I’d like to start this post with a short prayer written by Fr. Satish Joseph for the United States as a nation and for the election:
Let us pray for a peaceful election day,
for a peaceful reception of the news of victory or defeat,
for a peaceful concession,
and for a peaceful transition.
In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen.
[Note: I moved the prayer to the top of the post from the bottom so more people will see it — ML]
Politics can’t save us. No political candidate or government leader can save us. Jesus Christ alone can save us. As someone who made a personal commitment to emotionally disengage from US politics over a decade ago, it was shocking in 2020 to see my fellow Catholics give in to rage, vitriol, and intolerance over which tiny oval on a piece of paper someone filled in on a single day in November that year.
Obviously it’s not as trivial as that, but when we — especially people of faith — tie everything from our relationships, our morals, and our beliefs to whether others vote for our preferred candidate every four years, I think we’re doing it wrong.
2020 was very difficult for me as editor of Where Peter Is. I’ve told more than a few people I had a stomach ache for the entire year. I was committed to taking an absolutely nonpartisan approach, which meant scrubbing candidates’ names and sanitizing language in some articles while rejecting many well-written but too-partisan article submissions. It was difficult to walk the line between not directly criticizing Trump while covering and commenting on Catholic anti-papal reactionaries like Archbishop Vigano, Raymond Arroyo, and Fr. James Altman, all of whom went all-in for Trump. WPI contributors were passionate at times on social media, and for some reason people tried to pin it on me or on WPI. Despite all my efforts, it always seemed like everyone was still mad at me.
Fortunately this year I haven’t been as concerned about what people think about me. Four years later, I have much thicker skin, and I’m much less worried about me than I am about what our Church and society are becoming.
We should always remember that participating in political life is much more than voting. As Pope Francis taught in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, “Let us take an active part in renewing and supporting our troubled societies. … Others may continue to view politics or the economy as an arena for their own power plays. For our part, let us foster what is good and place ourselves at its service” (FT 77). Whoever wins on Tuesday, let’s try to act like Christ’s followers on Wednesday. The early Church, subject as it was to the Roman empire, didn’t have much say in policy decisions and didn’t have any influence at all over their rulers.
The early Christians knew, however, that their witness could transform lives and, ultimately, the world. They served the poor, cared for the sick, and upheld the dignity of every person in a society that often did not. This vision of Christian engagement requires humility and patience, especially in a polarized climate. Acting like Christian disciples this Wednesday means being willing to build bridges rather than walls, to seek peace rather than conflict, and to find common ground rather than deepening divisions. We are called to transcend partisan divides, lift up the marginalized, work for unity, and promote the common good.
As a meditation for those of us who are planning to vote in the US election tomorrow, or those who simply care about the future of our global community, I offer these excerpts from Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti:
77. Each day offers us a new opportunity, a new possibility. We should not expect everything from those who govern us, for that would be childish. We have the space we need for co-responsibility in creating and putting into place new processes and changes. Let us take an active part in renewing and supporting our troubled societies. Today we have a great opportunity to express our innate sense of fraternity, to be Good Samaritans who bear the pain of other people’s troubles rather than fomenting greater hatred and resentment. Like the chance traveller in the parable, we need only have a pure and simple desire to be a people, a community, constant and tireless in the effort to include, integrate and lift up the fallen. We may often find ourselves succumbing to the mentality of the violent, the blindly ambitious, those who spread mistrust and lies. Others may continue to view politics or the economy as an arena for their own power plays. For our part, let us foster what is good and place ourselves at its service.
CHAPTER FIVE
A BETTER KIND OF POLITICS
154. The development of a global community of fraternity based on the practice of social friendship on the part of peoples and nations calls for a better kind of politics, one truly at the service of the common good. Sadly, politics today often takes forms that hinder progress towards a different world.
FORMS OF POPULISM AND LIBERALISM
155. Lack of concern for the vulnerable can hide behind a populism that exploits them demagogically for its own purposes, or a liberalism that serves the economic interests of the powerful. In both cases, it becomes difficult to envisage an open world that makes room for everyone, including the most vulnerable, and shows respect for different cultures.
163. The concept of a “people”, which naturally entails a positive view of community and cultural bonds, is usually rejected by individualistic liberal approaches, which view society as merely the sum of coexisting interests. One speaks of respect for freedom, but without roots in a shared narrative; in certain contexts, those who defend the rights of the most vulnerable members of society tend to be criticized as populists. The notion of a people is considered an abstract construct, something that does not really exist. But this is to create a needless dichotomy. Neither the notion of “people” nor that of “neighbour” can be considered purely abstract or romantic, in such a way that social organization, science and civic institutions can be rejected or treated with contempt.
164. Charity, on the other hand, unites both dimensions – the abstract and the institutional – since it calls for an effective process of historical change that embraces everything: institutions, law, technology, experience, professional expertise, scientific analysis, administrative procedures, and so forth. For that matter, “private life cannot exist unless it is protected by public order. A domestic hearth has no real warmth unless it is safeguarded by law, by a state of tranquillity founded on law, and enjoys a minimum of wellbeing ensured by the division of labour, commercial exchange, social justice and political citizenship”.
