Christianity & pluralism.

The Common Good and Christian Ethics David Hollenbach Cambridge University Press, $23, 269 pp.

David Hollenbach, S.J., who teaches Christian social ethics at Boston College, works in a century-long tradition of distinguished scholar/priests, John A. Ryan and John Courtney Murray chief among them, whose thinking helped others in the church to make sense of the spirit of modern democracy and eventually to make peace with it as well. No scholar as adept at political and social theory has done more in recent years to deepen and extend this tradition. Hollenbach has been engaged in what he calls a "communitarian reconstruction" of the idea of human rights, and has contributed significantly to refashioning the idiom of the Catholic natural-law tradition.

Hollenbach's first book, Claims in Conflict (1979), outlined the church's efforts since the late nineteenth century to come to terms with the underlying values and implications of democracy. There Hollenbach traced the development of a more-or-less systematic, modern Roman Catholic rights theory from Rerum novarum (1891) through Vatican II and the papal encyclicals of the 1960s. The theory embraced civil and political rights of the familiar kind (participation, freedom of speech, assembly, and religion) together with a strong commitment to the more controversial domain of social and economic rights (to jobs, health care, education, economic security in old age, etc.). Underwriting these rights makes hard demands on today's society and government.

The histories of rights and of social change are not identical, but they are closely connected. Both are marked by conflict and struggle, as the decades-long abortion-rights controversy illustrates. Modern politics is largely about the costs of rights (both to governments and the private sector) as they are given concrete expression in programs of public education, social security and welfare, environmental quality, health care, and other areas of social concern. Hollenbach is no stranger to such conflicts. He worked with the U.S. bishops to draft their pastoral letter on the American economy, Economic Justice for All (1986), which cut strongly against the grain of the policy thinking of the Reagan administration then in power. Heated controversy, fueled in part by conservative think tanks, preceded and followed the letter's release.

Hollenbach learned from all this. In the course of meetings about the economic pastoral with both Catholic and non-Catholic groups, he discovered how fragile and confused is the sense of justice in contemporary American culture. His next book, Justice, Peace, and Human Rights (1990), took up different aspects of this condition. One lesson he drew from this experience was that the idea of the common good "was nearly incomprehensible to most of the people the bishops sought to address." People were so accustomed to thinking in terms of individual merits and rewards that the sense of interdependence and sharing in risks and rewards of community life were attenuated for them.

The problem is not so much with the idea of the common good itself, for it is no more mysterious than the golden rule, in which it has its roots. The difficulty is in making the concept both concrete and yet expansive enough to include everyone who ought to fall within our orbit of concern. We don't trust ourselves or anyone else to determine the common good, and this wariness (a key term for Hollenbach, and an attitude he examines critically), so characteristic of modern political sensibilities, is the obstacle that must be overcome. Otherwise, we will have to content ourselves with the liberal notion that mutual tolerance and "nonjudgmentalism" are the modern summum bonum, and the most we can hope for.

Hollenbach's The Common Good and Christian Ethics insists that there are many issues "tolerance cannot handle." Most important are those of social fragmentation and isolation. Here a more potent sense of kinship and community is required. Thoughtful chapters are devoted to what should be done regarding two policy areas: intractable poverty and hopelessness in America's inner cities, and the ominous ambiguities of globalization that threaten our notions of equality.

In premodern Europe, as Hollenbach reminds us, the notion of the common good was a living ideal, articulated and reinforced by the church. That ideal spoke to a shared unity of vision that encompassed a multicultural human community ordered by God and ruled in his name from throne and altar by the wise and the good. In the organic cultural life of Christendom, which still haunts the Catholic mind and imagination, there was a place for everyone, and everyone kept in his (yes!) place. With the Reformation and the subsequent protracted and bloody wars of religion, the role of religion in politics rightly became suspect, and tolerance began to take root as the core virtue of secular modernity. Traditionally, of course, pluralism in religious matters was deemed a sign of impiety and indifference to God's truth. Now for the churches pluralism became a necessary evil. Can there be, they asked, a strong feeling of social unity and the common good where there is no religious unity? Is a modern, theologically grounded pluralist notion of the common good possible?

Hollenbach believes so, although it will take a peculiarly modern kind of theology to speak compellingly about the common good. It calls for a "pluralistic-analogical understanding" of the subject. One must embrace the spirit of social unity without the religious uniformity and social hierarchy that accompanied it in the past. One must do so, faithful to tradition, but not captive to it. What is needed is an updated understanding (via the contributions of Jacques Maritain and others) of a Thomistic perspective on the theological significance of the common life in civil society. In Hollenbach's view, "the ultimate theological good and the good that can be achieved in the secular domain have an analogical relation to each other. They are both similar and different, mutually illuminating rather than mutually opposed to each other." This perspective encourages sustained commitment to the ideal of an ever more inclusive sense of community and the common good, but it does so without encouraging an irresponsible utopianism. We know that we are always building with the crooked timber of humanity, and we go on building nonetheless, confident that in the long run, things tend upward.

Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has spoken with increasing clarity and force on behalf of the sacred dignity of all human persons. It has been a voice for what Hollenbach calls the spirit of "intellectual solidarity" in a worldwide "community of freedom." As an international actor, the modern church has demonstrated that religions can learn from their historical failings, and in so doing live responsibly in a pluralistic world. Given the downward pull of social fragmentation in contemporary culture, religion may prove to be a greater force for good in the future than it has been in the past, a thought that few intellectuals would have entertained only decades ago.

In The Common Good, Hollenbach has made a strong case against complacency and withdrawal into the "lifestyle enclaves" and variegated ghettos of our day. Although he doesn't say so, perhaps the American bishops were right where they should have been in 1986, speaking up about economic justice in a pluralistic society. n

Michael J. Lacey is a historian and director emeritus of the American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.