It’s a common pitfall for many of us to only consider our political responsibilities every four years. When doing so, we tend to frame this question in terms of who we should vote for president of the country. Needless to say, “politics” writ large involves much more than who is sitting in the Oval Office, and our political responsibilities are much greater than checking off some boxes in a polling booth every four years.

In our current context, we tend to conceive ourselves as atomized individuals disconnected from others; power tends to be highly concentrated into the hands of those who are not elected by the populace – namely, into the hands of technocrats, large corporations, and wealthy elites; and our public discourse is dominated by a form of “culture war” that breeds social division rather than unity.

To begin assessing our responsibilities in light of our current context, it might help to consider the relationship between conscience and discernment, or as Giussani would say, freedom and judgment. Fr. Giussani’s second premise in The Religious Sense is essential: in order to be reasonable and use our conscience well, we need to engage the totality of factors in reality. We need to do the work of looking at the bigger picture, taking into account all of “the pieces of the puzzle.” A common error is to think of conscience in a relativistic or individualistic sense. But the work of engaging one’s conscience, or of making a judgment, is not purely subjective. It is always done in the context of a relationship with an external authority – which formally speaking is the Church’s teaching authority, and more immediately is the shared life of our Christian communities. Therefore it’s crucial to propose discussions and gatherings aimed toward helping each other understand our circumstances and judging together how to take action.

The Church’s Social Doctrine also asks us to consider the complementary principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Solidarity emphasizes that our ultimate good, our fulfillment as individuals, is always experienced as something shared. On the flipside of solidarity is the principle of subsidiarity, which formally defined is “a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.” The apex of our political engagement, contrary to what many of us think, is not voting for someone for president. Subsidiarity exhorts us to be aware of and involved in responding to the needs of our local communities. For starters, this means we ought to be aware of who our local politicians are, and should consider reaching out to them about local issues. We also should consider how we can get involved in social initiatives that operate on the local level. This can come in the form of doing charitable work, being involved in your parish or in your child’s school, joining a civic organization, or some kind of co-operative.

When communities fail to take up their shared responsibilities and collaborate on initiatives ordered toward the Common Good, we risk allowing our agency to be subsumed by those whose power operates at a far remove from us. Giussani warned in The Religious Sense that “either man depends on God or he depends on the chance movements of reality, i.e. the slave of those in power.” Giussani often recommended Robert Hugh Benson’s apocalyptic novel The Lord of the World, which vividly imagines what were to happen should “abstract,” “faceless” global elites assume a totalizing power, taking the liberty to suppress individual agency and smaller bodies of power that would otherwise limit their reaches.

Similarly, Giovanni Testori once stated while in conversation with Giussani that “today we proceed to powers that no longer have physical faces, faces in which the memory of man can recognize itself, however distorted or disfigured. Having wanted to take away the reality of being children—and therefore the presence, the seal, the imprint of the Father—the political powers have also become machines—monstrosities, abstractions.”

Inspired by the insights of both the Church and the charism of CL, a group of friends in the New York community recently planned a panel discussion to help each other understand how to face the current state of politics in the US. The discussion, which was open to the public, featured Br. Luke Lapean SJ and Dr. Elvira Parravicini, with myself as moderator. Br. Luke, who assists at Thrive for Live – an initiative that provides housing, community, and educational opportunities for those recently leaving prison, and where several of our friends engage in a charitable work – shared with us that his ministry to both those formerly incarcerated as well as those still in prison has helped him understand how certain policies directly impact the people he works with. He also shared how much he has learned from having to engage with local politicians in his district, many of whom have visited Thrive. Dr. Parravicini shared how the neonatal care program she initiated was born as a response to the needs of the people with whom she worked. Further, her work has taught her to witness to the dignity of life starting not from an ideological position, but from the needs and experiences of the people in front of her.

Personally, I must say that the most important part of the event was the work that went into planning it. Participating in weekly calls – where we shared our questions, ideas, even our disagreements and frustrations – taught me what it looks like to “do politics,” which is to say, to judge our circumstances and take action together for the sake of the Common Good. I walked away from the panel discussion grateful not so much for what we had “accomplished,” but for having begun a beautiful work which is only just getting started – and one that I am certain will bear fruit much more often than every four years.

Stephen, Brooklyn, NY