In the years since the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) the Roman Catholic community has emerged as a vigorous global advocate of human rights. The recent social teachings of popes and bishops, as well as the social engagement undertaken by individual Catholics and by Catholic associations, have increasingly been formulated in terms of human rights. Catholic thought and advocacy grounds its appeal to human rights in an affirmation that human dignity is the most basic standard to which all personal behaviour and social institutions are accountable. Pope John XXIII affirmed that the modern Catholic tradition of social thought is controlled ‘by one basic theme – an unshakable affirmation and defence of the dignity and rights of the human person’ (1964: 233). This commitment has led the Catholic community to become a significant force for the promotion of human dignity and human rights in Latin America, former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland, Asian nations like the Philippines and South Korea, and increasingly in African countries. Because of these developments the late Samuel Huntington concluded that the post-Second Vatican Council Catholic church had become one of the strongest worldwide forces for human dignity, human rights and democracy (Huntington 1991).

Shifts in Catholic thought

This is a remarkable development. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholicism was a significant source of opposition to both human rights and democracy. For example, in 1832, Pope Gregory XVI argued against the fundamental right to freedom of conscience, declaring it to be a form of ‘insanity’ (in Latin, deliramentum) (Neuner and Dupuis 1998: No. 1002). Just over a century later, the Second Vatican Council affirmed that ‘the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person, as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself’ (1965a: No. 2). More broadly, the Council committed the Catholic community to support for the full array of human rights by declaring that, ‘by virtue of the gospel committed to it, the Church proclaims the rights of the human person’ (1965b: No. 41).

Introduction

Planets form within circumstellar disks composed of a mixture of gas and dust grains. These disks result from the gravitational collapse of rotating molecular cloud cores. They are initially rather massive and consist of about 0.3 M*, where M* is the mass of the central star (e.g. Yorke et al., 1995). In contrast, the minimum mass required to build the planets of our Solar System is only about 0.01 Solar masses (M⊙). Evidently, there are processes that redistribute the mass, transform the dust to larger particles, and disperse much of the gas and dust.

The processes which are responsible for the dispersal of the gas influence the formation of planets. For example, the timescale for gas dispersal as a function of the disk radius affects the composition of the resulting planetary system. As long as the dust particles are small enough to be tightly coupled to the gas, they follow the gas flow. If the gas is dispersed before the dust particles have had a chance to grow, all the dust will be lost and planetesimals and planets cannot form. Even if there is time for particles to coagulate and build sufficiently large rocky cores that can accrete gas (Pollack et al., 1996; Hubickyj et al., 2004), the formation of gas-giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn will be suppressed if the gas is dispersed before the accretion can occur.

Religious communities have the capacity to contribute to the common good of a free republic. This chapter will explore how this potentiality can be actualized. Specifically, it will address the question of how pursuit of the common good in a pluralistic context should be an integral part of a Christian religious self-understanding. It will explore why Christians should be actively engaged in building up a community of freedom along with those who are not Christian. A Christian religious understanding of the full human good is not only compatible with commitment to the civic good of a free society but calls Christians to civic engagement that builds solidarity in freedom. One does not have to choose between promotion of a strong understanding of the civic good and full commitment to Christian faith. The two are essentially related.

The proposal that Christianity can make genuine contributions to the common good of a free society makes significant demands on both Christians and non-Christians. It cannot be otherwise, for placing conditions only on Christians or only on non-Christians will not lead to a community of mutual freedom and solidarity. The possibility of achieving such a community is a high-stakes affair in the public life of both nation-states and the world as a whole. Past and present religious conflicts provide ample evidence of just how high. Exploring the public role of Christianity from both secular and theological perspectives, therefore, is essential to revitalizing the pursuit of the common good.

The initial stimulus for this book came in the mid-1980s while I was working with the Catholic Bishops of the United States on the drafting of their pastoral letter on justice in the American economy. Both during the drafting of this document and after it had been published in its final form, I had the opportunity to speak often about the issues it discussed. These talks and papers were presented to church audiences, in secular academic settings, and in circles concerned with public policy. The experience of interaction with the audiences in all these settings led me to the conclusion that a central concept being advanced by the bishops' letter – the common good – was nearly incomprehensible to most of the people the bishops sought to address. This experience launched me into an extended period of reflection on what could be done to revitalize the notion of the common good in a way that could speak to both Christian believers and to citizens at large. Thus most of the ideas in this book arose from a cultural lack I experienced first-hand in trying to analyze and advocate an understanding of economic justice in pluralistic American society. Many of my preliminary efforts to clarify the issues were presented in writings listed in the Bibliography.

A second stimulus came from two academic terms spent teaching at Hekima College in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1996 and again in 2000.

