By Fr. Bill McCormick, SJ
When John F. Kennedy was elected U.S. president in 1960, many American Catholics believed they had finally made it. As Will Herberg wrote in the same period, “American Catholicism has successfully negotiated the transition from a foreign church to an American religious community. It is now part of the American way of life.”
Fast forward to 2024, and it seems we may have been too successful at that transition. Catholics are on every “side” of every issue and are divided between the two major political parties. They are also well represented among those disaffected by politics. Catholics are now fully assimilated, with seemingly little to differentiate ourselves from other Americans. While once the question was, “How can Catholics be American,” now it is, “How can Americans be Catholic?”
Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States. a document released in 2007 as a guide for Catholics, proposes that Catholics have something distinctive to say about political life. The bishops believe that consciences matter but must be formed. Citizens should be faithful, but their faith should be directed to something higher than politics. In this way, Catholics can exercise their political responsibilities in ways that benefit all of American society and the world.
Giving an Account of Hope
Any reading of Faithful Citizenship must account for its accent on hope. Pope Francis speaks of hope extensively in Laudato si’, his encyclical letter on care for our common home. The Holy Father, while acknowledging the difficulty of the task ahead and the sheer magnitude of human failure, reminds us that, “Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good and making a new start, despite their mental and social conditioning.”
To the many who feel trapped by colossal political, social and economic structures, Pope Francis says, “No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful, or our God-given ability to respond to his grace at work deep in our hearts.”
Faithful Citizenship operates out of such hope. Without denying the reality of fear, anger, anxiety and demonization, the bishops urge that, “The teachings of the Church … offer a vision of hope, where justice and mercy abound, because God is the infinite source of all goodness and love. With this wisdom and hope, we can find a way to bend down as the Good Samaritan did, through the fear and divisions, to touch and heal the wounds.”
Part I of Faithful Citizenship focuses on four guiding questions:
(1) Why does the Church teach about issues affecting public policy?
(2) Who in the Church should participate in political life?
(3) How does the Church help the Catholic faithful to speak about political and social questions?
(4) What does the Church say about Catholic social teaching in the public square?
For some Catholics, the fourth question covers well-trod territory, as it shares the principles of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity. The other three issues, therefore, become more urgent for our consideration: why should the Church have anything to say at all about matters of public life? And how can it hope to speak to Catholics across our considerable political and ideological divides?
An answer to this question begins with Gaudium et spes: “Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”
It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this central fact of our salvation, that it is Christ who reveals fully who we are. The consequences for our life together are considerable. As Faithful Citizenship offers, “Christ’s love for us lets us see our human dignity in full clarity and compels us to love our neighbors as he has loved us.”
Thus, the service of justice is intimately linked to the promotion of the faith, a concept familiar to most in the Ignatian family. This service is further guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and our most ancient political traditions, which protect the rights of both individual citizens and social bodies.
If the Church is drawn to contribute to the common good, then the nature of the Church unsurprisingly will condition how she contributes to it. Part I of Faithful Citizenship offers a critical thesis on this point: “Clergy and lay people have complementary roles in public life.”
Direct participation in politics belongs to the laity. Their task is to propose an alternative to a politics of “powerful interests, partisan attacks, sound bites, and media hype,” one rather “focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good, and the protection of the weak and the vulnerable.” In this way, Gaudium et spes argues, “laymen are not only bound to penetrate the world with a Christian spirit, but are also called to be witnesses to Christ in all things in the midst of human society.”
How does the Church assist the laity in this task? Most obviously, the bishops help to preserve and promote the teaching of the Church on social and political questions. More generally, the Church helps Christians to develop: a well-formed conscience, the virtues, particularly prudence; a commitment and habit to do good and avoid evil, and the ability to navigate moral decision-making. These are no small helps, and yet not often the subject of conversation among Catholics debating politics.
Part II of Faithful Citizenship concerns the policy positions of the Church and places them in their broader moral context. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this section is the interplay between universal Church teaching and the particular context of the United States. This section encourages U.S. Catholics to rely upon rich American traditions in seeking to respond to troubling aspects of American society.
Part III offers some goals and challenges for Catholic political engagement. Importantly, these goals are not highly specific prescriptions, but broad hopes and areas of challenge. The bishops respect the task of the laity to prudently follow their consciences in the ever-changing contingencies of political life.
