How Ought Catholics Engage in Politics?

[StudentMI]

How Ought Catholics Engage in Politics?| National Catholic Register

Currently reading that book. It’s excellent.

 

[ProVobis]

Of the top of my head,

Cicero’s De Officiis

 

[CATW]

It’s best to stay out of it for the most part unless its your job, usually not worth giving an opinion

 

[phil3]

Remove the word societies and replace it with utopia.

 

[Genesis315]

Some relevant passages below from the CCC demonstrating what the Church teaches. The true religion should animate both public and private life and inspire our vision of bring this about. Public authority’s vision of the common good is going to be inspired by some ideology or another–why not the Catholic faith which alone shows us our true good? (all quotes below from CCC):

2244 Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain preeminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man:

Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows.51

Again, it is the vocation of the laity to make sure this happens.

898 "By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will. . . . It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer."431

899 The initiative of lay Christians is necessary especially when the matter involves discovering or inventing the means for permeating social, political, and economic realities with the demands of Christian doctrine and life.

With regard to the place of Dignitatis Humanae, the limits and extent of religious freedom in particular circumstances must be considered in relation to that vision of the common good understood in relation to the true religion (ie it must take into account the truth and man’s supernatural end–positivism and naturalism are condemned):

2109 The right to religious liberty can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a “public order” conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner.39 The “due limits” which are inherent in it must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with "legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order."40