On Wednesday 2 November 2011, I attended the annual Tobin lecture held at All Saints Parish in Portland, OR.  The guest speaker was John Carr, the Executive Director of the Office for Peace, Justice, and Human Development.  He spoke on Faith and Politics.

Carr divided his talk into five segments:

1. What the Catholic Church’s mission is,
2. Our Current Context
3. What Catholic Bring to Public Life
4. Message
5. Directions and dangers

I will not take the time to summarize each of these sections.  Rather, I will reflect on what I saw as the most important contribution Carr made to discussions of Faith and Politics.  He notes that the Catholic mission is stated most clearly in Luke 4:

Good news to the poor,

Liberty to captives

New sight to the blind

Set the downtrodden free

This mission is truly Catholic and beyond partisanship.  It means that we, as Catholics must bring to bear into the public debate a concern for the most deprived in our society.  We bring about this concern through our assets: a consistent moral framework, another way of looking at the world that combined human life AND dignity, solidarity AND subsidiarity, and our focus on everyday experience.  Our mission and our work is about individual people — it goes beyond voting cycles to what we do in between those cycles.  Fundamentally, our task as Church and as members of the Church is to form the conscience of individual people with a moral vision that helps them live a virtuous and political life.  For, in the final analysis, our counter-cultural activity to bring about a culture of life out of this culture of death is to participate in politics.

I found Carr’s message inspiring and correct.  The way he framed the issues he spoke about proved to highlight key features of what we, as Catholics, are called to do in light of our faith.  As a Thomist, his words about politics ring true, but the radical nature of those words did not come out in the talk.  For what is radical about engaging in politics is that we say no to voting and to elections, and yes to participation in the formation of the common good.  We form consciences by engaging in that politics and shaping the common good.  As Catholics, we are called to live in the world and to participate in the common good, which is much different than voting in elections in the United States between pre-determined candidates who differ very little between each other.  Both democrats and republicans embrace an individualism that contradicts the deepest nature of our faith.

Individualism is not good news to the poor, not liberty to captives.

It is not new sight for the blind.

Nor does it set the downtrodden free.