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)
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.
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