A Catholic Conversion: How My Catholic Faith Transformed My Political Worldview

Documenting My Political Transition (Part 2)

In my senior year of high school, I had what many would consider a “conversion experience” to Catholicism in the Sacrament of Confession. After having struggled with a particular “sin” for a while, I brought it to the Sacrament of Confession in December 2018 and felt a strong sense of peace and healing from that experience. This marked a serious turning point in my life.

Prior to that experience, though I had been nominally religious, I didn’t really see myself as “Catholic” or particularly faithful. Religion was simply a tool for me to feel as if I was part of a community, as well as a tool to make political statements – for example, about being pro-life or being opposed to same-sex marriage. But after that “conversion experience,” I immersed myself in all things Catholicism and tried to make my faith the center of my life. It wasn’t something I used for personal convenience. I didn’t read the Bible, study the Catechism, or read Church documents with an eye towards defending some pre-set political or social agenda. I studied my faith with an eye towards genuinely transforming my own life and outlook on the world – to look beyond my own personal convenience and try to make a difference in this world in whatever way I could.

Along this journey, I came to recognize how my own political ideology and way of discussing politics and people clashed with my newfound faith. This was driven, in particular, by my encounter with Catholic social teaching, which concerns itself with the structure of the social order and politics more broadly. In the remainder of this particular Substack post (and probably a few more!), I will discuss Pope Francis’s encyclical (a papal encyclical is simply a letter from the pope to the Catholic faithful and “all people of goodwill”) entitled “Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship,” as well as some of the broader principles of Catholic Social Teaching.

Central to Pope Francis’s (and the Catholic Church’s) political and economic vision is the principle of “the dignity of work and the rights of workers,” per the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Catholic Church argues that, to fulfill this principle, “the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative” must all be preserved.

Pope Francis expounds upon these principles in Fratelli Tutti. He articulates a vision of private property that rejects common understandings of this principle. He first highlights the understanding of property as understood by several “Fathers of the Church.” For example, St. John Chrysostom, an Archbishop of Constantinople who lived in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, wrote “Not to share our wealth with the poor is to rob them and take away their livelihood. The riches we possess are not our own, but theirs as well.” Saint Gregory the Great, a pope of the 6^th and 7^th centuries, said, “When we provide the needy with their basic needs, we are giving them what belongs to them, not to us.”

Pope Francis doesn’t stop there, however. He writes in paragraph 123 of Fratelli Tutti that, “The right to private property is always accompanied by the primary and prior principle of the subordination of all private property to the universal destination of the earth’s goods, and thus the right of all to their use.” He continues to say, perhaps most radically, that this principle of “the universal destination of the earth’s goods” makes the following true: in paragraph 124, he writes, “we can then say that each country also belongs to the foreigner, inasmuch as a territory’s goods must not be denied to a needy person coming from elsewhere.”

In other words, from a Catholic perspective, the massive accumulation of wealth by the few – at the expense of the working class, the working poor, the poor, and the migrant searching for a better life – is simply not ethical. This massive accumulation of wealth, from a Christian perspective, is equivalent to stealing from people who are in most dire need of resources to survive in our economy. Such an economic and political system does not create a world, where “Every human being has the right to live with dignity and to develop integrally,” where those who “are unproductive, or were born with or developed limitations” are also recognized as having “great dignity as human persons, a dignity based not on circumstances [or their productivity] but on the intrinsic worth of their being.” We need, as Pope Francis stated in his Evangelii Gaudium, an economy and politics that makes and institutes “decisions, programs, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income” and “an integral promotion of the poor.” Redistribution efforts – in the form of taxes to support access to food assistance, healthcare, affordable housing, and education access – must surely be a part of these efforts.

Unfortunately though, we live in a world where this vision is not recognized. Certain people’s labor is devalued — and the idea of “redistribution” rejected — in order to prop up the salaries, benefits, and extravagant lifestyles of CEOs, big bankers, and others. People and politicians – usually of conservative backgrounds – rather than recognizing the importance of redistribution, instead try to devalue the work that service workers, like fast-food workers, waitresses, and janitors do. They say that these jobs are just “for high school students.” They say that the people working these jobs just need to “go get more education or training,” so that they can increase their salary. Or, they say, these people “just need to go work a second or third job, so they can support their families.”

