Politics are Hot Buttons, Indeed! (A Basic Catholic Principle for Electing Officials)

Whether you are red or blue or in between, I like to share what Dr. David Anders from EWTN said that, for me, succinctly articulated my political philosophy in the hope it may help enlighten those of what as a Catholic should decide, even for a little bit.

 

"The CHURCH has maintained always that no ideology, whether conservative, liberal, capitalist, socialist-- no political ideology is adequate to really capture the essence of the human person or of human flourishing, because people are transcendent beings, body and soul, made in God’s likeness and image and we have a transcendent destiny, and so there’s no material construction of civil society that is adequate to man’s transcendent end.

There are however some basic natural law principles, things that we can know naturally about human flourishing that have to be respected in any civil society. And one of them, Pope Leo XIII made this point very plainly in 'Rerum Novarum'--the first of the social encyclicals--is the right to private property, the right to marriage, its duties and privileges, man-woman-child as the foundational cell of civil society, the right to life, the principle of subsidiarity that we ought not to construct these superstructures over the state that govern every aspect of our lives but that society ought to be thick with mediating institutions, voluntary societies, churches, families, baseball clubs, etc. and you only bring in these massive superstructures to deal with those things that absolutely can’t be dealt with at the local level, you kind of need the federal government to lay down interstate highways and armed forces to protect the country, they don’t need to be down there micromanaging everybody’s life. All these things are principles of Catholic moral theology and political theology. 

And so some of the more radical visions of social reforms out there seem to me to run roughshod over some of those principles and I would be deeply uncomfortable with them." - Dr. Dave Anders, Called to Communion.

"Citizens have co-responsibility for society. The moral theology tradition teaches that one may not vote for an enemy of religion or of freedom except to exclude a worse enemy of religion or of freedom."

I also like to echo the phrase what again Fr. Ed Meeks beautifully exhorted in one of the masses he celebrated popularly captured on video. And that is we need to "think with the Church."

Jesus left us the Church for a reason (Matt. 16:18) and it is in her that we find the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim. 3:15).