Here Lies the Common Good

If our well-being is tied to that of those around us, we’re all in big trouble because the Catholic idea of the Common Good is pretty uncommon.

I’d like to say I grew up learning about the common good. My extended family was filled with teachers and social workers who dedicated their lives to being of service, and my parents 
regularly went above and beyond to help others in our neighborhood.

But when I heard the common good discussed in Ronald Reagan’s America or Pope John Paul II’s Catholic Church, it was generally in relation to some vision of society that chose winners and excluded or denounced losers.

Some church and U.S. leaders since then have encouraged more inclusive images of society. But we continue to be a nation where persons of color live in uncertainty, if not outright fear; a place where you have more of a right to own a gun than to receive health care for a gunshot wound. “If I lived in your country,” a friend from Australia told me after revealing how he’d survived a frightening form of cancer, “I’d be dead.”

In his encyclical “Laudato si’,” Pope Francis called on people to look beyond their own desires to the needs of others and the planet, and he organized synods built around the idea that we discover the call of the Lord only by listening to one another. Yet these ideas engendered fierce resistance, including from other bishops, who argued that Francis’ work was contrary o Catholic notions of the common good, just as those in government today insist everything they’re doing is for the benefit of our society.

In the face of these reactions, I can’t help but wonder: Does common good talk have value? Or is it just a term we use to justify whatever we want?

I put this question to a number of people inside and outside LMU, starting with Melissa Cedillo ’18. Since graduation, Cedillo earned a master’s in theology from Harvard Divinity School and covered the experiences of Latino Catholics for National Catholic Reporter. She now works in health care advocacy in California.

As a member of a generation who have spent their whole lives being told that every aspect of their future is going to be worse than their present (or their parents’ past), I wondered, does conversation about the common good seem meaningful or like a burden being thrust upon them by generations that didn’t include them in their own conceptions of a common good.   

In response, Cedillo tells me about a high school theology teacher who helped convince her that marriage could be about more than agreeing to find a man and have kids. “You turn to each other in the church and say your vows,” her teacher explained, describing the rite of marriage. “Then you turn outward to your community to say, ‘I’m also promising to you to keep showing up.’”

Cedillo acknowledges the bad news that is regularly dumped on her generation, how they’ll never own a home, they may not get social security, and our climate is in crisis. “How do we get through it?” she asks. “By being there for each other.”

Whenever she or her husband, Antonio De Loera-Brust ’17, complain about the burdens that come sometimes with showing up for others, says Cedillo, “We say to each other, ‘You live in a society.’” And, that’s the beating heart of the common good ethos they live by, she tells me. “The common good at its root is remembering that you live in society, and that you’re really lucky to have obligations to each other.”

As she goes on, I can’t help but be puzzled by her description of obligations as ‘lucky.’ “I don’t want to romanticize showing up for each other,” Cedillo admits. “Sometimes it’s annoying. It’s easier to only think of yourself. But sometimes it’s fun. And it’s much better to show up for people when it’s inconvenient and to have these obligations than to try and get through all this shit by yourself.”

As the Catholic Church in the United States became more polarized in the decades after Vatican II, Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin pushed Catholics to search for common ground. Steven P. Millies runs the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, which continues Bernardin’s work. He’s someone I expected to share the Church’s rich and still relevant traditions around the common good. But as we talked soon after St. Patrick’s Day, our conversation kept returning to the failure of the Catholic immigrant experience. “St. Patrick’s Day began as a way of saying, ‘We’re here, take us seriously,’” Millies explains. “We came to this country to be Americans, to do well. But now we’re doing well, and it’s the hell with the rest of you.”

After World War II, Americans dreamed of a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. But with that often came a sense of privilege and isolation that is largely anathema to Christianity. “There’s a lot of historical evidence that says that prosperity is not good for Christian life,” Millies argues. “So much of how we’re meant to think about who we are is built not just on the suffering of Jesus, but on that kenotic self-emptying, the idea that we are meant to give to one another.”

