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September
19, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 16Oakland,
CA
Public
policy breakfast addresses
issues of the common good
The poor and
dispossessed — the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the needy in
all corners of the globe — are our neighbors, the ones we are to
care for with compassion and justice.
This was the consensus of those who addressed the annual Catholic Charities
Public Policy Breakfast Forum, Sept. 7, at Santa Maria Parish in Orinda.
Speakers and panelists were invited to address the topic, “Who Cares
for the Poor? The Role of Government and Faith Based Organizations in
Serving the Common Good.”
This question was also posed to Jesus, said Jesuit Father Bill O’Neill,
professor of social ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley.
In the Gospel of Luke a lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?”
and Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbor
is the one who reaches out to the person in need.
In effect, we choose to become neighbors. “This makes all the difference,”
Father O’Neill said, adding that this is not the tendency in the
U.S. today. Americans tend to view morality as a private affair unconnected
to the struggle for justice and to place the onus on the poor to show
that they are “worthy of society’s largesse,” he said.
These views, he said, are “tacit prejudices” and were “tragically
revealed in the recent devastation in New Orleans.”
Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference,
also made reference to the disaster and the need for social commitment.
“We are painfully aware that we all share in the responsibility
to meet the human needs of so many left devastated by Hurricane Katrina,”
he said.
But this concern for society at large is often absent, he said. Among
California lawmakers in Sacramento he has found a lack of consensus on
the common good.
Partisanship, for instance, is “unflagging,” he said. “Most
would rather do the party thing than the right thing.”
The “pressing issues that should be dominating the agenda,”
Dolejsi said, are taxes and spending: “What is the real need and
what’s fair and what’s not as we take and spend our hard earned
dollars?”
Instead, he said, the legislature avoids these issues while “think
tanks, legal firms and interest groups write much of the legislation.”
Narrow interests dominate the conversation because “we can’t
define the common good,” he said.
Although “most notions of the common good are in serious conflict
with the American (and a distinctly Californian) experience of individualism,”
Dolejsi said, Catholic teaching calls us to take a different stance.
“We must discover ways to institutionalize an understanding of the
common good,” he said.
The Church is one institution “that can and must incarnate the common
good,” Dolejsi said, and recent events show that this is possible.
“The tragedy in New Orleans clarifies in our minds that we can come
together around human suffering.”
