Public activism must become more focused on common good, speaker says

Published: 2007-11-01

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Catholics involved in the public square must above all follow the principles of the common good, though that's a countercultural approach in both politics and contemporary American life, said the chairman of the department of politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington. Speaking Oct. 30 to a gathering of the group Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Stephen Schneck, who also heads the university's Life Cycle Institute, a public policy research program, outlined a five-step agenda for bringing a "common good agenda" to American public policy. "The foundation for Catholic thinking about politics, governance and policy is the idea of the common good," Schneck said. But that's "a hard notion for contemporary Americans to understand." And the momentum in American politics "is one accelerating (away) from anything like the common good," he said. "Let's remember that ours is a politics where citizens are encouraged -- after a terrorist attack -- to go shopping."

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