July 2026 marks the 250th birthday of the United States. Alas, the celebration next year will come in the midst of yet another election cycle, and at a time of deep cultural divisions. We need a “common good” politics more than ever. But that’s easier said than done. Here’s why.
In Catholic thought, the political realm is primarily the responsibility of the laity – complicated and distracted people like you and me – not the clergy. But the civil war inside the Church over what Vatican II really meant, and the resulting confusion about which issues should have priority in working for the common good, are not over.
Quite the opposite: During the Francis pontificate, the frictions took on new heat. And the course of the Leo pontificate, while promising, is not yet fully clear. Additionally, the bureaucratic mass of the U.S. bishops’ conference, with its need for collective buy-in from its members, creates inertia. This makes any quick, clear, and decisive action by the body of bishops difficult to achieve. Plus, the risks for the Church of being co-opted and used by the political left and right are always present, and always expensively high.
Thus, the “political” role of the Church, in her national and diocesan structures, rarely amounts to more than providing basic principles of morality and justice, and interfacing and lobbying at the bishops’ conference level with government offices on a range of issues.
Very broadly speaking, that’s how the Church in the United States operates institutionally, as an organized community of believers. But it’s worth considering a few added points, most of them obvious to the alert observer:
1. The Church always seeks a modus vivendi with public authority – in every nation, in every century. This get-along strategy has both practical and Scriptural grounding. But it also has its weaknesses. The desire to minimize conflict with secular authority predisposes the Church to make compromises and avoid confrontations in a way that’s not always prudent. Additionally, given her minority status in our own country, the Church has always been eager to fit in and prove her loyalty. The result of that eagerness today, sustained over generations, is that most Catholics are now more thoroughly American than they are Catholic. Many bishops are, in their own words, “generals without armies.” This reduces Catholic political muscle as a distinct and coherent community.
2. Many American Catholics, and even a few Church leaders, still assume that we live in a country that (in reality) no longer exists – at least, not in the form they imagine. Demographic, technological, legal, and cultural changes have transformed the United States over the past 70 years. But this delusion of America as somehow implicitly Christian, or at least Biblically grounded, persists. And it’s strongest among boomer-aged practicing Catholics like myself who still have a reasonably accurate knowledge of the Founding. In many dioceses, this is exactly the age group, now dying out, who are most actively involved with the Church, and the most generous.
3. We have a duty to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. But that duty requires a healthy degree of Catholic prudence. Whatever governmental form Caesar takes, he always has three defining characteristics: (a) his legitimate zone of authority is very limited; (b) he thinks it’s a lot bigger than it is; and (c) he’s never a trustworthy friend, no matter how cordial he seems. This suggests that while issues like protecting the unborn and defending religious freedom are vitally important and must be pursued, the more fundamental task for the Church is educating Catholics to develop a healthy distance between themselves and their allegiance to the American experiment and its culture.
4. As Catholic numbers and practice decline, so does the influence of Christian moral thought. The “common good,” according to secular thinkers, can be very different from that same idea according to the Gospel. Note too that no “common good” can exist without a shared understanding of who and why the human person is, and what defines his or her proper destiny. American culture now orders itself against any such defining narrative in the name of individual autonomy. This has huge civic implications, because politics builds on anthropology.
John Paul II saw this from the start of his pontificate. All of his teaching unfolds methodically from his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, “Redeemer of Man.” The Francis pontificate, unfortunately, had no such systematic discipline of thought. It also had an instinctive dislike of the United States. It could also seem ambiguous in its approach to the fallout of the sexual revolution. This limited its ability to impact American Catholics by way of inspiration or help in dealing with today’s emerging and much more challenging U.S. environment.
5. Finally, one of the most important “political” things the Church could do is terminate her own unproductive ministries and structures, and focus on forming faithful young leaders who can witness the Gospel to a new cultural environment that is frankly not pagan, but worse than pagan. As C.S. Lewis said, real pagans at least had a sense of an enchanted world and the supernatural realities behind it. Today’s “post-Christians” lack even that.
The great French Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague notes in his book, The Law of God, that the two great “political” religions – Islam and Christianity – differ radically in their historical encounter with civil society. Islam conquered and imposed itself politically, by force, from the outside. Christianity converted society gradually from within,one person and one community at a time, with no explicit political intentions.
That happened once. It can happen again. The same challenge of conversion presents itself today, but with an added and serious obstacle because the supernatural/sacramental dimension of life seems removed from the modern imagination. Restoring it is the work of a new generation of leaders, which is why Catholic education and formation efforts, and apostolates like the Leonine Forum, FOCUS, and others, remain so vitally important. That’s where the energy is. There also should be our support.
