{"id":825,"date":"2008-10-17T11:46:20","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T11:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/is-catholic-politico-talk-too-idealistic.html"},"modified":"2008-10-17T11:46:20","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T11:46:20","slug":"is-catholic-politico-talk-too-idealistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/is-catholic-politico-talk-too-idealistic.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Catholic politico-talk too idealistic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s my first question for you guys to discuss. Let me try to unpack the probably poorly-articulated question.
\nI don’t mean, “Is it too unrealistically oriented toward a greater good that can never be achieved?”\u00a0 No. I mean – is Catholic politico-talk, particularly in the present moment, as most of us are engaging in it, taking place essentially on the level of vague assertions, associations and concepts? And – are we avoiding and ignoring the way that government and political processes actually work? <\/em>
\nIn my mind, at least two aspects of this stick out:
\n1. Voting:
\nOne of the smartest Catholic political-blogging bloggers out there is Erin Manning of Red Cardigan. <\/a>Anyone who’s not discovered her – I encourage you to go read. However, one of the pithiest, most intelligent statements on her blog in the past few months wasn’t actually written by Erin, but by a commenter on this post,<\/a> who wrote:<\/p>\n

“We need to realize that politics is a practical science – oriented toward result. A vote is a vote for the RESULT, not any particular candidate.<\/em>
\nFor instance, it would be a completely moral action for me to vote for Hillary in a primary if she’s a weaker candidate in the general election, in order for a RESULT, which is, that that the ethically superior candidate might win. A vote is not your stamp of approval for any one person. It is not a marriage, or a contract, or a vow to a particular individual. It is a tool for a result.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that much of what I’m reading out there comes from a completely different perspective: that my vote for a presidential candidate signifies that I belief this candidate to be a perfect embodiment of the finest humanity has to offer as well as an individual who embodies every value which I hold dear.\u00a0 Much sturm und drang, <\/em>gnashing of teeth and rending of garments results. It’s one thing to agonize because you are torn between two candidates whose victories might result in positive or negative consequences of proportionate value, or because your vote might (realistically) contribute to a particular moral or immoral result, but to treat this as if we’re voting on a canonization case, your vote on which somehow shows the world something about you<\/em> is silly.
\n2. Government and civic life.
\nCan we read St. Augustine, please? City of God and City of Man and all that?
\nIt seems to me that some of our conversations about political life in Catholic circles ask far more from government than it is able to give (I’ll touch on this more in a later post, as well – probably several. It is a core issue, I think.), not only because of the proper scope of government but because of the limitations and VAGARIES of political, social and economic life.\u00a0 I do think conversations about health care are a perfect example of this, but I do want to do a separate post on this, so you might want to save your specifics for later.
\nI don’t want to suggest cynicism or hopelessness. I’m also not definitely suggesting that the law, for example, is useless or pointless in shaping our lives and choices. That’s just silly. I’m just sort of groping for a way towards a more realistic engagement between the way politics and government actually works and the way that we talk about it as Catholics, citizens of both Cities, at the moment.
\nUpdate: <\/span>
\nAll the comments so far have been good, but I want to highlight Liam’s, which says what I was trying to say far more knowledgeably:<\/p>\n

The problem is that much Church teaching still indirectly assumes the idea of the single-willed sovereign in the political organism. And that notion simply doesn\u2019t obtain in modern representative democracy with a panoply of checks and balances that are precisely designed to frustrate the application of any single will to political effectiveness. Someday, the Church may catch up on this, but it has only done so at the surface and at the level of very general goals.
\nOne thing that may have to evolve is our understanding of the conditions for grave sin. We have a long-standing teaching about consent that still implies a single actor capable of having sufficient knowledge. In representative government, there are many actors, partial knowledge, and consent cannot necessarily be presumed to omissions because the array of consequences of omissions are too numerous to take into account. I do wonder if there are any serious moral theologians out there who are considering this aspect of the problem.
\nFinally, one always has the classic Catholic problem of moralism\/ethicalism vs sanctification\/theosis: that is, the tendency (dating to the time of Jesus own preaching, as testified in the Gospels) to settle for avoiding vice\/cultivating virtue instead of the much riskier proposition of making room for God in our souls the way God wants for us, which often does not neatly align with a vices\/virtue checklist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s my first question for you guys to discuss. Let me try to unpack the probably poorly-articulated question. I don’t mean, “Is it too unrealistically oriented toward a greater good that can never be achieved?”\u00a0 No. I mean – is Catholic politico-talk, particularly in the present moment, as most of us are engaging in it,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Catholic politico-talk too idealistic? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/is-catholic-politico-talk-too-idealistic.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Catholic politico-talk too idealistic? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here’s my first question for you guys to discuss. Let me try to unpack the probably poorly-articulated question. 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Let me try to unpack the probably poorly-articulated question. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}