Ignatian Soundings
There are many resonances between Faithful Citizenship and Ignatian spirituality. That’s because the best of what is Ignatian taps into the universality of Catholicism itself. Ignatian spirituality’s intrinsic connection to the universality of the Church opens its devotees to deeper and more capacious appropriations of Ignatian spirituality, a task of recovery and purification that never ends.
First, the document’s hope-filled vision reminds us of St. Ignatius’ understanding of creation as the vineyard of the Lord. The text’s openness to challenges and opportunities reminds us of the great call of Jesus: the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. For followers of St. Ignatius, we know that Jesus is Lord of the vineyard, and he is calling us to reap the harvest. This vision of hope particularly calls to us in situations in which others have abandoned hope, such as U.S. politics.
Second, the document assumes that we can sentire cum Ecclesia, St. Ignatius’ laconic phrase in the Spiritual Exercises for “to think and feel with the Church.” Our membership in the Church as the baptized faithful means something to our political life.
Saint Ignatius believed wholeheartedly in a hierarchical church, one characterized by a “unity of order,” in the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas. If the Church is truly to be the body of Christ, then each member must play his or her part symphonically with others.
This can be a tough message for Catholics today. How can we act as the Body of Christ when we are so internally divided? Just as the Holy Father has called us to see the Earth as our common home, so, too, must we see the Church as our common home, one toward which we need to cultivate love and a desire to serve.
Third, the complementarity between faith and reason is a foundation of Ignatian spirituality so strong that it rarely finds explicit articulation. Discernment assumes that our faith is deeply reasonable, and we can give an account of hope for it. The wisdom promised by Proverbs and Psalms is precisely the wisdom we seek in knowing the ways of God and His will for us: yes, the way of the Lord is too high for us, but he has also revealed himself in Christ Jesus his Son.
Many members of the Ignatian family would do well to push themselves, to go deeper with the reasonability of faith. What are the ideological blinders that limit our understanding of reality? Where are we attached to false dogmas that serve only to prop up the fruitless status quo?
If we are willing to submit our most cherished idols to rational scrutiny, the teaching of the Church will help us to live out the harmony of faith and reason, and in turn, help us to prepare for the Kingdom that already dwells among us.
Ultimately, the point is to see the truth as a gift that we receive from God and share with others. As Faithful Citizenship has it: “The truth is something we receive, not something we make.”
Finally, the orientation of the document might be compared to the phrases de arriba and en medio in the thought of St. Ignatius, so fruitfully explored by the great Jesuit historian Hugo Rahner. When we recognize that we receive all that is good from on high, de arriba, then we come to see ourselves not as simply in a neutral space, but in between heaven and earth: en medio. We are not only sinners, but loved sinners.
This is a deep tension, even a paradox. Our faith has profound social consequences, but it can never be identified with a political project. Moreover, while God empowers us, He always empowers us not to follow our own will, but God’s, and for the mission He has given us de arriba. This means, of course, that we must be aware of the effects of sin on ourselves and others. To be en medio, then, means to embrace a politics that seeks to ennoble what is best in humans, while being attentive to what is worst. It is hopeful without being naïve, prudent without being Machiavellian, and thereby realist without descending into cynicism.
Responding to the Challenge of Faithful Citizenship
Taking seriously the challenge of Faithful Citizenship requires us to take stock of our lives as human beings, citizens and Christians. That reflection cannot stop after the November elections, however. For that reason, the document calls us to one of St. Ignatius’ favorite virtues: perseverance.
As Fr. Bart Geger, SJ, has suggested, for St. Ignatius, perseverance has a subjective and an objective component: seeking to purify our intentions to serve God’s greater glory, and identifying and cultivating our gifts that allow us to do so fruitfully. Both efforts will be strengthened by our deepening commitment to and understanding of the public dimensions of the Gospel, or the way our faith calls us to act in the public square. Not only will we come to recognize the possibility of alternatives to the division and conflict in our common life, but we also will begin to see our service to humans as part and parcel of our service to God. Ultimately, we hope for our self-sacrifice to our fellow citizens to spring forth from our great suscipe to God: the act of faith, hope and love by which we acknowledge God’s deep love for us and the world, and hope to participate in that love by God’s grace.
Father Bill McCormick, SJ, is a writer based in Rome for La Civiltà Cattolica and a contributing editor at America.