exposition. This approach makes the book somewhat dull, but the Catholic argument benefits greatly from his thoroughness. If Dirksen could not, given his human limitations, predict future developments, those developments are still built on the foundation he surveys. Indeed, his work is all the more vital in the spirit of Orwell's dictum that "the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."
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