Any fruitful contribution by the Christian community to the common good will be one that is faithful to essential Christian religious convictions and also affirms that non-Christians are full members of a civic community of freedom. The discussion of the previous chapter shows that such a Christian contribution is entirely possible from a theological point of view. We now turn to an examination of what realizing this possibility will require more practically. This chapter will explore how Christians should bring their vision of the good life into the public sphere in a spirit of solidarity with their non-Christian fellow citizens. It will also address the question of how non-Christian citizens ought to respond to the presence of religion in the public sphere. The shared good of a community of freedom is incompatible with all forms of domination or exclusion of one group of persons by another, whether on religious or secular grounds. For this reason, an inclusively free community makes demands on both those inside and outside the church. This chapter will suggest what some of those demands are and why we should try to meet them.

A religiously pluralistic community, by definition, does not already share a common vision of the good life. Moving toward such a shared vision, even in outline, will take intellectual work. This common pursuit of a shared vision of the good life can be called intellectual solidarity.

Human beings are dependent on one another not only for the higher achievements of cultural life we have been discussing but also for the necessities of material and economic well-being. For this reason, recovery of an active social commitment to the common good is a critical element in serious efforts to reduce poverty and advance economic justice. Poverty continues to be an entrenched fact of life for many people in Western societies today and it is vastly more widespread globally. Chapter 2 of this book has argued that the poverty of American core cities is a problem that an ethic of tolerance alone cannot handle. This chapter will argue that a revival of commitment to the common good and a deeper sense of solidarity are preconditions for significant improvement of the lives of the poor in large cities of the United States. The focus here will be on how effective efforts to alleviate the plight of the American urban poor call for public commitment to solidarity and the common good. Social allegiance to the common good can tackle poverty in a way that that the prevailing American ethos of individualism and tolerance cannot. The next chapter will extend this analysis to the larger international setting.

Commitment to the common good will not, of course, settle all the policy debates concerning poverty in the United States or elsewhere. But the lodestar of the common good can guide movement along a path toward better lives for the poor.

Over two millennia ago, Aristotle set the challenge this book will address. Aristotle's aim was to discern fitting goals for a good human life. At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics he argued that a human life can be judged good when it is shaped by a relatively consistent pursuit of ends that are themselves good. Thus much of Aristotle's moral reflection was devoted to determining the nature of the good that people should seek. On this basis he wanted to specify what lifestyles can be called genuinely good patterns of living. His entire understanding of morality was built upon this conviction that a good life is one devoted to the pursuit of good purposes or ends.

One of Aristotle's most significant conclusions was that a good life is oriented to goods shared with others – the common good of the larger society of which one is a part. The good life of a single person and the quality of the common life persons share with one another in society are linked. Thus the good of the individual and the common good are inseparable. In fact, the common good of the community should have primacy in setting direction for the lives of individuals, for it is a higher good than the particular goods of private persons. In Aristotle's words,

The prevailing values of tolerance and non-judgmentalism emerged in the social and intellectual history of the modern West as expressions of a developing commitment to the equal dignity of all persons. This commitment is a huge achievement that must not be forgotten or negated. This history, however, has engrained in the modern Western imagination not only a positive commitment to equality but also the suspicion that pursuing stronger notions of shared goods will lead to oppression and violence. It will be argued here that, in the context of several of the major social developments of our time, commitment to equality and pursuit of the common good can become allies rather than adversaries.

Judith Shklar has proposed an interpretation of our inherited social vision that makes explicit its linkage of commitment to equality with suspicion of the dangers of the common good. She calls her interpretation the “liberalism of fear.” It begins from the presupposition that the political pursuit of the summum bonum, however this highest good is defined, is almost guaranteed to lead to cruelty and violence. When people with convictions about what a good society should look like also have the power to act on these convictions, everyone else is in danger. Those who lack the power to define and enforce their own definition of the highest good must be on guard. A liberal democracy seeks to assure the equal dignity of all by protecting the weak against the strong.

The common good was displaced from its preeminent position in the public philosophy of the West by the emergence of serious religious disagreement about the meaning of the good life at the dawn of modernity. Because of this history, recovering the common good as a plausible social aim today requires careful consideration of the role of religious communities in public life. Today in both Europe and the United States religious pluralism is significantly greater than in the past, due to immigration, conversions to non-Western religions, the emergence of new religious movements, and the rise of agnosticism and unbelief. Widespread popular awareness of these religious differences is also higher today than in most of past history. International communication and travel have made Westerners newly conscious of the importance of non-Western religions in the lives of many of the peoples of the world. Because of this heightened awareness of religious diversity, there is considerable apprehension today about the dangers of religious involvement in politics in both popular and more theoretical discussions. These anxieties are based in real events, such as the divisive role played by religion in the conflicts of the Middle East, northern India, the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and numerous other places. Worries about the conflict-prone tendencies of religion are not the result of secularist paranoia. Religious beliefs and loyalties have a marked proclivity to deepen social divisions. They create communal bonds that do not coincide with those linking the citizens of nation-states.