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American Reform – The Catholic Definition of the Common Good — Ramírez, 1956

“The immanent common good of political society must, accordingly, contain in a perfect manner all these classes of goods: exterior goods (wealth, abundance, and sufficiency of useful goods), interior goods of the body (health, robustness: sufficiency and abundance of means for the perfect development and preservation of the race, with its accompanying bodily well-being — sufficiency of delightful goods), and interior goods of the soul (sufficiency and abundance of resources for the perfect development of the faculties and habits of the soul: arts, sciences, culture, virtue — sufficiency of honorable goods).— Fr. Santiago Ramírez>

<span class=prefix>Fr</span> Santiago Ramírez” class=”sizing-normal” height=”483.12″ src=”https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9rgy!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6138fe0c-4f02-4fb5-95a1-11847e43e267_250x366.jpeg” title=”<span class=prefix>Fr</span> Santiago Ramírez” width=”330″ /></div> <p></a><figcaption class=Father Santiago Ramírez, O.P. (1891-1967) | Source

The Return of the Common Good

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, the on-going civil war in the Republican Party has come into sharper focus with a fierce debate centered on the “common good” and its importance for American politics. The two schools of thought on the question can be broadly distinguished as follows. On one side stands the Republican establishment and Conservative ideologues1 who identify the end of civil society in the protection of individual rights, with the common good to the extent it is even acknowledged, as subordinate to that end.On the other side stands an ascendant coalition, led mostly by Catholic intellectuals and notably Adrian Vermeule, Chad Pecknold and Patrick Deneen who — following the natural, classical and Catholic conception of politics — see the common good as the end of civil society, with the particular goods of individual men subordinate to it. This latter truth is the common sense principle of totality, expressed simply by St. Thomas and Pope Pius XII, respectively:

Originally published in The Journal of American Reform. Read original article