Election Time & the Common Good

By Anthony Bracuti, member of the SPARK community

The non-optional presence of Good Works in the life of a Christian is paradoxically often ignored and focused on in equal measure. Jesus’ core teachings revolve around care for your neighbour, and to ignore this is to ignore Jesus.

The Church’s long history of social teaching, formed into our Catholic Social Teaching, is particularly overlooked when it comes to election time, and so it’s worth emphasising, especially in these particularly trying times.

When Jesus called us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the imprisoned, he did not call us to abandon these principles for our own politics when convenient.

This also comes at a time in our Church’s history of crises where our youth, raised on stories of the goodwill, charity, and empathy of Christians, are leaving in droves due to the hypocrisy we demonstrate through our actions not aligning with our words.

By demonstrating that being a Catholic is to be an agent of Christ through words and actions in Christ’s teaching, we can demonstrate that the Church is worth participating in and that our faith in Christ is meaningful, both spiritually and materially. Our failure to do this, to implement the ideas that Christ told us we must enact to be His followers; has created these crises in our Church, crises which we deserve.

Through politics, and a coherent social policy agenda, we can collectively work to enact this fundamental part of our faith. Indeed, by failing to fight for this social justice in our political system, i.e. in our failing to use this tool available to us, this talent which we have buried in the sand; we fail in our faith as Christians.

Using Christ as our beacon, we can see the path we must pave: an end to hunger, to dirty water, to homelessness, to poverty, to declining access to healthcare, to the prison crisis. These must form the basis of our life, our communities, and our politics; and not let chronic individualists relegate the responsibilities for these sufferings onto those who suffer.

In addition to these basic positive principles, we should also oppose the stripping away of dignity which seems so universal in our political system, and across our media. We must oppose the vilification and weaponisation of refugees who suffer so much, of activists who fight for a better world, and of our youth who are just trying to survive.