Ross’s latest column discusses the ways in which Catholic social teaching challenges our usual partisan alliances:

… Catholics are obliged to take seriously the underlying provocation of the papal message — namely, that our present political alignments are not the only ones imaginable, and that truth may not be served by perfect ideological conformity.

So should all people of good will. For liberals and conservatives alike, “Caritas in Veritate” is an invitation to think anew about their alliances and litmus tests.

Why should being pro-environment preclude being pro-life? Why can’t Republicans worry about economic inequality, and Democrats consider devolving more power to localities and states? Does opposing the Iraq war mean that you have to endorse an anything-goes approach to bioethics? Does supporting free trade require supporting the death penalty?

These questions, and many others like them, are the kind that a healthy political system would allow voters and politicians to explore.

But for now, at least, you’re more likely to find them being raised in Benedict XVI’s Vatican than in Barack Obama’s Washington.

Indeed so; and the urgent need for this kind of reconsideration is made all the more evident when one recognizes that political platforms are determined, not by anything like coherent schools of political or social thought, by but rather by the need to pander to voters and – even more crucially – to serve the varying and often incoherent agendas put forward by the interest groups that provide the core of their support. With precious few exceptions, political “philosophies” are created only post hoc, and are carefully constructed so as to line up neatly with partisan agendas; hence we end up with words like “liberal” and “conservative” and “progressive”, in whose ordinary usage the appearance of consistency and intellectual substance obscures the fact that they actually function in very much the same way as “Yankee fan” or “Raider Nation”. What Ross calls the “underlying provocation” of Caritas in Veritate is every bit as important as its explicit themes, since it’s only by bringing ourselves to align ourselves on moral and political issues along lines other than those drawn by our dominant political parties that our broken political system can be healed.

     Filed under: politics, religion