On Loyalty, by Michael Pakaluk

By Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing, Jan. 29, 2026

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is Professor of Political Economy in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His collection of essays, The Shock of Holiness (Ignatius Press) is now available. …

Loyalty is a republican virtue, and more than that.  “The American people have been chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the correlative of royalty,” Orestes Brownson says, in his great work on our country, The American Republic, “but loyalty is rather the correlative of law.”

That fact pops up from a cursory glance at the components of the word. It clearly comes from the French for law,loi.  Loyalty is loi-alty.  In Medieval Latin, it was simply legalitas.   Loyalty is most fundamentally lawfulness.

But loyalty is not simply “a” virtue, if Brownson is correct.  Recall he was writing in 1865, just after disloyal men, the “rebels,” had been put down, and hundreds of thousands of loyal men gave up their lives for their country.  Let us hear him out: …

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