Originally published at The Catholic Thing
“Drain the swamp!” is one of today’s more passionate political cries. The swamp, of course, is Washington, D.C., which oozes all sorts of contaminations: slimy politicians, rancid deals, foggy lies, sink-holes of money, hazy procedures. The people demand a champion, a DOGE, to clean it up: to drain its political and social sins so the government can function smoothly, and America can be great again.
“Swamp theory” assumes that the governmental system is broken and that a properly functioning reform will bring in a kind of political salvation. There is some truth in this contention, but Catholics must avoid seeing “the system,” and not sinful individuals, as the real problem. As Pope St. John Paul II taught, “such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins.” (Reconciliatio et paenitentia, 16)
When constant media coverage hypes fixing “the system,” this system can easily become the speck in the other’s eye that shifts attention from the beam in our own. For as St. John Paul continued, if any structural and institutional reforms do occur, they will be “of short duration and ultimately vain and ineffective, not to say counterproductive, if the people directly or
