WSJ | OPINION
The faithful need a framework that rejects secularism and sectarianism alike.
By: Andrea Picciotti-Bayer
How should American Catholics think about their faith and public life? Take abortion. Two of the nation’s most prominent Catholic politicians, President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have unequivocally abandoned the church’s teaching on the dignity of human life from conception onward. Meanwhile, despite the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a group of Catholic hard-liners in the academy and media have written off American institutions as hopelessly compromised and demand that all public life be radically reoriented along strictly Catholic lines.
Neither offering is distinctly Catholic, yet both are given national airing. What are ordinary Catholics to do?
Though Catholicism has never been a political system, the faithful have always existed in the political sphere. The Catholic tradition thus includes a deep vein of thinking about political institutions and practices, from early thinkers such as St. Augustine (354-430) to medieval ones such as St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), whose work incorporated Aristotelian political philosophy into Christian thought. This intellectual tradition continued to develop into early modernity and was rekindled by the Thomistic revival of Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) and the development of modern Catholic social teaching.
