Of Guns, Dreamers, and Politics

by Fred Kammer, S.J., J.D.

The headlines staring from my morning newspapers are all too familiar: Another unstable person uses an automatic weapon to slaughter teenagers at their high school and the U.S. Senate stumbles again on immigration reforms.  We have been down both roads far too many times and bemoaned our inability to take common sense steps to remove combat weapons from our communities or to reasonably accommodate people fleeing poverty, starvation, and war.  The world’s oldest continuous democracy flails about in the face of real but not insoluble problems.

Despair is not an option.  While almost everyone acknowledges the current heightened political polarization, we must not abandon the political process. Political participation is one essential way in which we exercise our responsibility for co-creating the world entrusted to us by God and through which we express the communitarian nature of the human person.  “Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics.”[1]   Political participation also enhances human freedom because, “Freedom acquires new strength … when a person consents to the unavoidable requirements of social life, takes on the manifold demands of human partnership, and commits himself to the service of the human community.”[2]  

As the U.S. Bishops put it recently, “In the Catholic Tradition, responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation.”[3]  This obligation flows from our duty to promote the common good and “is inherent in the dignity of the human person.”[4]

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