James Kalb, The Left, the Right, and Catholicism

CWR (via Insight Scoop)

Catholicism sees freedom as directed toward the good life, and fills in the details with its understanding of God and man. Liberalism likes to avoid big issues like God, man, and the good, because they cause arguments, so it sees freedom not as freedom to pursue anything in particular but as freedom to choose freely. Freedom is freedom to go after whatever it is you happen to want.


The result of that view, along with the view that freedom is the highest political goal, is that the good life drops out of sight as a public concern. That’s a problem for Catholics who want to promote the good life through politics, because almost all politics today are liberal. Even the battle between liberals and conservatives is mostly a dispute between two groups of liberals. The two sides may differ in their interpretation of freedom, but they agree that it comes first, and that in essence it’s freedom to do whatever you want.