I agree with and have nothing to add to EBH’ response to your question but I’ll make another attempt to explain Catholic social teaching and reiterate that it’s based on Holy Scripture.
Mark Shea: [...]Catholic social policy which fosters the family, i.e., the revealed understanding of family as one man, one woman and children living in self-giving love is at the heart of Catholic social teaching. Catholic thought conceives of human beings not as “individuals” but as persons. “Person” is not synonymous with “individual” for a person is not a set of subjective impulses and opinions untethered from any objective truth. A person is made in the image of a Trinity Who is, in His very essence, a kind of Holy Family united in love. Therefore, persons are, of their very essence, members of family themselves and such families are a sort of Icon of the Holy Trinity. In short, persons are made to live in love and union with another and cannot exist without participating in that reality to some degree.
It’s the Trinity and not “my personal truth of the moment” or “the rights of the Individual against the Government” which is at the root of our existence, it is this love, expressed in the family, which is the earthly Icon of the Holy Trinity. Therefore, it is the family which forms the unifying basis for all the Church’s prudential (and occasional dogmatic) social teaching...
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/mark-shea/the-key-to-catholic-social-teaching/
Dale Ahlquist on Chesterton: [...]Chesterton was so consistently right in his pronouncements and prophecies because he understood that anything that attacked the family was bad for society. That is why he spoke out against eugenics and contraception, against divorce and “free love” (another term he disliked because of its dishonesty), but also against wage slavery and compulsory state-sponsored education and mothers hiring other people to do what mothers were designed to do themselves. It is safe to say that Chesterton stood up against every trend and fad that plagues us today because every one of those trends and fads undermines the family.
Big Government tries to replace the family’s authority, and Big Business tries to replace the family’s autonomy. There is a constant commercial and cultural pressure on father, mother, and child. They are minimized and marginalized and, yes, mocked. But as Chesterton says, “This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”[...]
[...]Marriage is between a man and a woman. That is the order. And the Catholic Church teaches that it is a sacramental order, with divine implications. The world has made a mockery of marriage that has now culminated with homosexual unions. But it was heterosexual men and women who paved the way to this decay. Divorce, which is an abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Contraception, another abnormal thing, is now treated as normal. Abortion is still not normal, but it is legal. Making homosexual “marriage” legal will not make it normal, but it will add to the confusion of the times. And it will add to the downward spiral of our civilization.
But Chesterton’s prophecy remains:
We will not be able to destroy the family. We will merely destroy ourselves by disregarding the family.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/g-k-chesterton-its-not-gay-and-its-not-marriage
Bottomline: Simply put - Catholic social teaching rule of thumb (using Holy Scripture as a guide) -
“If it’s good for the family, it’s good. If it’s bad for the family, it’s bad.”
Great post. TY