Recovering Common Goods by Patrick Riordan SJ (review)

Abstract

Book Review Recovering Common Goods, Patrick Riordan SJ (Veritas: Dublin, 2017), 200 pages. Patrick Riordan has been thinking about the question of the common good for quite some time and has shared his insights in an impressive series of books. In Recovering Common Goods, he distills the essence of what he has found in a form eminently accessible to the general reader. It is a work of civic education that draws on the rich resources of Catholic social teaching to make its own contribution to the common good. As always, Riordan’s thought is never far from the problems of public life as they emerge in the Irish scene, while not excluding Britain and Europe. The abundance of concrete cases and examples makes the task of grasping theoretical concepts all the more accessible. Riordan is well aware of the necessity for the strategy of illustration he adopts. He knows the common good is among the most ancient notions. It is there in the Republic of Plato and endures all the way up to our own usage of the term ‘republic’. Res publica is the public good or common good, that which makes us a community. It is what constitutes the public realm in which we meet and work in building our lives together. We would not be able to undertake cooperative and collective action if we were not bound together in a common order. That is the genesis of our Constitution, as that which constitutes us into a unified political society. It is for this reason that the idea of the common good is more elusive than it may appear at first sight. We live within the common good even before we inquire into its meaning. Recovering Common Goods does not, however, launch us into the philosophical history of the concept but, instead, draws on the exposition in Catholic social thought. There the common good is announced as one of the four pillars of the Church’s teaching on the social and political world in which it finds itself. The common good is what marks the just social and political community. It is rooted in the dignity of the human person, as realised in a regime that respects mutual responsibility under the twin principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. Taken together, these key insights into the common good form an impressive intellectual contribution to the flourishing of modern civilisation. They stake out the moral witness the Studies • volume 108 • number 429 109 Spring 2019: Book Review Church continues to provide to a secular age. One does not have to be a believer to acknowledge the cogency and coherence of the vision that underlies them. All of this is masterfully unfolded in Riordan’s book, beginning with the recollection of his personal discovery of the potential of the Church’s social wisdom. It was his reading of Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975) that made a big impact on him, inspiring both his priesthood and work in philosophy. This ‘Evangelisation in the Modern World’ opened a wider perspective for the author, who seemed to glimpse in it the radical social significance of Christianity. As with the social teachings more generally, the Church is not only presenting the social significance of Christianity, but the possibility of a deeper and more expansive way of life for our world. St Paul VI managed to convey some sense of the liberating aspect of Christianity that points toward a new way of living within human history. The word ‘liberation’ was not too far from the resonance that was widely echoed, even as it began to take on more strictly political overtones in certain quarters. Later the excesses of ‘liberation theology’ would have to be pruned back but the centrality of the liberated human spirit would not disappear. In many ways the task of the Church has always been to explain how the eschatological promise is already a mysterious possibility within the temporal existence we live in. Using the definition of the common good from Gaudium et Spes as ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily’, Riordan then proceeds to examine...