No One Is Exempt from the Common Good

The Pittman Center Community Volunteer Fire Department in Sevier County, Tennessee, has voted to stop answering emergency calls on October 31 because it can no longer find enough volunteers, and the county has not yet agreed to take over its work. A few neighbors have carried the fire service for everyone else in their corner of the county, and now there aren’t enough of them. Whose job was it, and whose job is it now?

The Principle

Last week’s issue taught what the common good is. This one asks who owes it, and the Church’s answer is short enough to memorize. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says that the common good “involves all members of society; no one is exempt from cooperating, according to each one’s possibilities, in attaining it and developing it.” It also admits that this is hard, because the common good “requires the constant ability and effort to seek the good of others as though it were one’s own good.”1 Both clauses matter. No one is exempt means the duty binds the retired farmer and the busy surgeon alike. According to each one’s possibilities means it binds them differently. Nobody is asked for what he doesn’t have, and nobody gets to say he has nothing.

The Catechism calls this participation, and it starts closer to home than most people expect. “‘Participation’ is the voluntary and generous engagement of a person in social interchange. It is necessary that all participate, each according to his position and role, in promoting the common good.” Then it says where that begins: “Participation is achieved first of all by taking charge of the areas for which one assumes personal responsibility.”2 So the first service a man owes the common good is honest work and a family well cared for, before any committee or volunteer roster.

In May, Leo XIV sharpened this considerably. In Magnifica Humanitas he wrote: “For a Christian, going beyond the narrow confines of one’s own interests and committing oneself, within the limits of one’s ability, to the common good is a non-negotiable value, as is the promotion of life.”3 Benedict XVI used “non-negotiable values” for goods a Catholic may never trade away in public life, and Leo XIV puts this commitment on that list, beside the defense of life. The Compendium said no one is exempt. Leo XIV says that for a Christian, the duty can’t be bargained down. That is a real development, and you should see it plainly.

The second half of the principle concerns public authority. We turn to the Compendium again: “The responsibility for attaining the common good, besides falling to individual persons, belongs also to the State, since the common good is the reason that the political authority exists.” It gives the reason: “The individual person, the family or intermediate groups are not able to achieve their full development by themselves.”4 The Second Vatican Council said the same in Gaudium et Spes: the political community “exists, consequently, for the sake of the common good, in which it finds its full justification and significance, and the source of its inherent legitimacy.”5 John XXIII was more direct in his treatment of this topic: “As for the State, its whole raison d’etre is the realization of the common good in the temporal order.”6 St. Thomas Aquinas holds both halves in one sentence. To order anything to the common good, he writes, “belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people.”7

Leo XIV ties the two together. “It is the State’s responsibility to ensure cohesion, unity and the proper organization of civil society, so that the common good can be pursued with everyone’s contribution.”8 Authority organizes; everyone contributes. A government that does the work while the people watch has failed the principle, and so has a people that does nothing and blames the government.

Be clear about the weight of each claim. That every person shares the duty, and that public authority exists for the common good, is the ordinary magisterium, taught without a break from John XXIII to Leo XIV. How a particular town and county should share a particular service is prudential judgment, and faithful Catholics can disagree about it. When a higher body should step in is subsidiarity, which gets its own issues next month.

More on this principle: The Common Good. All twelve principles.