Why "Catholic Liberal" Is Not a Contradiction in Terms

To a great many people, on both the secular left and the religious right, the phrase “Catholic liberal” sounds like a contradiction in terms. Faith demands submission; liberty demands autonomy. The one looks upward to authority, the other inward to the self. How could a serious Catholic also be a serious friend of freedom?

I had the pleasure of taking up precisely this question last week with John Daly and Thomas Howes on the Reagan Caucus Action podcast. Our conversation ranged widely across two centuries, several encyclicals, and the varied threats to the liberty we too often take for granted. The supposed contradiction between political liberalism dissolves under honest examination and careful distinctions.

The Acton Institute, where I serve as a research fellow and where I host the Acton Line podcast, exists to make exactly that case. We are not a partisan policy shop, and I tried to be clear with John and Thomas about the distinction. Our aim is not to win the next election but to promote a free and virtuous society in which liberty is sustained, rather than corroded, by religious principle. The two are not adversaries. Strip virtue out of freedom and you are left with mere license; strip freedom out of virtue and you are left with coercion in the costume of piety.

This insight is central to a whole tradition of nineteenth-century thinkers, Lord Acton chief among them, who labored to reconcile the Catholic faith with constitutional government, freedom of conscience and of speech, and the free economy. These men were not liberals in the impoverished modern sense, that rationalistic and atomistic creed which holds tradition and institutions in contempt. Theirs was the older, organic liberalism that understands freedom as the necessary condition for human beings to pursue the good together. Acton found the seed of that liberty not in the Enlightenment but in the Gospel itself: in Christ’s instruction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, words that, as Acton observed, set bounds upon the state that it had never before been made to acknowledge.

The twentieth century furnished its own vindication. We spoke about Pope St. John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, his great encyclical marking the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, in which the pope, who took the trouble to consult some of the finest economists of his day, affirmed a free economy set within a strong juridical framework, an economy ordered to the whole of human freedom rather than against it. It was not an unqualified blessing of capitalism. It was something better and more durable: a humanistic account of why markets, rightly bounded, can serve human dignity rather than diminish it.

If all of this sounds comfortably historical, the latter half of our conversation was anything but. I gave John and Thomas my candid assessment of the obstacles to freedom in 2026, and they are not few. Abroad, liberty faces open hostility from authoritarian regimes that regard it as a species of weakness. At home, the threat is subtler and, to my mind, sadder—a growing impatience with the liberal settlement among Christians themselves. Among some Protestants it takes the shape of Christian nationalism; among some Roman Catholics, of integralism. Both are tempted to cut through the Gordian knot of a pluralistic society with the sword of political power. Both misread the very tradition they mean to defend.

We closed on the question of war and the papacy, drawing on a piece I recently wrote for The Dispatch. There has been a great deal of confusion about the pope’s role in moments of conflict. The Holy Father is not a geopolitical referee, called to adjudicate this or that campaign. He is an advocate for peace, and his office obliges him to remind a forgetful world of an old and sober truth: a war that would eradicate a civilization can never, under any doctrine worthy of the name, be called just.

Which brings us back to where we began. “Catholic liberal” is not an oxymoron. Properly understood, it is closer to a redundancy, a name for the conviction that the God who made us free intended us to remain so. I’m grateful to the Reagan Caucus Action for the chance to make that case, and I’d commend the full conversation to you.

Watch the full episode here: