As Catholics our commitment should be to truth, so our concern should be esse quam videri—to be rather than to seem.
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Christians have historically given regimes the benefit of the doubt as regards to whether their authority is legitimate; only reluctantly have they considered under what conditions a regime can be considered unjust and even more reluctantly have they stipulated what the morally acceptable responses to such a regime are.
Still the judgment as to whether a regime is unjust or not lies not with the bishops of the Church, as if they had a secular authority greater than that of the civil authorities, but with the members of the polity, or to those subject to the power of those claiming authority.
As for whether the public good is identical to what has been traditionally called the common good… I leave it to Mr. Kalb to explain as to what he means by it. But the modern state can make no claim to be a protector of the common good as it seeks to destroy community in order to preserve its power, and in so far as men seek to build community they must oppose the state. If the public good is merely order or the respect for the rule of law then the state has revealed itself to be opposed to that, and to uphold the "public good" is to uphold the state and its legitimacy. Catholics will have to decide where their political loyalties are and the bishops have no divinely-given competence to give particular judgments on these matters, judgments that would be binding upon the faithful.
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