**1. Introduction**

The tradition of modern CST, since the papacy of Leo XIII (1878–1903) offers a distinctive set of lenses through which to assess and justify the basic goods of human flourishing, which include both individual health and the communal good of public health. Catholic natural law reasoning is both axiological and deontological: moral imperatives are generated by reflection on the basic goods that contribute to human flourishing, and such reflection generates both duties and rights concerning health. There are virtue-based duties of all persons to act, to the extent they can, as responsible stewards for their own health. There are also the rights of persons to adequate health care, with entitlements to basic care to be guaranteed by social institutions as concomitants of human dignity. In addition, there are the requirements of the common good that provide the larger context that both justifies and constrains the claims of individuals to pursue their own ends within society. The latter point is especially relevant to the COVID-19 context, in which some have resisted wide-scale vaccination efforts in the name of individual "liberty". As I will discuss, such claims to unfettered individual freedom have no basis in Catholic thought. Individuals have duties to protect and promote their own health and the health of others. Persons also have rights to such protection and promotion as individuals and as members of the larger society. At the same time, the common good provides the appropriate framework for understanding persons as necessarily social, with rights and duties both justified and constrained by that foundational awareness.

In what is perhaps the most comprehensive recent overview of the fundamental values invoked by CST, Anthony Annett identifies a range of basic norms that he describes as "concrete principles" of CST (Annett 2022a, pp. 42–66). While each of the principles Annett identifies might serve to inform an analysis of collective obligations in response to the

**Citation:** Lustig, Andrew. 2023. Fostering the Global Common Good: The Relevance of Catholic Social Teaching to Public Health Debates. *Religions* 14: 504. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel14040504

Academic Editors: Andrew Flescher and Joel Zimbelman

Received: 23 November 2022 Revised: 16 January 2023 Accepted: 30 March 2023 Published: 6 April 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

COVID-19 pandemic, my focus here will be CST's recent emphasis on solidarity as a virtue that should animate both individual and social morality, especially its relevance to the functions of multilateral institutions in the context of ever-greater global interdependence. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, I will argue that the appeal to solidarity supports both the global right to vaccination and the general duty of persons to avail themselves of the vaccine as a necessary contribution to the common good. The warrants at work in CST's arguments for a right to basic health care, ordinarily discussed within the context of individual care, *a fortiori* justify the provision of the goods of public health, where the Catholic understanding of individual claims as necessarily situated in the context of larger society is especially obvious in its implications and application. The Catholic case for a global responsibility to provide effective vaccines to all persons at risk, as well as the duty of individuals to be vaccinated, follow directly from the moral and theological warrants for CST's distinctive understanding of the rights of persons *vis-a-vis* the requirements of the common good. Moreover, the norm of solidarity helps to resolve certain tensions that may arise in interpreting the relevance of the Catholic vision to the global discussion of public health. Especially as developed in the writings of John Paul II (but also invoked regularly by his two successors, Benedict XVI and Francis), solidarity emerges as a virtue that should animate both individuals and institutions, especially the institutions of government.

My discussion will also engage two aspects of the vaccine discussion raised by certain "dissenting" Catholic voices: first, the charge of "moral complicity" in the evil of abortion insofar as the recent vaccines, as well as earlier ones, have relied on decades-old research that included the use of cell lines initially derived from abortions; and second, the issue of whether and to what extent various policy "restrictions" on personal behavior (e.g., mask mandates, limits on or refusals of public access, required quarantine) are justified or challenged by a distinctively Catholic understanding of personal liberty of conscience. In each instance, I judge the "dissenting" voices to be in error. In addition, while the Catholic literature on the second topic—that of justified restrictions during the pandemic—is not extensive, I conclude that the answers follow straightforwardly from a distinctively Catholic understanding of individual rights as necessarily exercised within and constrained by the requirements of the common good.
