Timothy Gordon

“Next up is the right to pursue happiness. Thomas Jefferson called this the third natural right in the Declaration. But as the reader may now see, the right to pursue happiness is actually the same thing as liberty. True happiness, as disclosed by Catholic Natural Law, means fulfilling human existence by freely choosing the moral good.39 This should strike the reader as nearly identical in meaning to the true definition of liberty: freedom to pursue the good. In both the ancient Greek and the Catholic sense,40 happiness and the good end up being the same thing. Man is truly happy when he acts as God intended him to act — morally. But in a failing or a failed republic, populated by immoral people, the pursuit of happiness is misunderstood as the immoral pursuit of pleasure. (Moral cultures, by definition, do not allow immoral government. Plato wrote that “the penalty that good men pay for their indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by wicked men”41 — the very men who create such misdefinitions.)”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“Whether it is popularly emphasized much or not, Catholic teaching in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII tracks Thomas Aquinas’s quote above very closely: “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary” (22). Immediately after this passage in Rerum, the famous encyclical repeats Thomas’s above words. Taken together, all this underscores the Catholic call to public aid, not by heavy taxation but by private charity instead. The same paragraph in Rerum Novarum refines this concept even further: “Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind [which cannot be taxed!], has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome