Common Good Blog

Pope Benedict XVI’s first papal visit to the U.S has brought an inevitable jockeying to claim the pope’s words as endorsement for partisan agendas during a divisive election year. But the pope and the billion-member church he leads do not fit easily into tidy ideological boxes. Above all, Benedict is a moral leader who brings a transcendent message of hope to a nation often paralyzed by a culture of fear.

Forty years ago today one of the great voices for human dignity was silenced by an assassin’s bullet. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis in support of striking sanitation workers demanding better wages and union representation. A leader of soaring eloquence and historic importance, King had met with presidents, traveled the globe as a hero of nonviolent resistance and at age 35 was the youngest person awarded the Nobel Prize. But in his final hours King was still in the streets walking the long road to justice with men who struggled to earn a living collecting garbage.

This is a first in a series of blog posts on the upcoming papal visit.

My thoughts on the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United States have to do with the common good -- a central concept in Catholic social thought that is nearly incomprehensible to most people in the United States. Americans surely know what liberty and equality mean, but they are largely in the dark concerning the fraternity and solidarity required for building a common good culture. Pope Benedict can help inspire a revitalized commitment to the common good that is urgently needed if we are going to move closer to economic justice in American society.

Originally posted God's Politics as part of their "The Cost of War Series."

Five years after bombs first exploded over Baghdad with a "shock and awe" display of staggering military might, the Iraq war continues with tragic costs and still-unseen consequences.

First, we mourn and honor the American and Iraqi dead whose lost lives are the ultimate reminder of war's cruelty. These many thousands gone are not statistics. Fathers, mothers, husbands, and sisters will never come home again. Children will grow up without parents. Grief etched on the human heart does not fade like today's headlines.

The White House has reported that President Bush vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from waterboarding suspected terrorists because it would “take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.” The president said, “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe."

Originally posted as part of a discussion at TPMCafe.

Ideology and political expediency have trumped the Gospel’s prophetic call to justice and peace for those who have recently dominated the debate over faith and politics in America. But a narrow interpretation of faith in the public square is at odds with our nation’s great religious movements.

The Catholic social tradition in particular offers an unequivocal critique of policies advanced by leading neoconservatives on the religious right who have trumpeted the Iraq war and a holy trinity of tax cuts, unregulated free markets and a Darwinian brand of corporate capitalism that has been devastating to the poor and most vulnerable among us.

President Bush made no reference in his State of the Union message to the tens of thousands of injured veterans or to the more than 5500 Americans who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (including both military and private contractors). But even more profound than these losses are the hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women who have suffered permanent scars to their mental health and damage to their home lives. Desertions have risen significantly over each of the past four years, as one measure of the despair felt by US forces and their families. More than 100 soldiers have been accused of murder here in the US after returning from the carnage of the Middle East, and new data shows that military suicides have reached record highs.

While Catholic opposition to physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is often mentioned in the same breath as abortion and grounded in an appeal to the sacredness of human life, there is a strong but often-neglected argument against the legalization of PAS that also relies on other key principles of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly its emphasis on social justice and the common good.

Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) is calling upon the presidential candidates and elected officials to engage in a more productive discussion of citizenship and immigrant integration. In fiscal year 2007, 1.4 million persons applied for U.S. citizenship, double the number from 2006. This remarkable increase, combined with the massive demand for English-as-a-Second-Language classes, belie the claims of anti-immigrant groups that U.S. immigrants do not want to integrate in the United States. Unfortunately, processing times for naturalization applications have soared to 18 months. As a result, many lawful immigrants who filed for citizenship last year will not be naturalized in time to vote in the 2008 presidential elections.

As President Bush prepares to give his final State of the Union address Monday, prominent Catholic and evangelical leaders challenged the president to use the next year working to salvage his moral legacy on war, torture, poverty and global climate change.

In a media briefing organized by Faith in Public Life and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Fr. Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA; Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action; Rev. David Gushee, president of Evangelicals for Human Rights; Sister Anne Curtis, Leadership Team, Institute for the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas and Rev. Paul de Vries, board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, urged Bush to close the glaring divide between his “compassionate conservative” rhetoric and the reality of public policies that have left behind the poor and most vulnerable.