Common good gets boost from Catholic gathering

By Tom Roberts - National Catholic Reporter
Thursday, July 17, 2008 - Web Link
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July 17, 2008

The concept of the common good, an idea that winds through time from Plato to Aquinas, to the U.S. Founding Fathers and, on the way, through a number of popes, got a boost in Philadelphia July 11-13 when a crowd of more than 800, mostly Catholics, showed up to affirm a political platform based on the idea.

The Convention for the Common Good was a project of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a group that describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization formed to promote awareness of Catholic social teaching, and Network, a national Catholic social justice organization, and co-hosted by some 16 other Catholic groups, religious orders and institutions.

“What we’re trying to do is expand the debate about what faith can be in the political arena,” said John Gehring, senior writer for Catholics in Alliance. “The religious right has had a monopoly on the debate for too long. We’re seeing a change now not just in the Catholic world but among evangelicals.”

The alliance has worked to expand the notion of pro-life, said Gehring, so that in addition to “protecting innocent life in the womb,” it is also about “caring for the poor, about the silent genocide of poverty” and about opposing the death penalty and war.

Through the course of the weekend, participants discussed five areas of a platform that was affirmed on the final day of the gathering and that will be advanced to the two major parties for consideration.

(A fuller story on the convention and the development of Catholic political groups during the past four years will appear in the Aug 8 edition of NCR.)

In an opening speech to the convention, theologian M. Shawn Copeland of Boston College appeared to pull the conversation from the theoretical to the here and now. The common good, she said, “is human achievement: It is us right here, right now making ourselves who we are and who we might become, first and foremost, as authentic human persons, as people of faith, as citizens of the United States.”