This is the text of my acceptance talk for the Pope Pius XI Award for Contributions to the Building Up of a True Catholic Social Science, at October’s annual meeting of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.  I had hesitated to post it, but my advisors think it would be interesting to many of my readers.

I stoutly hope that I am wrong about how the president-elect will govern.  He has made several appropriate gestures, and he did not use his victory speech to boast and bluster, as he might have.

However, he seems to be laboring under a misconception.  He thinks he won.

No, the other candidate lost.

Liberalism is said to mean believing in liberality, which is generosity.  Though generosity is a real virtue, it lies between opposite vices.  The interesting question, then, is not whether you are in favor of liberality.  Instead let us ask:  How do you recognize and avoid covetousness on the one hand, and prodigality on the other?

We have come to expect vast and manipulative public relations campaigns mounted to influence the voters, who are then supposed to exert influence on elected officials.  In an empire, however, the only constituency that matters to people who want things done is the courtiers, and the only constituency that matters to the courtiers is the emperor himself. 

I number myself as a drop in the flood of formerly Evangelical Protestant scholars and writers who have become Catholic in recent decades.  The purpose of this post is not to boast that we are right, and I certainly don’t want to bash the Evangelical community, among whom I first heard the Gospel as a child.  God bless you.

During the Constitutional ratification debates, the skeptical party worried that a state that tried to govern too many people and too much territory would inevitably degenerate into despotism.  That is why they believed in keeping as much authority in the localities instead of exporting it to the top.

I’ve been waiting for Cambridge University Press to release the paperback edition of my Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, so that bookworms who long for it will no longer have to mortgage their firstborn children.  This happy event has finally transpired; your children are safe.