‘There is no global common good’: A Catholic writer repudiates world government by Emily Mangiaracina for Life Site News
While Catholicism should ‘inform the public life of all nations,’ the idea of a ‘global common good’ that informs an international political body is simply impossible, Emile Doak argues.
Amid calls by Pope Francis for global government, a Catholic writer is rejecting such a political arrangement as absurd, even while embracing the universality of the Catholic faith.
In a Tuesday talk at NatCon 3, with the admittedly provocative title “There is no global common good,” Emile Doak, executive director of The American Conservative, argued that a global political common good is “impossibl[e],” — that is, the common good that “is the proper object of political life.”
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A sense of the common good as applied to the political sphere “must emerge instead from the concrete relationships and traditions lived out in particular places,” according to Doak.
While his claim starkly repudiates Pope Francis’ calls for international “norms” to address what the Pontiff explicitly calls the “global common good” in Fratelli Tutti, Doak makes clear that this does not mean Catholicism is not a truly universal faith, and that it should not be promoted in public life.
In fact, “it matters which faith informs the public life of all nations,” stressed Doak, and it should be that of “the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”
To illustrate the point, Doak sketched the hypothetical, if unlikely, scenario of a major national leader converting to the Catholic faith: “Can you [imagine if Xi Xinping converted to Catholicism? Not the fake Chinese Patriotic Church, but the actual Catholic Church. I imagine millions of souls would be saved.”
Even aside from the fact that by far the most forceful and serious calls for global government today do not include a call for Catholic moral underpinnings, Doak maintains that advancing the common good via politics must necessarily happen at the local or national level.
