How our society fails to serve the common good

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 18, 2026

At his regular public audience this week, Pope Leo XIV spoke on a topic that has been much discussed among Catholic intellectuals recently: the common good.

The “common good,” one of the key concepts in Catholic social teaching, is not easy to explain simply; serious scholars have devoted entire books to the exploration of the term. But in his Wednesday audience— in a continuation of his series of talks on the documents of Vatican II— the Holy Father pointed to the short-form definition of the term, provided in Gaudium et Spes [#26], as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment.”

The concept of the common good is difficult to grasp because different people have different ideas about what they require for “their own fulfillment.” Gaudium et Spes acknowledges the problem, cautioning: “Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family.”

So the discernment of the common good is a complex process, played out through the political world: the subject of countless prudential decisions. Depending on the circumstances, the pursuit of the common good might call for different public policies at different times. There is no simple checklist that can be applied to every society in every generation.

Yet there are a few clear standards: principles that should be applied to every assessment of the common good, in every time and place. Gaudium et Spes provided a short list in the same paragraph, saying that everyone should have access to food, clothing, and shelter, to education, to employment, and freedom, among other things. How all those goods might best be provided is of course a difficult question, which again will be solved—rightly or wrongly—by the political process.

But in the paragraph that follows [#27]—which Pope Leo also quoted at his Wednesday audience—Gaudium et Spes lists some of the evils which, insofar as they are present in a society, show that the society is not serving the common good. It is interesting to see how that list begins, and how prominently the Council fathers—writing several decades ago—feature evils that have won wide acceptance in the Western world today. The Council condemns:

…whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation…

The list goes on, to include slavery, human trafficking, prostitution, and a host of other ills—more than a few of which are sadly common in the world today. Oddly enough the Council does not mention drug abuse, a scourge that would doubtless command more attention if the document were rewritten today. Still the list as it was written, in a document released in 1965, applies with an almost eerie prophetic accuracy to the degraded condition of our society today.

Murder is still rightly condemned, to be sure. Genocide, too—although moralists have markedly different ideas of when that condemnation should be applied. But the next three items on list speak very directly to political issues that figure prominently in American debates today. Abortion won widespread acceptance, or at least acquiescence, to our nation’s disgrace. The drive for acceptance of euthanasia is gaining speed. And the Council’s condemnation of mutilation applies directly to what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming” surgery.

Today’s calls for “common-good conservatism” serve a useful purpose, bringing the wisdom of Catholic social teaching to bear on American political debates. Nonetheless it remains difficult to reach any consensus on what policies are best designed to promote the positive requirements of the common good. What we can do, however, is agree on the negative requirements: the evils that must be abolished before we can make any plausible claim to serve the common good.