Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish: Praised be Jesus Christ! With this column, I offer a brief “Part II” of election commentary after last week’s article about the challenges of discerning what candidates for office to support as informed by Catholic teachings. Ideological issues, such as abortion, immigration, war, and traditional marriage all being what they are in the hierarchy of values that Catholics are asked to carefully consider when voting, polling data suggests that none of these issues made the difference in this most recent election. Not surprisingly, what is foremost on everyone’s mind these days is economics. In times of prosperity, one might say, everyone has the luxury to argue about social issues; in lean times, everyone simply wants to know how they are going to pay for food and gas, and the other problems of the day can wait. Hence, in our current moment, it might be said that the outcome of the election is a reflection of the population’s view on the economy more than anything else. While not surprising (we all need to eat), this raises a few interesting reflection questions for a person of faith and for students of political philosophy. For one, Americans largely subscribe to the notion that policy directions on key ideological issues should be determined by the democratic process rather than by appealing to transcendent moral laws. In other words: for example, the question of the nature of laws about abortion in our nation is not settled by opening up the Bible, but is instead supposed to be solved by majority electoral opinions. “Right” or “wrong” is for most Americans a function of “who won.” In the face of this mode of decision-making, in a situation where the majority of voters chose candidates based on inflation rates, can it truly be said that whoever is now in power truly has a mandate to make legitimate rulings about our pressing ideological issues when voters did not choose them based on those issues? This is a complex argument to make in a brief column space, but the basic point is that the whole situation brightly underlines the deeply self-contradictory flaws in our American system of politics and governance. A society that has eliminated its own ability to appeal to higher sources of moral authority for the crafting of its own laws that govern human behavior is destined to be one that retreats further and further into a schizophrenic dysfunctionality. On a related point: no one can be blamed I suppose for worrying more about their pay checks and inflation than they do about ideological social issues in a voting process. So much of life is indeed governed by the principles of self-preservation. Additionally, it would be false to claim that who we elect has no bearing at all on our economic situation. Office-holders do influence economics to a point. All that being said, it is a curious phenomenon of our modern times that we place such tremendous faith in the electoral process to soften our daily materialistic miseries. We all really believe that if we just vote for the right people, and install the right batch of leaders, that we are going to arrive at lasting solutions to our problems. This might be termed the “tinkering” mindset of modernity. If we just keep “tinkering” enough with medicines, machines, systems, processes, structures, objects, persons, etc, then we will be happy. We place an enormous amount of faith in this mindset and in these modern processes and systems to solve our problems. In response to this, any honest political scientist or economist would tell us that whoever is in public office actually has very little control over day to day economic conditions contrary to what we might think. History suggests that much of it has a mind of its own, and that most of our election rhetoric on this point is a fabrication. Moreover, a historian or a Christian would explain that for the vast majority of human history, general populations of areas or realms would have found it laughable to think that if they changed their kings, emperors, or rulers that it would fix all of their problems. Most people just accepted their miseries and life conditions as a given, and their rulers they accepted because they had no control over them, and they did not delude themselves with a tinkering mentality about life. In those prior eras, everyone placed faith in God and in the Church, and above all in Heaven, as the way out of their problems because everyone knew that life on a fallen earth is unavoidably hard. Of course we can work to improve things around us, like developing medicines to relieve aches and pains for example, but no one should have over-blown ideas on our ability to make ourselves happy in this world. In Christian societies and cultures there were tons and tons of problems, but everyone dealt with them through the lens of Biblical faith, and this kept things in right perspective. Faith in ourselves has replaced faith in God in the modern world. An honest person, a Christian, ought to be able to see with every passing year that it is not working. A time will come for us in the modern world when all of the modern faith we have placed in politics, and material wealth, and economics, and science, etc, etc, will evaporate as we realize more and more that all of our tinkering is not really fixing anything. A catalyst for this will be our ever increasing crunch for resources, people, and wealth to satisfy all of our boundless appetites. The Lord explains over and over in the Gospels that all of the material comforts in the world are not going to make us happy, yet it is easy to ignore these points while the culture labors under the illusion that we can buy happiness, enabled by (for now) the resources to satiate our desires. Too many elections governed by economically driven voting behavior rather than by foundational issues of ideology and justice will eventually hollow out a society and lead us to the inevitable dead-end. Where is God in all of this? Unfailingly he is the consistent and patient teacher who walks with our world, always saying the same thing, often watching us ignore it, ever ready to forgive, and continually giving us the freedom to learn things the hard way. Through it all he does have a plan, and fortunately that is not something we control with elections. It is something we accept and trust with faith, hope, and love.