And yet, these statements simply fail to account for the reality of the world we live in. As we all live busy lives, we rely on our service workers to provide essential services. When you get your coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, or a local coffee shop at 8 in the morning on your way to work, who is working to get that for you? When you forget to pack your lunch for work or simply didn’t feel like it, because the night before, you ran your three children to baseball and softball practice and then helped them with their homework, who do you think is the cook, waitress, waiter, and / or food service worker making it possible for you to eat your lunch? And finally, when a businessperson travels to a conference, and leaves their hotel room on Tuesday to return home, who is preparing the room for the next person to come when check-out time ends at 1 PM? (I can tell you who it’s definitely not. It’s definitely not a 17-year old high school student, because they’re likely in their first period math, science, social studies, or technology class, or at lunch themselves.)

When a service worker (or any other person paid a meager wage) leaves their work shift, they have the same needs and responsibilities as the rest of us. They have to take care of their children – feed them, run them to their after-school activities, and simply be a stable, nurturing presence for them. They need a home. They need to maintain their car when its battery inevitably dies, or when its brakes need replaced. They need decent, affordable health care, that will cover important surgeries, mental health care, and various forms of preventative care, which probably aren’t provided for by their employer. They need to go grocery shopping, feed their families, pay the bills, wash their clothes, run countless other errands, and also make some time for sleep, rest, and leisure.

In this way, reading this document challenged me to expand my vision of what it meant to be “pro-family” or “pro-life.” From my perspective, to use these labels as a Catholic, one needs to be more than “opposed to abortion” or “opposed to same-sex marriage.” Being “pro-family” or “pro-life” meant believing in and fighting for an inclusive economy, where the poor and the working poor could actually support a family, where they could feel confident and supported in making a choice to have a child. It meant fighting for an economy where the poor and working class didn’t need to work more than one job to support themselves, because poor parents and working class parents also deserve the opportunity at the end of a work day to spend time with and nurture their children, and attend their children’s sporting events.

With all of this in mind, when I was Catholic, I came to realize that I could never vote for candidates or parties who wanted to cut healthcare programs for people in poverty. I couldn’t vote for candidates who wanted to cut important welfare programs that sustain people with disabilities (whether they be physical or psychological, which we often cannot see). I couldn’t vote for candidates who seek to undermine the ability for workers to unionize, and seek better wages and benefits for themselves. I couldn’t vote for candidates or parties who have such negative perceptions of the poor and the working class, that they frequently just cast them as “lazy,” without recognizing the ways in which the economy has disadvantaged them and made it nearly impossible for them to live fruitful lives full of joy.

I want to vote for candidates who are empathetic and understanding of the needs and challenges of the working class and the poor. I want to vote for candidates who recognize that, sometimes, people who have few resources to begin with, might need a helping hand when they start out within this economy — which might need to come in the form of government-funded food, education (including, possibly, college education), and housing. I want to vote for candidates who recognize that ALL labor and service is valuable. I want to vote for candidates who believe redistribution from the super wealthy to the poor and working poor is essential, in a world where many go without food, housing, healthcare, sleep, rest, and leisure, while the super wealthy live extravagant lives full of leisure and with access to the best schools, hospitals and healthcare plans.

To conclude, I want to leave you with a quote from paragraph 54 of Fratelli Tutti: “We began to realize that our lives are interwoven with and sustained by ordinary people valiantly shaping the decisive events of our shared history: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caretakers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests and religious… They understood that no one is saved alone.”

May we remember – when we vote and when we discuss politics with others – that we are all connected and all dependent upon one another to make our world work. No one can be excluded, or left to simply fend for themselves. To create a culture of life, we must build an inclusive economy and political system: an economy where all work is deemed valuable and no work is demeaned, an economy where we don’t place excessive growth for just a few individuals above the needs of the poor and the working class, and an economy that is fundamentally rooted in compassion, empathy, and charity for all people – especially those in greatest need and the most vulnerable.