The election is over as this is being written. President Trump is soon to be Former President Trump, having pretty much exhausted his legal recourse. Which is not to say he has conceded.
I do not wish to write a political reflection as that is beyond my pay scale. But I thought it timely to review an issue that was raised during the election, and that is the contradiction in Joe Biden’s Catholicism. On the one hand he is fervent and public and a believable practitioner of his faith. On the other hand, he is clearly a pro-choice politician. He is seen as decent and as empathic, and it is predicted that he will repair some of the great harms that have been done during the previous administration, in the areas of immigration, race relations, climate change, and others. Many evangelical Protestant and Catholic believers focused on his pro-choice and his social justice stands, however, and branded him as a heretic and a socialist. There are notable You Tube videos of Catholic pastors railing against the notion of any Catholic voting for him. More than one Bishop supported such pronouncements.
So with this piece today, I just want to highlight some writings about a topic that we do not necessarily hear a lot about, and that is the Common Good, and especially the Catholic Church teaching on the Common Good. Are those righteous pastors correct in their interpretation of church teaching?
U.S. Catholics weigh in with mixed reaction on Biden win NCR Nov 9, 2020:
“The day after the results were announced, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, congratulated Biden on the win.
"We thank God for the blessings of liberty. The American people have spoken in this election," Archbishop Gomez said. "Now is the time for our leaders to come together in a spirit of national unity and to commit themselves to dialogue and compromise for the common good." (Italics added.) ...........
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago said that "as we now have the results of the election, it is good to remember that our strength in America lies in our unity."
"We commend all who had the courage to compete in the electoral process and participate in our democracy," the cardinal said. "We pray that the Lord will enlighten and sustain those elected in their service to all the people of our country.
"Let us also ask God to free our hearts of regrets and resentments, of pride and contemptuousness. Particularly in this time of pandemic, we must set aside whatever partisan concerns have divided us and turn our energy and passion to serving the common good."(Italics added.)”
So what is the Common Good? It turns out that it is not an American invention. If anything, Americans are individualists by ethos, and that may be a big part of the reason why they are in such turmoil right now.
Here is some background on Common Good in Catholic moral teaching.
Jared Dees in The Religion Teacher. Apr 2017
"At the foundation of Catholic Social Teaching is the concept of the “common good.”
Here is a definition drawn from Pope St. John XXIII and quoted in the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes: the common good is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”
By common we mean all people. To pursue the common good is to work towards the greatest good for all persons, not the greatest good for the greatest number and certainly not the greatest good for only a specific group of people. There is a difference between the good for a majority of people and the good for all people."
David Cloutier | Aug 19, 2013 | From the Field |
“The notion of “the common good” may be the most familiar concept of Catholic social teaching. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church* cites it as the first principle of CST, and as something “to which every aspect of social life must be related” (164), and as the “primary goal” of society (165). It may also be one that is subject to the most misunderstandings. ....
Thus, “the common good” while not the ultimate good, is nevertheless the central aim of our social lives, as affirmed by Gaudium et Spes (#75). We do not exist for ourselves. Pursuing our own private goods, while it may have some positive spillovers, eventually degenerates into an order where only the strong survive, where only those who “play to win” can “make it,” and where every shared enterprise is merely a vehicle for my own personal advancement. In many ways, all our social problems can be seen in the light of our temptation to believe in this awful myth of “survival of the fittest.”
*published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the request of Pope John Paul II.
So here is an argument applying the Common Good principle to the election of Joe Biden:
Michael Sean Winters: US bishops need to recalibrate their stance toward the culture NCR, Nov 13, 2020.
“As the bishops prepare to welcome a new administration in Washington, they need to be guided by that concern for the common good and abandon the culture-warrior approach that has plagued their public posture for too long.
President-elect Joe Biden is now the most prominent Catholic in the country. He speaks powerfully about how important his faith is to him, usually in the context of the monstrous suffering he endured, losing his wife and daughter in a car accident, and then his adult son to brain cancer. He also ran a campaign that highlighted some of the pillars of Catholic social teaching — human dignity, the common good, solidarity — and he did so explicitly. He is not coming at the bishops looking for a fight.
Yes, from a Catholic perspective, the president-elect is grievously wrong in his support for liberal abortion laws. We Catholics are rightly horrified whenever any group of people, no matter how powerless, is denied legal protection. The taking of innocent human life is wrong no matter the circumstance. But how a politician approaches the issue of abortion is not the only thing to know about them.
Biden is a man of decency who is wrong, not an indecent man, and if the bishops welcome his presidency in the same nasty, combative way they welcomed that of President Barack Obama, they will live to regret it. They need to abandon the zero-sum, legalistic approach they have followed in recent years ..........
They should look to lower the temperature in the culture wars and reach some accommodations with the Biden administration on the issues where they disagree with the president and work together on the many, many issues about which a Democratic administration is much closer to the teachings of the church than the outgoing administration was, starting with immigration and climate change policy.”
I leave you to weigh that up.
In the meantime, a Common Good issue has arisen very recently in the matter of Covid-19 vaccines that are being developed. The moral issue raised is that the vaccines were developed using cell lines that date back to the 1960s and 1970s in which tissue was taken from aborted babies. Some of the same anti-Biden voices are arguing that Catholics therefore cannot use these vaccines. Here is one response to that argument:
Use of Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 vaccines is morally acceptable, say bishops. NCR Nov25, 2020
“Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine, and Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, addressed the issue in a memo to their brother bishops.
A copy of the memo was obtained by Catholic News Service Nov. 24.
"Neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine involved the use of cell lines that originated in fetal tissue taken from the body of an aborted baby at any level of design, development or production," the two prelates said. "They are not completely free from any connection to abortion, however, as both Pfizer and Moderna made use of a tainted cell line for one of the confirmatory lab tests of their products.
"There is thus a connection, but it is relatively remote," they continued. "Some are asserting that if a vaccine is connected in any way with tainted cell lines, then it is immoral to be vaccinated with them. This is an inaccurate portrayal of Catholic moral teaching." .........
For Dr. Robert Tiballi, an infectious disease specialist in Chicago and a member of the Catholic Medical Association, this indirect use raises an ethical issue for Catholics.
"The fetal cell lines were not directly used in the Moderna vaccine, but they were indirectly used several steps away from the actual development of the vaccine," he told "Currents News" in a separate interview.
Any such cell lines were derived from tissue samples taken from fetuses aborted in the 1960s and 1970s and have been grown in laboratories all over the world since then.
In its 2005 study, the Pontifical Academy for Life said Catholics have a responsibility to push for the creation of morally just, alternative vaccines, but it also said they should not sacrifice the common good of public health because there is no substitute.
"Catholics can have confidence if there is a great need and there are no alternatives, they are not forbidden from using these new vaccines," Brehany told "Current News," but he added: "There is much the church calls us to do in seeking out alternatives and advocating for alternatives."
I will leave it there. I trust the voices I have cited here. There are many others arguing in different directions. It can get confusing for sure. Watch out for hidden agendas in what you read, and be sure to stay grounded in church teaching.
