On behalf of all of us here at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, I wish you and yours a very happy new year.
Here at CACG, we hope it will be a happy year but we are sure it will be a busy year. Never before in our memory has there been such a well-funded and broad-based attack on policies that we believe reflect traditional Catholic Social Teaching and especially the Church’s belief that a principal objective of government is to work for the common good.
The Tea Party is organized and powerful and they seem hell bent on overturning many of the social programs we hold dear. They espouse an economic theory rooted in the writing of profoundly anti-Christian economists such as Hayek and von Mises and Ayn Rand. They deny that government has a role in promoting justice. They want to rollback government regulations that protect the environment from industrial pollution. They want to privatize Medicare and Social Security. They worship the false idol of the market at all costs, denying what is obvious in decades of Catholic Social Teaching: All human activities, including economic activities, are subject to the most rigorous moral analysis. All government policies, all economic policies, all foreign policies, must face the strict scrutiny of the question: Does a given policy advance the common good of our society?
We are determined to do our best to beat back this Social Darwinism in the coming year, when the media and the political parties will be focused like a laser beam on Catholic swing voters in key swing states. To get our message out, we will continue to run weekly articles in our Common Good Forum. Already, we have seen the influence of our articles as Tea Party members of Congress have been called out for espousing anti-Christian views.
But, we are also starting some new initiatives that we hope will call attention to our concerns and I want to share some of these plans with you.
This month, we are launching our “Future Leaders” project. We hope to recruit young people – and we take a small “c” catholic approach to the definition of “young” – who will use their own social networks to help us get out our message, network with other progressive groups, and ensure that young people are informed about the issues that matter to them. To start the project, the next few weeks, the Common Good Forum will feature articles by some of the “future leaders” who have already signed up to help us.
In February, we will be releasing our Voter Guide. This will be available on-line and we also plan to print a shortened version of the Voter Guide in brochure format for distribution across the country. It will be available in both English and Spanish. The Voter Guide is rooted in traditional Catholic Social Teaching and will provide all of our members with valuable talking points as we try to promote voting that supports those candidates who support Common Good policies.
In March, we will release our “Speaker’s Bureau,” experts in Catholic Social Teaching who will be available to the media and others to address how the different candidates do, and do not, endorse policies that promote the common good.
Over the summer, we hope to be able to hire some field staffers to work in key states like Florida and Ohio, educating Catholic voters, making sure that neither party distorts Catholic Social Teaching for its own ends, and making sure our Catholic voters, especially young people, are registered and informed.
In short, it is going to be a busy year. I want to thank everyone who donated their time or treasure to us in the year just past. Your donations help keep CACG going. I ask you to consider making a further donation this year. Voter Guides are not cheap to print. Field workers need to be paid a salary. We want to be able to bring our “future leaders” together every few months to discuss their work, especially on college campuses.
We are so blessed to live in a country where our future is in our own hands. But, as we saw in 2010, if Catholics committed to the common good sit on their hands, those who seek to eradicate our nation’s commitment to the common good will prosper and the programs and policies we hold dear will be in jeopardy. America can’t afford another election like 2010. Get involved today. Help us at CACG to make sure 2012 is a prosperous year for all of us, and for the whole country.
Fred Rotondaro
Chairman, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good
