We should look for the common good together, with dignity

If the human person is understood as having dignity at their core, then it seems reasonable to contend that social institutions are necessary for both protecting this dignity and fostering its flourishing.

Why? We are relational beings who do not exist in isolation. The family, civil society and the state — each one a social institution — play crucial roles in developing human persons to recognize the dignity in themselves and in others.

Such recognition is fundamental to personhood.

We cannot be full persons without recognizing our own dignity and the dignity of others.

As a Catholic Benedictine, of course, I would identify the Church as an institution of critical importance in fostering the dignity of the human person.

The Church fosters this dignity not only through the sacraments and teachings, but also through its advocacy work that holds governments accountable to moral goods like justice, solidarity and the preferential option for the poor (including migrants).

The dignity of the human person involves not only rights, however, but also duties.

Unlike a crude liberalism that holds autonomy as the central feature of the human, Catholic social and political thought sees humans as members of collectives or communities that involve obligations to contribute to the common good. Having intrinsic dignity, in other words, calls forth the cultivation of virtue and aiming for the common good.

For individuals to be able to fulfill their duties, social institutions must facilitate access to affordable education, affordable health care, adequate incomes, affordable housing, healthy food, clean air and water and other goods that are necessary for developing human capabilities and the pursuit of the common good.

Catholic social and political thought does not deny the autonomy or freedom of the individual person but situates this autonomy within social and communal bonds. Autonomy and freedom matter precisely because they enable the individual to seek the good.

This is not negative freedom — that is, freedom “from” — but freedom “for” relationship and the transcendent good.

Freedom of this kind also requires maximum participation in the decisions that affect us.

Commenting on ideas in the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, the late Canadian theologian Gregory Baum states that human “beings, created in God’s image, are meant to be subjects — that is, responsible agents — of the institutions to which they belong. If they are not allowed to share in the important decisions that affect their lives, they are reduced to mere objects and deprived of their human rights.”

In summarizing the British Jesuit Cyril Clump, Dr. Anna Rowlands states that “Catholics believe that, by nature, we are social and political animals, drawn to associate with each other that we might complete a social task we cannot achieve alone.”

Each of us has been made for relationships that enable us to seek the common good together.

Social institutions like the family, civil society, Church and state each play a vital role in fostering the recognition of dignity in each person and facilitating access to the goods that enable the pursuit of the common good.