To be Catholic, says Millies, you must be part of a community. But in the United States today, “there’s very little holding us together anymore,” he observes. “We really have to want to be a community in order to be a community.”

When I put the question of the common good to Michelle Amor Gillie, who teaches screenwriting in the LMU School of Film and Television, she immediately questions the term. 

“Common good for who?“ she asks me. “As a Black woman, I’ve been treated like a second-class citizen the entire time I’ve lived in this country. And not only that, people don’t think it’s true. It’s so exhausting.

“When people say we need to go back to the way things used to be, Black people say, ‘Really?’”

At the same time, Gillie doesn’t completely write off common good talk. In fact, she sees it as emblematic of the attitude of Black women. “There was a viral TikTok for children a while ago that said, ‘If you’re ever lost, find a Black woman. They’re going to help you,’” she recalls. “And it’s true. We are. Historically, every time we fight, we’re fighting for every woman and every person of color.”

That other-centeredness, she says, emerges from their shared suffering. “We’re a double minority,” she notes. “We understand what it’s like to be discriminated against. That makes us more likely to see someone else’s pain.”

Gillie argues that the starting place for Black people when it comes to the common good is the care and support that they show one another. “There’s been so much done against my good, my people’s good,” she notes. “The good we find is within our community. We understand how sacred it is to have a place where you can come and be free.”

“In the end, what you think society is made of makes a big difference,” says Brett Hoover, professor of theology in the LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. In U.S. society, he explains, “the common good often has a social contract quality to it. ‘What kind of basic things do we need so that everybody can be free and pursue their own interests?’”

Meanwhile among the Mexican American immigrants with whom he has worked, the starting point is more along the lines of Pope John XXIII’s idea that we are all a part of one human family. “There’s this background notion that of course you take care of the poor and marginalized,” Hoover explains. “Even for bosses, it was considered shameful not to take care of your workers. You’re part of a community, and you have to think of the good of that community first.”

Hoover noted how in recent years, some Catholic politicians and thinkers have begun insisting that the broad-based notions of the common good are neither realistic nor true to the tradition. Instead, they insist that the common good only makes sense within the context of monolithic cultures.

“You can see how that as an idea could easily be wedded to ‘Let’s get rid of all the Brown people,’” he says. “And that’s part of what’s happening now.”

Hoover suggests a Catholic notion of the common good must be built around shared flourishing. “What do we need to provide for together so that we can flourish?” he asks. “And we can’t flourish without each other. We either flourish together or we don’t at all.”

In March, I attended the No Kings rally in New York City. I was immediately struck by how many in attendance seemed to be senior citizens. And where I had expected to find mostly outrage, the prevailing emotion instead was a quiet kind of joy. Couples walked arm in arm or took pictures of themselves with their friends.

For as hopeful as the situation seemed, I had to acknowledge that there have been plenty of reasons for all of us to have shown up like this for each other before now, plenty of injustice ignored. How many here had walked in the Black Lives Matter marches? Where were all these concerned citizens when the government and the church left gay men to die in my childhood, insisting that our lives were not to be considered as part of the common good, or worse, that our deaths were for the good of all? 

Still, each of these people was making an effort to acknowledge that they were in fact a part of a society. And just as Cedillo described, they actually seemed happy to do so, as though they had been waiting for this chance to show up for one another. Perhaps without knowing it, they had wanted to be a community. And being there with them, I realized that on some level so did I.The idea of the common good seems just as available to cooptation as it did in my youth. But as we walked, I wondered whether the greatest resource we have — both in terms of evaluating someone’s claims to it and believing that some version of it is possible — might ultimately be each other.

Jim McDermott, a frequent contributor to LMU Magazine, is a freelance writer and screenwriter who lives in New York. His writing has appeared in America magazine, National Catholic Reporter, American Theatre, and elsewhere. His “Right Coast, Left Coast,” which looks at the New York-Los Angeles rivalry, appeared in the fall 2024 issue of LMU Magazine.