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Alexia KellyOctober 15, 2007

Victor Hugo, the 19th-century French writer, famously remarked that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The common good—a classic theme of moral and political philosophy with deep roots in Catholic social teaching—is an old idea that has found new life in contemporary political discourse.

 

Rick Santorum, for example, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and a Catholic, has written a book titled It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. His one-time opponent, Robert Casey Jr., a Catholic and currently a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, made the common good a defining theme in his campaign. Several 2008 presidential candidates, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback, have peppered their stump speeches, talking points and position papers with language about the common good.

Appeals to the common good resonate particularly at a time when war, corporate scandals, the government’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina and anxiety about globalization have left many feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” W. B. Yeats wrote in his 1920 poem “The Second Coming.” This could describe our own fractured and alienated era.

Despite the flurry of references to the common good in public discourse, however, the term often twists in the rhetorical wind and comes across as a vague idea, so unthreatening that it is about as controversial as clean drinking water. The common good has been invoked in sound bites and catchphrases to support both liberal and conservative arguments. But an authentic understanding of the common good—one enriched by its particular connection to Catholic social thought—has practical implications for public policy and defies conventional ideological and political categories. Indeed, Catholicism’s long history of defining the common good as rooted in the dignity of the human person and the specific demands of justice, makes Catholics especially well-suited to challenge societal leaders to embrace a more energetic public agenda rooted in the common good.

Theory and Practice

For centuries, the Catholic tradition has emphasized a call to the common good as the centerpiece of Catholic social teaching. Building on concepts articulated first by Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas spoke about the good sought by all as intertwined with the reality of God. In the 16th century, the earliest followers of St. Ignatius Loyola were among the first Westerners to travel beyond Europe, inspired in part by a global vision of the common good. Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum(1891), was the first to make formal use of the concept of the common good as the starting point for the church’s social analysis.

According to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, “The principle of the common good, to which every aspect of social life must be related if it is to attain its fullest meaning, stems from the dignity, unity and equality of all people.” Yet there is a stunning failure to connect the clarity of these ideals and the realities of a world in which poverty, war and racism tear apart the human family. As globalization dissolves borders and shrinks our world, for example, the burdens and benefits of global capitalism undermine the common good by widening the chasm between rich and poor, hope and despair.

The chasm was evident in a recent New York Times story, “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age” (7/15), in which billionaire tycoons boasted about their personal accomplishments, bemoaned taxes on their fortunes and had little to say about why more than 37 million Americans live in poverty in the world’s richest country. A few months earlier, the Nasdaq launched a private stock market for elite investors with assets of more than $100 million. Meanwhile, in many towns and cities, the blue-collar jobs that once supported the middle class have disappeared as corporations pursue cheap labor, minimal regulation and higher profits outside the United States. Traditional community bonds are fraying. A commitment to the “commons,” public spaces that benefit all, has given way to private, gated communities where strangers of different classes or complexions can live apart, at a comfortable distance.

Our political culture both mirrors and shapes these trends. While government has often been an instrument of social good during epochal changes in American history, several decades of ideological assaults have branded “big government” as antithetical to freedom and individual responsibility. The marketplace, privatization and the primacy of choice have become a secular trinity. While Catholic social teaching values the importance of personal achievement, it also insists that government take on responsibilities that the market or individuals alone cannot or will not meet. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the common good as “the reason the political authority exists.” Furthermore, the church’s social doctrine insists that “ownership of goods be equally accessible to all” and that the “universal destination of goods” requires a moral economic system in which workers earn living wages and resources are distributed equitably. Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, writes that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable and that “justice is both the aim and intrinsic criterion of all politics.”

These are powerful words with practical implications for our most divisive contemporary debates about abortion, war, immigration, health care and climate change. These words challenge us to think deeply about what it means to be faithful citizens and to reflect on how our conscience and faith inform how we vote and live as both citizens and disciples.

The 2008 Election

As a presidential election year approaches, campaigners will again rank Catholics among the most coveted voters. Since Catholic social teaching is broad and deep, Catholics should insist that our national debate on values reflect the fullness of this rich tradition. Building a culture of life requires economic and social policies that help women choose life. It requires ending an unjust war, ensuring that poor children have health care and taking seriously the threats of global climate change. A renewed common good narrative in our public square has the potential to inspire a civic and moral awakening, one that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned when he spoke of the “beloved community,” a society where all of us, not just a few, have the opportunity to share in the abundance of creation.

No political party has a monopoly on moral values. Both Republicans and Democrats have an equal opportunity to succeed or fail in living up to the obligations of the common good. As Catholics, our faith inspires us to help reshape our culture and politics not simply as another interest group, but as members of a global church that seeks justice for the most vulnerable because it recognizes our common humanity as children of God. We should take up this struggle with hope, insisting that our public officials treat the common good not as another catch phrase in a campaign playbook, but as the foundation of moral leadership. In this way, we speak from the heart of our tradition with a message as old as the Beatitudes and as powerfully relevant for this election as it will still be a century from now.

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BURT HARRINGTON
16 years 4 months ago
Regarding Thomas Mulcahy's (11/19)letter re: "A Catholic Call to the Common Good" (10/15), I'd like to point out that there is more to the concept of the common good than a sum of social benefits. It is also a concept of balance between the order of things and the order of persons, a balance based on the dignity of the human person. Today's American culture speaks a language of individualism, a distortion of the civic republican languages upon which our country was founded. James Madison felt that civic virtue in American citizens would allow them to elect men of equal civic virtue as their leaders and to actively participate in political life, but somewhere along the road to territorial and economic expansion this vision of public virtue, this 'aristocracy of merit', was dimmed. Politicians began to concentrate on the accommodation of individual interests, a brokerage system, rather than civic virtue. This political brokerage system has now broken down into fruitless partisan squabbles. Utilitarian individualism is not the language we need to solve the problems of our relativized society today. As we prepare to elect new leaders, shouldn't we remember our Catholic world-view which is based on our understanding of the Gospels and of the human person? Don't we have the duty to participate in civic life and to carefully discern our choices as suggested by the authors of "A Catholic Call to the Common Good"? Isn't it time for us to speak to our world in the language of Catholicism? In October of this year, Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Italian Bishops' Conference in regard to the relationship between religion and politics with words very much to my point. "Jesus opened the way to a more human and freer world, with full respect for the distinction and autonomy that exists between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God (cf. Mt 22:21). If, therefore, on the one hand, the Church recognizes that she is not and does not intend to be a political agent, on the other, she cannot avoid concerning herself with the good of the whole civil community in which she lives and works and to which she makes her own special contribution, shaping in the political and entrepreneurial classes a genuine spirit of truth and honesty geared to seeking the common good rather than personal advantage." Alexis de Tocqueville worried that a democracy could easily atrophy due to citizen apathy. Madison emphasized the need for the citizens of the new-born 'republic with a democratic constitution' to participate in the political process and to thus seek the common and public good. To preserve our rights as Americans now, isn't it is our duty as People of God to publicly speak Catholicism, the language by which we live?

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