CrossCurrents: #375 The Catholic Platform

This is not about the election. This is about the electorate.

In the last week of the 2012 campaign I offered a parish presentation that distilled my thinking about the connection between US politics and faith. That thinking has been developing since 2007 in a number of CrossCurrents articles and in several parish talks in the United States and France. The result last week was a simplicity and clarity that my listeners found especially helpful. It occurred to me that I should share the basic concept with my readers.

Here it is: US politics typically presents a two-dimensional approach to public issues, polarized between left-and-right, liberal-and-conservative, Democrat-or-Republican. But Catholic Social Teaching offers a three- dimensional approach. This “Catholic Platform” offers a dramatically richer and wiser vision of the future society we should expect than anything we find from our major party platforms. That vision cannot be shoehorned into the conventional US two-dimensional framework. In fact, the Catholic Platform moves simultaneously to the right of the Republicans and to the left of the Democrats. (This also gives the lie to the common popular misconception that the Catholic Church is simply a conservative, backward-looking institution.)

In the light of this Catholic Platform, my own view is that both the Democratic and Republican platforms fail us in two ways. First, on many issues they offer analyses that are wrong-headed and strategies that are simply wrong. Second, on many other important issues (like peace, human rights, and economic and social justice) they say nothing at all.

This situation frustrates me in two ways. First, the Catholic Platform has little impact on US voting, or even on Catholic voters, so it remains mostly just good ideas that fail to change anything. Second, Catholic leaders (especially our bishops) have squandered so much of their moral authority that their attempts to communicate the Catholic Platform fall largely on deaf ears.

Their mismanagement of clerical sex abuse has neutered the potency of the Catholic Platform. Moreover some of them have undermined the Catholic Platform itself by reducing it to a narrow focus on one or two issues—which is only a small portion of its true, broad scope.

The real power of the Catholic Platform—its potential to reshape our politics—depends on both its depth and its breadth. Taken whole, it conveys a clear vision of and American society all of us would envy and most of us would sacrifice for. Taken whole, it could create solidarity not only among Catholics but across a wide spectrum of the American electorate.

But when Bishops and others cherry-pick the parts of the Catholic Platform they find appealing, and neglect or ignore the rest, they polarize the Catholic Community along party lines and weaken the Church’s mission.

The Catholic Platform makes me proud to be Catholic, but our Church’s self-inflicted impotence to communicate the rich wisdom of our tradition saddens me profoundly.

So, for readers who wish to explore the Catholic Platform in more detail, I am offering the selection of CrossCurrents articles below, most of which appear in the archives of this blog. In cases where only excerpts appear, you may obtain the complete article on request by emailing me at bfswain@juno.com. In cases where an article is older than the archives, just ask me for it at bfswain@juno.com. I’ll be happy to send along anything you need by email.

The articles below are listed in reverse chronological order:

#374: What Foreign Policy 10-26-12

#373: Which Catholic Candidate 10-19-12

#371: Manipulating the Catholic Vote 10/3/12

# 83: Freedom’s Façade is Not Enough 9/8/12

#353: Endless War—part I 3/23/12

#352: For God and Country? 3/12/12

#350: Is the Obama Administration Forcing Catholic... 2/9/12

#349: 2/3/12 Expanding the Religious Option

#341: Warfare—or Justice? 9/30/11

#339: Ten Years Later 9/17/11

#295: Scapegoating “Illegals” 06-02-10