At the heart of the teaching on Faithful Citizenship is a document issued (revised) every four years by the U.S. Bishops.  The timing is no accident, since that is how often national elections in our country take place.  The purpose of this teaching is to better enable Catholics of good will to take their proper place in the political system in our nation, specifically as Catholics.  In essence, this means letting the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church inform one’s values and thoughts, thus leading to choices (i.e., votes) that are consistent with Catholic teaching.

            In their 1998 statement, “Sharing Catholic Social Teaching”, the US Bishops stated that “Catholic social teaching is a central and essential element of our faith.”  They spoke of this body of teaching as emerging from the truth of what God has revealed of himself to us.  This teaching is  based on and inseparable from our understanding of human life and human dignity, and must be rooted in our spiritual lives.  It is a teaching founded on the life and words of Jesus Christ, who came "to bring glad tidings to the poor . . . liberty to captives . . . recovery of sight to the blind" (Lk 4:18-19).  In other words, for Catholics, the embrace of Catholic social teaching is a necessity, not a luxury.

            By its very nature, this rich body of justice teaching involves elements that are frustrating to some.  Like all authentic Catholic teaching, the tenets of social justice teaching exist in a hierarchy of truths, with some values and realities being more fundamental and important than others.  More to the point, each of the values and principles of social justice must be applied to the lived reality of human life in the midst of a variety of nations, communities and situations.  It is here, in the concrete applications, that Catholics with the best of intentions will sometimes disagree even while upholding the fundamental principles.  (E.g., two persons committed to a just wage may disagree on what that just wage amount might be.)

            While the church’s justice teaching is addressed to a worldwide audience, our focus in these articles will be on applying these truths to the situation here in the United States.  Several obstacles to making gospel truth a reality in our nation should probably be mentioned.

The first is that our nation has a long history of anti-Catholicism, what one author recently called “the last acceptable prejudice”.  Even today, in the current atmosphere of “political correctness”, individuals and institutions ridicule and mock Catholic symbols, values and practices with impunity, in ways that would be unacceptable toward any other group in our society.

Secondly, it must be stated that the United States is not and never has been a Christian nation in the sense that Italy was once a “Catholic” nation.  (Given the toxic nature of mixing political power with religious authority, this may not be such a bad thing.)  While some fundamental Christian principles underlie the foundations of our country, we remain a nation where no religion may be given favored status, and where pluralism of religious belief (or the absence thereof) is the rule.  As long as the terminally ill may be euthanized, and the unborn slaughtered at will in the womb, we are not a nation “under God”.

            A third obstacle to the effective preaching of justice in our nation is perhaps more difficult to both perceive and overcome because it is a fault intertwined with one of our society’s greatest strengths.  Our nation has always been at the forefront of advocating for individual rights (e.g., the Bill of Rights).  We continue to hold dear those fundamental human rights as the bedrock of our national character.  Alongside this virtuous commitment is to be found its dark side:  a rampant individualism which ignores the importance of community and appears willing to sacrifice all to the whims and fancy of the individual.  This self-centered exaltation of the individual is reflected today in a moral relativism which denies the existence of any abiding truth, as well as in the priority of special interest groups over the well-being of any and all others, especially over the needs of the poor.

            Contrary to this, the social justice teaching of the Church demands responsibility as a necessary companion to individual rights and a concern for how the structures of society affect the most vulnerable in our midst.  IFor this reason and for others, the justice teaching of the Church both affirms and confronts distinct elements of the national character and ethos of our nation.