America and Catholic Social Teaching

… America’s highly individualistic ethic clashes in various ways with ideas like “common good,” “solidarity,” and Catholic personalism. In Catholic social thinking, the human person is neither an autonomous individual nor a mere fragment of a social mass as in several forms of twentieth-century collectivism. The person, then, exists in a matrix of relationships that is not given much attention in mainstream American thought. Catholic social teaching, with its highly technical and somewhat foreign terminology, has therefore found itself in some tension with mainstream American political discourse, and this tension has given rise to disputes, even among Catholics, about the applicability of Catholic thought in the context of this nation.”

Peter Steinfels & Robert Royal