Originally published at The Catholic Thing
“This is my geopolitical fiction,” Jesus did not say, when He broke the bread at the Last Supper. “The group, though it has many members, is still one group,” Paul did not say, when he sought, gently, to lead the fractious democracy-leaning Corinthians back to their responsibilities toward one another and their submission to the truth. “Every man is an island,” John Donne did not say in his meditations on death, so that if you hear the church bells ringing, he did not continue, “you need not ask for whom they toll, so long as they do not toll for thee.”
It is almost impossible, in our time of social alienation, family breakdown, self-imposed detachment, radical sexual individualism, and loneliness, to ask people to consider what a society is; a prerequisite, one might think, for considering the social teachings of the Church, or the social good or harm to be expected from a proposed policy.
It is as if we were to ask a shepherd on the steppes to build a fleet of ships, when he has never seen one in his life. Or, perhaps more to the point, it is as if we were to entrust our health to
