America Needs to Want a Catholic Politics

Michie

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Catholics need to offer something simple, radical and real — and something that can transform hearts and change what Americans want.


“Does America need a Catholic politics?”

Or, in other words, does our broken political landscape, divided between two rival emphases of the same liberal individualism, need the healing balm of communal solidarity and personal dignity offered by the Church’s social application of the teachings of Jesus Christ?

That was ostensibly the topic question at an Oct. 13 panel discussion hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.

But the answer to this query seems to be so obviously “yes!” that the participants — which included New York Times columnist Ross Douthat as moderator, and The Lamp’s Matthew Walther and Commonweal’s Paul Baumann as discussants — instead spent the hour and half focusing on a far more difficult pair of questions:

Continued below.
America Needs to Want a Catholic Politics
 

chevyontheriver

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Catholics need to offer something simple, radical and real — and something that can transform hearts and change what Americans want.


“Does America need a Catholic politics?”

Or, in other words, does our broken political landscape, divided between two rival emphases of the same liberal individualism, need the healing balm of communal solidarity and personal dignity offered by the Church’s social application of the teachings of Jesus Christ?

That was ostensibly the topic question at an Oct. 13 panel discussion hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.

But the answer to this query seems to be so obviously “yes!” that the participants — which included New York Times columnist Ross Douthat as moderator, and The Lamp’s Matthew Walther and Commonweal’s Paul Baumann as discussants — instead spent the hour and half focusing on a far more difficult pair of questions:

Continued below.
America Needs to Want a Catholic Politics
We COULD HAVE a Catholic politics if we didn't love being Democrats and Republicans so much. But being in LUV we make compromises we shouldn't. We blind ourselves to things we should not accept.

The American Solidarity Party doesn't seem at all ready to take off. I'm not sure it's even ready to taxi to the runway. It's more like they are still assembling the plane. But it's Christian Democratic Party ancestry is part Catholic and part conservative Protestant. OK. Mostly Catholic, but not enough that it should scare off thinking evangelicals.
 
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