The Existential Angst of Catholic Voters

it shouldn't be this hard for us

Aside from those whose line of work (and personal charism in life) is explicitly political in nature, the majority of religious folk [of good will] struggled mightily to discern how to prudently use their right to vote earlier this week. Catholics could follow the Pope’s advice and choose the lesser of two evils. We could vote for a third party candidate and signal our disapproval of the status quo. We could pull a Dorothy Day and abstain from voting altogether.

People of ideals have always had to make compromising decisions, to choose from options that do not fully align with their values. This is nothing new. The way you vote should not be an emotionally tolling decision. It is what it is. You make your decision, walk out of the ballot box, and move on with your life.

But nowadays, few of us feel ourselves capable of taking on this attitude.

Part of the reason we feel so strained to make this decision is that we increasingly feel that this is the ONLY way for us to take up our civic responsibility and respond to society’s needs. Beyond voting—and volunteering with or donating to charitable organizations—Catholics especially feel like they have no other means available to be involved in society. Thus, our impulse to contribute to the Common Good is concentrated into these very miniscule vessels.

This should not be the case. And it does not have to be the case.

I recently spoke about the principle of subsidiarity¹ as it applies to localist, grassroots initiatives, and how waiting for larger entities in power to get around to responding to social needs not only is ineffective, but is also dangerous. And as Musa al-Gharbi points out in his new (masterpiece of a) book, the news media has exacerbated this “nationalizing” of politics at the cost of trivializing and hiding information about local issues, making us feel as if the sole locus of social change exists at a far remove from more immediate bodies.²

Surely, plenty of these types of initiatives “for the people, by the people” exist within Catholic spaces. But the reality is that they are much rarer to come by in these spaces (let alone in any public spaces), and the predominant discourse of Catholic life and devotion largely ignores these kinds of initiatives. Faith is reduced to spirituality and ethics…and when it comes to the social realm, to volunteer work and voting on “the issues.”

Where are the spaces for Catholics to get directly involved in responding to social needs…spaces where one doesn’t have to compromise one’s values, or wait for someone living miles away from your community and who knows nothing about you to take care of it?

There is a ghastly lack of civic and social initiatives like Homeboy Industries, co-ops like Mondragon (which I’ll be presenting on in February), Boystown, the Catholic Worker…figures like Dorothy Day, Fr. Geno Baroni, the Berrigans. Surely, such initiatives still exist both within and beyond the walls of the Church. But why is is that discourse in the Church has defaulted to involvement in national elections and charitable initiatives as the normative way for Catholics to do politics, and that proposing more immediate civic initiatives has become something of a marginal rarity?

Maybe then we wouldn’t have to feel so stressed out about choosing who to vote for…as if the entirety of my social and political responsibilities culminated in that one little box I have to check.

In a providential turn of events, my students and I spent the day after the elections with Martha Hennessy, a Catholic Worker and granddaughter of Dorothy Day, who spoke to us about the legacy of her “granny’s” prophetic Christian anarchism.

Hennessy decried the mentality that it’s up to the State to solve all of the people’s problems. Nodding toward Chesterton, Belloc, and Pope Leo XIII, she warned that when institutions get too big—on top of being more vulnerable to corruption, they become bogged down by bureaucracy and find themselves incapable of effectively addressing people’s needs. She exhorted us to take direct action, to get our hands dirty and do the hard work ourselves. She also reminded us that Dorothy never voted for president…though she did emphasize the value of participating in local politics (“Roads still need to be built…”).

I asked her if this was an overly utopian position. How effective can grassroots initiatives really be—given the gargantuan size of our current, highly-concentrated, and increasingly globalized centers of power? Isn’t it vain to try to rebuild civic society in an atomized, individualistic culture where people have been conditioned to feel that their agency has been nullified, and that the best they can do is settle for striving to live a bourgeois life of attaining as much material comfort as possible—as a sort of numbing effect to our dissatisfaction with the status quo?

She conceded that attempts to take direct action, to rebuild community and civic society rather than leaving everything to the State, may seem destined to fail. But that one who relies on “the trinity” (self, God, and others) rather than on herself alone is more free to take such risks. When risking on our neighbor and on God’s providence, there’s no telling what kind of fruits such seemingly futile efforts can bear. Further, she said that on top of praying, we need to strive to “catch courage” from each other and the people who came before us (part of the reason I’ve caught the localist-subsidiarist bug is thanks to my own ancestors). Look to the “cloud of witness” of the saints, of community leaders and activists of days past, and jump in.

Surely, many of us are too busy trying to keep our heads afloat, trying to take care of our families and pay off our bills, to risk dreaming of a better society. Resolving to vote for president, donate to a charitable organization, say a few prayers, and calling it a day may seem like the only viable option. It might feel like striving to be a prophet, a dreamer, an idealist, a holy fool is too risky nowadays, and that it’s easier to settle for a cozy, bourgeois life. And that if we attempt to generate something new and more human and beautiful, we’ll fall flat on our faces.

Again, we ought to be cautious of how our atomized, bourgeois cultural ethos breeds such defeatism. As Dorothy well understood, real change will not come from individual efforts or lofty projects of our own making, but from starting from looking to God and our neighbor to help us see how we are being called to transform our immediate circumstances for the sake of the Kingdom…for that little drop in the bucket to become a vessel for bringing about the hundredfold.

Let us dare not to just throw our hands in the air and accept that things are the way they are, that it’s more efficient to let the almighty State and its bureaucracies, and its paradoxically inefficient faith in efficiency, take care of things. Let us dare to risk taking direct action, in our homes, blocks, neighborhoods, churches, schools, civic organizations, cities…and to let God pick up the slack of our tragicomically limited efforts.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how Dorothy Day and the CW have inspired Cracks in PoMo’s take on social issues, join us for our event at Maryhouse on 12/13. More details to come.

photo taken by Jacob Anthony Amaro at the CW Maryhouse

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Subsidiarity exhorts us to be aware of and involved in responding to the needs of our local communities. For starters, this means we ought to be aware of who our local politicians are, and should consider reaching out to them about local issues. We also should consider how we can get involved in social initiatives that operate on the local level. This can come in the form of doing charitable work, being involved in your parish or in your child’s school, joining a civic organization, or some kind of co-operative.

When communities fail to take up their shared responsibilities and collaborate on initiatives ordered toward the Common Good, we risk allowing our agency to be subsumed by those whose power operates at a far remove from us. Giussani warned in The Religious Sense that “either man depends on God or he depends on the chance movements of reality, i.e. the slave of those in power.” Giussani often recommended Robert Hugh Benson’s apocalyptic novel The Lord of the World, which vividly imagines what were to happen should “abstract,” “faceless” global elites assume a totalizing power, taking the liberty to suppress individual agency and smaller bodies of power that would otherwise limit their reaches.

Similarly, Giovanni Testori once stated while in conversation with Giussani that “today we proceed to powers that no longer have physical faces, faces in which the memory of man can recognize itself, however distorted or disfigured. Having wanted to take away the reality of being children—and therefore the presence, the seal, the imprint of the Father—the political powers have also become machines—monstrosities, abstractions.”

In 1983, roughly 90 percent of all media were controlled by fifty companies. By 2012, that stat had been reduced to six companies. Even local newspapers and television conglomerates are increasingly being bought up by huge conglomerates…These consolidations have led to a significant decline in coverage of local issues (and the issues locals care about)...local and state news has largely been replaced with nationalized and centralized news, contributing to the ‘nationalization of politics.’

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