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By now, most of the Catholic internet world has heard about the minor blow up concerning Rev. James Martin, SJ and his tweet, which claimed that “Pete Buttigieg is married,” itself a response to a Catholic League article stating that “It is true that Buttigieg is legally married, but that is a legal fiction.”

The following lecture was delivered to the faculty of Thomas Aquinas College in the fall of 2020.

When Aquinas presents his understanding of the natural law, he unifies it under a single precept, “Good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be shunned.”^[1] This precept forms the basis for every other natural law precept—which is why it is a unifying principle for the natural law as a whole^[2]—because it expresses the first principle of any action whatsoever. We do not commit a fully human act except insofar as an act seems to be good or to be aimed at a good (or away from its opposite). The precept is universal; it grounds any and every pursuit of goods. But there is a question: What, precisely, is meant by “good” in this precept?

by Michael Berndt

For my wife.

The title of this essay is “The Child as a Common Good,” which would seem to be an unfortunate topic to defend, for at least two reasons. The first is that the notion of a common good requires a degree of universality that the child, as a particular subject, apparently fails to attain. The second reason follows from the principle that because a common good is more universal than a singular good, it is also more communicable. As Charles De Koninck has put it, the common good “reaches the singular more than the singular good: it is the greater good of the singular” (16). Now if the child as a good is held in common by anyone, then it is certainly by the child’s parents; but in practice it is perhaps rare to hear parents echoing De Koninck’s words with respect to their children. The reality, in fact, seems closer to the opposite: many parents would describe the relationship between their own singular goods and their children in sacrificial terms—and every sacrifice, however willing, must imply some opposition between goods. The child as a good, therefore, seems not to “reach the singular more than the singular good,” and so the child appears not to fit the definition of a common good for his or her parents.