What is this Common Good?

Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton (PA) criticized Catholic supporters of the president-elect for justifying their support through a "distorted" concept of the common good:

"'Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good,' Martino charged, defined 'common good' in terms of 'utopianism and prosperity-oriented materialism, which is not at all what it means in Catholic teaching.'" (http://ncrcafe.org/node/2272)

What then is the official Catholic meaning of common good?

"By common good is to be understood 'the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.' The common good concerns the life of all. It calls for prudence from each, and even more from those who exercise the office of authority." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1906, quoting Vatican II)

According to the Catechism, the "essential elements" of the common good are:

• Respect for the (inalienable rights of) person (1907)
• The well-being and development of the social group (1908)
• Peace, in the sense of security and stability (1909)

"The common good of the whole of society dwells in man; he is ... 'the way of the Church.' ... It could be said that here we encounter the loftiest definition of man: The glory of God is the common good of all that exists; the common good of the human race." (Pope John Paul II, "Letter to Families" 11)

Government's purpose (1 of 2) is to realize the Common Good:
"The State, whose purpose is the realization of the common good in the temporal order…Moreover, it should safeguard the rights of all citizens, but especially the weaker, such as workers, women, and children. Nor may the State ever neglect its duty to contribute actively to the betterment of the living conditions of workers" ("Christianity and Social Progress," Pope John XXIII (1961)

The following paragraphs are from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 164-5:

"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. According to its primary and broadly accepted sense, the common good indicates 'the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily'.

The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains 'common', because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future. Just as the moral actions of an individual are accomplished in doing what is good, so too the actions of a society attain their full stature when they bring about the common good. The common good, in fact, can be understood as the social and community dimension of the moral good.

A society that wishes and intends to remain at the service of the human being at every level is a society that has the common good — the good of all people and of the whole person — as its primary goal. The human person cannot find fulfilment in himself, that is, apart from the fact that he exists 'with' others and 'for' others. This truth does not simply require that he live with others at various levels of social life, but that he seek unceasingly — in actual practice and not merely at the level of ideas — the good, that is, the meaning and truth, found in existing forms of social life. No expression of social life — from the family to intermediate social groups, associations, enterprises of an economic nature, cities, regions, States, up to the community of peoples and nations — can escape the issue of its own common good, in that this is a constitutive element of its significance and the authentic reason for its very existence."

The Common Good may be the new "family values": an oft repeated but vacuous concept. But this is so only because of ignorance or avoidance of the official Catholic documents.

The Best Pig in the Slop

I had the opportunity to spend the weekend with my best friend from my adolescence, 20s and early 30s. Life has separated us geographically so we have not seen each other for a decade or so. Over dinner one of the questions I asked him was whether he enjoyed beating me in sports. Not really, he said. I never enjoyed beating him in my sports. We agreed that we loved the beauty of the games, the playing rather than the winning.

For those who are exceptional, competitiveness and the will to win are necessary qualities. I admire my son's will to win, although it is not pleasing when the game is simply Uno or chess. But unless a person becomes a college or professional athlete, joy and the beauty of the game have to replace winning at whatever cost.

I love tennis. Beating my wife or my neighbor in tennis is meaningless; the only victories that would actually mean anything would be those that lead to the opportunity to compete against the best players in the world. (I hope you realize how absurd this is, since my major accomplishment each day is to breathe while climbing.)

High school athletes do not yet know who or what they will be. Their competitiveness is now a virtue. But when their dreams are dashed and only a memory, the competitiveness should give way to an appreciation of the beauty of sport.

Yet I see too many has-been and never-will-be athletes tossing aside everything to have one final success. In college it seems rather sad when young persons who have the opportunity to receive a quality -- and life-shaping -- education use it as a means to continue a sporting career that is over: once one has reached as far as possible, the goal should be to compete fully in order to win, but more so to learn for life with every human energy, all that one has.

Sports are fun and they yield wonderful memories, but it makes no sense to expend all of one's energies to be the best pig in the slop.

Lewis the Thomist?

I happened upon the following line in CS Lewis's chapter on the Incarnation:

"Nature by dominating spirit wrecks all spiritual activities: spirit by dominating Nature confirms and improves natural activities." ("The Grand Miracle," Miracles)

This strikes me as Lewis's version of grace-perfecting-nature. A professor friend thinks Lewis's opinion of nature and grace reflects Henri De Lubac:

"When He said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." ("Is Christianity Hard or Easy?" Mere Christianity)

De Lubac's 's controversial position was that there were no natural ends (or, goal, purpose, from the Greek term telos); the human person has super-natural ends. According to Lewis's egg image, the egg is meant to hatch as a chick; this is the end of an egg, parallel to the supernatural end of the human person. A person cannot go on as a merely natural person; either one is born again as a Spirit creature, or one goes bad. Lewis presents this in his fine dream story, The Great Divorce.

A Life Calculus?

I am arguing with myself here, but I imagine people who read the prior entry want to ask, "what is the death toll of war?"

I am not justifying killing in warfare, capital punishment, etc. The human person has the right not to be killed, period. Governments and societies have no natural right to kill that subordinates the right to life.

Rather, my point was that if the policies of the president-elect work themselves out, the impact should be quantifiable.

If we can quantify the impact, then we can learn something about the outcome of voting pro-life.

A Death Toll?

Now that the presidential election is over, it would be wise for pro-life advocates to carefully track the real, quantifiable impact on unborn human beings. Archbishop Chaput (Denver) has warned Catholic voters that this man is the most radical pro-abortion candidate. What I have read about the president-elect's abortion policies has truly chilled me. I have read Catholic theologians -- even my friends -- justify a vote for this man on the lack of impact pro-life politicians have had to this point. It looks to me that his policies will have an identifiable impact, an escalation in the death of the unborn. I hope I am wrong, of course.

(I am an independent who varies from socialist to libertarian, depending on the issue. I had no dog in this race.)