165. True charity is capable of incorporating all these elements in its concern for others. In the case of personal encounters, including those involving a distant or forgotten brother or sister, it can do so by employing all the resources that the institutions of an organized, free and creative society are capable of generating. Even the Good Samaritan, for example, needed to have a nearby inn that could provide the help that he was personally unable to offer. Love of neighbour is concrete and squanders none of the resources needed to bring about historical change that can benefit the poor and disadvantaged. At times, however, leftist ideologies or social doctrines linked to individualistic ways of acting and ineffective procedures affect only a few, while the majority of those left behind remain dependent on the goodwill of others. This demonstrates the need for a greater spirit of fraternity, but also a more efficient worldwide organization to help resolve the problems plaguing the abandoned who are suffering and dying in poor countries. It also shows that there is no one solution, no single acceptable methodology, no economic recipe that can be applied indiscriminately to all. Even the most rigorous scientific studies can propose different courses of action.
166. Everything, then, depends on our ability to see the need for a change of heart, attitudes and lifestyles. Otherwise, political propaganda, the media and the shapers of public opinion will continue to promote an individualistic and uncritical culture subservient to unregulated economic interests and societal institutions at the service of those who already enjoy too much power. My criticism of the technocratic paradigm involves more than simply thinking that if we control its excesses everything will be fine. The bigger risk does not come from specific objects, material realities or institutions, but from the way that they are used. It has to do with human weakness, the proclivity to selfishness that is part of what the Christian tradition refers to as “concupiscence”: the human inclination to be concerned only with myself, my group, my own petty interests. Concupiscence is not a flaw limited to our own day. It has been present from the beginning of humanity, and has simply changed and taken on different forms down the ages, using whatever means each moment of history can provide. Concupiscence, however, can be overcome with the help of God.
167. Education and upbringing, concern for others, a well-integrated view of life and spiritual growth: all these are essential for quality human relationships and for enabling society itself to react against injustices, aberrations and abuses of economic, technological, political and media power. Some liberal approaches ignore this factor of human weakness; they envisage a world that follows a determined order and is capable by itself of ensuring a bright future and providing solutions for every problem.
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHARITY
176. For many people today, politics is a distasteful word, often due to the mistakes, corruption and inefficiency of some politicians. There are also attempts to discredit politics, to replace it with economics or to twist it to one ideology or another. Yet can our world function without politics? Can there be an effective process of growth towards universal fraternity and social peace without a sound political life? [157]
The politics we need
177. Here I would once more observe that “politics must not be subject to the economy, nor should the economy be subject to the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy”. Although misuse of power, corruption, disregard for law and inefficiency must clearly be rejected, “economics without politics cannot be justified, since this would make it impossible to favour other ways of handling the various aspects of the present crisis”. [159] Instead, “what is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a new, integral and interdisciplinary approach to handling the different aspects of the crisis”. In other words, a “healthy politics… capable of reforming and coordinating institutions, promoting best practices and overcoming undue pressure and bureaucratic inertia”. We cannot expect economics to do this, nor can we allow economics to take over the real power of the state.
178. In the face of many petty forms of politics focused on immediate interests, I would repeat that “true statecraft is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-term common good. Political powers do not find it easy to assume this duty in the work of nation-building”, much less in forging a common project for the human family, now and in the future. Thinking of those who will come after us does not serve electoral purposes, yet it is what authentic justice demands. As the Bishops of Portugal have taught, the earth “is lent to each generation, to be handed on to the generation that follows”.
Political love
180. Recognizing that all people are our brothers and sisters, and seeking forms of social friendship that include everyone, is not merely utopian. It demands a decisive commitment to devising effective means to this end. Any effort along these lines becomes a noble exercise of charity. For whereas individuals can help others in need, when they join together in initiating social processes of fraternity and justice for all, they enter the “field of charity at its most vast, namely political charity”. This entails working for a social and political order whose soul is social charity. Once more, I appeal for a renewed appreciation of politics as “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good”.
181. Every commitment inspired by the Church’s social doctrine is “derived from charity, which according to the teaching of Jesus is the synthesis of the entire Law (cf. Mt 22:36-40)”. This means acknowledging that “love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world”. For this reason, charity finds expression not only in close and intimate relationships but also in “macro-relationships: social, economic and political”.
182. This political charity is born of a social awareness that transcends every individualistic mindset: “‘Social charity makes us love the common good’, it makes us effectively seek the good of all people, considered not only as individuals or private persons, but also in the social dimension that unites them”. Each of us is fully a person when we are part of a people; at the same time, there are no peoples without respect for the individuality of each person. “People” and “person” are correlative terms. Nonetheless, there are attempts nowadays to reduce persons to isolated individuals easily manipulated by powers pursuing spurious interests. Good politics will seek ways of building communities at every level of social life, in order to recalibrate and reorient globalization and thus avoid its disruptive effects.
Effective love
183. “Social love” makes it possible to advance towards a civilization of love, to which all of us can feel called. Charity, with its impulse to universality, is capable of building a new world. No mere sentiment, it is the best means of discovering effective paths of development for everyone. Social love is a “force capable of inspiring new ways of approaching the problems of today’s world, of profoundly renewing structures, social organizations and legal systems from within”.
If you need something to draw your attention away from the election results, why not read the whole thing?
Image: Adobe Stock. By vesperstock.
Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. He and Jeannie Gaffigan co-host Field Hospital, a U.S. Catholic podcast.
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