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Commonweal

Commonweal

Magazine | United States | Centre-Left
www.commonwealmagazine.org/

Liberal Catholic magazine offering independent commentary on religion, politics, and culture.

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Discussions from Commonweal

Healthcare

Repairing the Broken

Repairing the Broken The phone rang at two in the morning like a siren in a war zone. I sat up quickly and answered the call in a hushed voice, careful not to wake my wife or the children who had found their way into our bed during the night. How unaffected we become even by the most unusual and extreme circumstances when those circumstances become routine. There is nothing normal about waking from deep sleep to make decisions that mean life or death. Nothing normal about rushing into work as...

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Politics

How can different beliefs about democracy shape our community's future?

The Pope, the President, and Our Democratic Crisis President Donald Trump’s undermining of democratic institutions poses a difficult challenge for Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pope. Since World War II, the Catholic Church has endorsed democracy as an effective way to advance two of its foundational principles, human dignity and the common good. How should the Vatican respond when the world’s most powerful leader flouts democratic norms by abusing executive authority, violating basic human rights, and questioning the legitimacy of free elections? The question is complicated by the Church’s commitment to political neutrality. As a religious institution with a mission to spread the Good News of salvation, the Vatican respects the autonomy of the secular political sphere. Popes are committed to working with diverse governments, many of them autocratic, to safeguard the Church’s mission and protect its institutions and members. Historically, however, this respect for the secular realm has not meant agnosticism when it comes to political systems. For centuries, popes accepted autocracy as the preferred way to promote order, peace, and the common good. They opposed the French Revolution, universal human rights, and religious freedom as incompatible with those principles. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did Leo XIII encourage Catholic accommodation with democracy (while still insisting that the ideal polity embrace Catholicism as the official religion.) It was not until 1944 that Pius XII, responding to the catastrophe of war and dictatorship, threw the Church’s moral authority behind democracy as a promising way to advance human dignity, the common good, and peace in practice. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) went further. While its key documents did not mention democracy by name, they acknowledged the constitutional principle of religious freedom, celebrated human rights, and affirmed political systems with elected leaders and a separation of powers. During h

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Culture

Letters | The historical Mary, how we approach AI

Letters | The historical Mary, how we approach AI Devotion, not Degradation I appreciate Luke Timothy Johnson’s engagement with The Lost Mary (“Manufactured Matriarch,” May), but his review presents a characterization of my work that is difficult to reconcile with the book itself. Readers are told that I exclude anything supernatural, selectively and arbitrarily construct conspiratorial theories from ancient sources, deny the Resurrection, despise the Gospel of John, portray Paul as the villa...

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Culture

Seeing What’s Not There

Seeing What’s Not There “Religion and humanity had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.” —John Rutledge of South Carolina, August 6, 1787, during debate on the slave trade, recorded in James Madison’s “Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention” I tried to watch as much as I could of “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving,” held on the National Mall on May 17. Featuring Evangelical leaders like Dutch She...

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Culture

‘As an Emerald Is Green’

‘As an Emerald Is Green’ “God loves, not as I love, but as an emerald is green. And I too, if I were in a state of perfection, would love as an emerald is green. I would be an impersonal person.” —Simone Weil There is something immediately attractive about the French mystic Simone Weil’s plea in her notebooks that she might learn to love “as an emerald is green”: to achieve a love that is as steady, unconscious, and enduring as a color. The green profusion of nature is both unwavering and imp...

Global
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Geopolitics

When Art & Geopolitics Collide

When Art & Geopolitics Collide The Venice Biennale has never been merely an art exhibition. It is a diplomatic instrument dressed up as a cultural event, a map of the world redrawn every two years between the pavilions of the Giardini and the Corderie of the Arsenale. This year, however, the sixty-first International Art Exhibition has made the matter explicit. The jury resigned. The European Commission threatened to revoke two million euros in funding. The Italian government dispatched inspe...

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Politics

Can Women Deliver a Blue Wave?

Can Women Deliver a Blue Wave? Eighteen months after Kamala Harris’s disastrous defeat, there are mounting expectations of a decisive victory for Democrats in November’s midterms—a “blue wave” that will seal Donald Trump’s lame-duck status. But a closer look at the range of truly competitive U.S. House districts reveals a more sobering picture. The number of vulnerable Republicans has held steady at around thirteen or fourteen, according to Cook Political Report. Flipping the House looks like...

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Politics

A Presidential Smash and Grab

A Presidential Smash and Grab One now often hears Donald Trump described as the most corrupt president in U.S. history. It may sound like hyperbole—just another extravagant insult from those afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—but it is the plain, well-documented truth. It may even be an understatement: Trump is not only the most corrupt U.S. president; he is more corrupt than all other corrupt presidents, including Richard Nixon, by orders of magnitude. If this isn’t obvious to every...

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Politics

Reviving the Pro-Life Democrat

The article explores the resurgence of pro-life Democrats, examining their impact on party dynamics and the broader conversation around reproductive rights in contemporary politics.

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Culture

The Serpent in the Garden

The Serpent in the Garden Most Americans would probably say that the capitalist West won the Cold War, but they would be wrong. They need to wake up and realize that, in the long run, Marxism has prevailed by worming its way into every aspect of American culture. Think about it: it’s been years since Disney last released a Marvel movie where a white man named Chris was the lead star; instead, it’s been pumping out cultural propaganda featuring scientific impossibilities, such as Black mermaid...

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Culture

Leo vs. the Americanists

Leo vs. the Americanists In 1899, Pope Leo XIII sent a letter to the Catholic bishops of the United States condemning the errors of what he called “Americanism”—a temptation, he warned, to embrace pluralism, religious liberty, and freedom of expression, and other dangerously “Protestant” ideas in an effort to help Catholics assimilate to the surrounding culture. Not only did the Catholic Church eventually embrace most of the concepts that Leo deplored, but even at the time, the American bisho...

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