By  Michael Drissen. Professor of Political Science at John Cabot University, Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, University of Notre Dame, USA

The editorial addresses the challenges facing Catholic social thought in an increasingly complex international context. At the heart of the discussion are the themes of freedom, pluralism and the need to renew multilateralism and international law in order to promote the common good.

Centesimus Annus Pro-Pontifice Foundation

General Assembly and International Conference 28th – 29th and 30th May 2026

Renewing the Vision of Centesimus Annus: Catholic Social Thought Facing the Challenges to Freedom and Pluralism

How to Build New Frameworks for Multilateralism and International Law

Over the last ten years, I been working on a project that I call the “Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue.” I use that term as a way to reflect on the ongoing transformation of religious traditions in late modernity and as indicating something about their attempts to articulate a vision of international cooperation therein.

Viewed as a kind of global movement or ideal, interreligious dialogue offers us a good sense of what global religious traditions are up to in terms of politics and theology in late modernity.

One of the things that is interesting- ironic perhaps but certainly not coincidental- is that the recent development of interreligious dialogue on the international stage and the interest of policymakers to engage with that project have coincided with the onset of a major crisis of secular liberalism as the guiding political philosophy for Western democracies, whose values also motivated international cooperation as a shared project.

So on the one hand, there is a close connection between the crisis of political liberalism and the crisis of an international system which was built upon it to facilitate cooperation. And, on the other hand, there is also a close connection between the crisis of both of those and the re-emergence of religious actors, traditions, philosophical insights and movements as major dynamics within international politics.

Now, this is not the first time that liberalism, democracy and the international system have been in crisis, nor the first time that religious traditions have seriously engaged with states and international organizations as a result.

In one reading of the birth of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in fact, religious traditions played a key role in providing the moral and normative foundations- or as my colleague Robert Hefner has put it- of extending the moral and normative epistemologies which both documents and organizations stand upon. In doing so, they embedded these documents with spiritual hope and, critically, with spiritual charge in the face of global war and devastation. Their attempts to do so might be interpreted as a successful, early exercise in interreligious dialogue- especially if one looks at the UNESCO deliberations which engaged major and diverse religious and philosophical thinkers and came up with a workable framework to encase human rights.

Among others, Jacques Maritain is a key figure in this story as was his conceptualization of integral or Christian Humanism which would influence both those debates and the subsequent deliberations of Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae in particular.  

And I think that as we look at the crisis of international order and multilateralism today, its helpful to go back to the core elements of the political and religious resolution which made Christian Humanism such a generative response to the crisis of modernity at its time and to do so with new eyes.

The animating heart of Christian Humanism- that all humans have been created by God with inviolable dignity; that such dignity necessitates religious freedom; and that dignity and freedom both require the development of a more inclusive and active practice of citizenship to be realized- offered a basic formula for creating and measuring institutions at all levels of politics – how we think about the international system, the state and local politics– and I would argue can help us do so today.

And in this sense, Christian Humanism represents a kind of historical arc – linking the papacies from Vatican II- through Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis- whose exclamation that “Jesus is our Humanism” remains as live a call to Christian Humanism as any – which can be recovered today. And one reading of Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is that it represents an attempt to do precisely that, in a way which deliberately brings that tradition to bear on what Pope Leo refers to as the “crisis of multilateralism.”

In the rest of these remarks I want to make two points about renewing and/or rereading Christian Humanism in our time of international disruption.

First, I want to emphasize how these various elements together point to a need to recuperate what I would say is a lost sense of the political vocation of the Christian citizen. Perhaps having thought that the question of politics had been resolved, over the last 50 years Christian theology and movements inspired by Christian humanism have left too much space for other religious narratives to fill the political void. This includes alternative Christian views on politics that embrace nationalism and authority in ways that are at odds in dangerous ways with a Christian humanist understanding of freedom and dignity.  

And perhaps especially today I want to remember the “vocation” part of that call. In their work, Maritain and Lubac wrote in passionate terms about the heroic spiritual urgency of integral humanism, one which leads to sacrifice for the common good and social communion on the basis of love of God and love of neighbor. Maritain and Lubac wrote movingly – in ways I think we have buried- about the witness and power of fraternal love and solidarity with the outcast and the taste of human communion that it inspires in human hearts to transform the world accordingly. I do not think we can get a good measure of the mobilization of Catholic actors investing themselves in democratic politics and the building of international structures during this period without some appreciation of what my colleagues Rosario Forlenza and Bjorn Thomassen would call the political spirituality of the movement.

Maritain referred to this as the “lymph of the gospels,” writing, “From the moment in which we understand that we are made for the beatitudes, we are no longer afraid of death, but we also can no longer resign ourselves to the oppression and slavery of our brothers and sisters and we aspire, also for this early life, towards a state of emancipation that is worthy of their dignity.”  

Here Maritain is thinking about democracy not merely as an intellectual response to nationalism and isolationism – although that is clearly also important in his work- but also as a living faith, what he called a “comprehensive way of life,” a place where the poor can be blessed, where those persecuted for righteousness can build a kingdom of justice, and where enemies can be loved. In this light I am struck by how Pope Leo ends Magnifica Humanitas by recalling Mary’s Magnificat as an inspiration for politics, namely, as a place where the mighty can be cast down from their thrones. There is a strong democratic appeal in that line, especially as seen from the crisis of democracy today. Or as Henri Bergson declared in 1932, and quoted by Maritain:  “The essence of democracy is evangelical and love is its determining motive.”

That is a spiritual charge, one which requires cultural and political renewal and which also requires social organization, concrete social witness and a concrete understanding of the relationship of both to the state. I think the naming of this project is important. In the face of Christian nationalism- with organizations proudly using that title- I think we should not be afraid to call ourselves “Christian humanists” and “Christian democrats”- at least with a small “d”- Christians who are co-creators of civil society and the politics that build our common life.

One final point. I want to observe a clear strand running along side all of this which has to do with dialogue—and specifically interreligious dialogue- as key to this vision of humanism and of the kind of international cooperation it imagines. Here we need to speak about religious humanisms in the plural. Just as at the time of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, today we have multiple religious humanisms engaged in a similar attempt at moral and normative renewal in response to international crisis.

This indicates that religious traditions – again in the plural and in partnership with one another- have connected a God-bestowed understanding of human dignity and the sanctity of life to the need for renewed social solidarities for inclusive rights, citizenship formation and international cooperation

These religious communities have often done so in explicit and surprising ways by re-centering the United Nations as a place for preserving these rights, and they have connected to various traditions of religious humanism in order to do so. Here I am reminded of the Humanitarian Islam movement in Indonesia as an important example, but there are others.

In conclusion, these dynamics, taken together, offer opportunities for the creation and strengthening of new multifaith and multistakeholder alliances in favor of international cooperation, which is the title of a recent white paper cosponsored by Globethics, Wilton Park, the UN Faith for Rights and Inter-Parliamentary Union which I helped work on. These new forms of collaboration between policymakers and faith actors might be interpreted and seized upon as the beginning of a new and expanded round of global dialogues aimed at renewing the moral and normative foundations of international cooperation in the face of global crisis.