The first task was far more important, of course, than the second, which depends on firm religious grounds. But modern Catholic social principles such as solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good, and Catholicism’s rich view of the human person, might save a wobbling political order from its own self-destructiveness. Indeed, Neuhaus claimed that non-believers could not really be good citizens because they cannot give a coherent account of our freedoms and why governments should respect them.
In 1990, our late friend Fr. Richard John Neuhaus published The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. His central thesis – surprising in someone then still a Lutheran pastor – was that given the apostasy of mainline Protestantism, the intellectual poverty of evangelicalism, and the sheer inadequacy of secularism, renascent Catholicism under John Paul II: 1) is the single most important bearer of Christian belief and behavior in the world; and 2) should assume “its rightful role in the culture-forming task of constructing a religiously informed public philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty.”
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