Common Good is committed to the integration of faith and life. We believe that our efforts to integrate our faith with our life can be categorized under the themes of life , family , freedom and solidarity . It is to these four "pillars" that we have committed the work of COMMON GOOD .
COMMON GOOD believes in the dignity of every human life from conception to natural death. We are committed to supporting and advancing every legitimate effort to ensure that the dignity of every human person becomes the polestar of all public policy. Our position on life is not a "single issue" commitment but rather a framework within and against which every other issue must be measured in our corporate mission as well as our economic, political, cultural and social participation as an association.
COMMON GOOD supports the primacy of the family as the first cell of society, the first church, first school, first hospital, first economy, and the first mediating institution. Our philosophy of government is predicated upon the understanding that the family is the first government and that all other government is first at its service. We believe that parents are the first teachers of their children and that all education begins in the home. We support public, private, parochial and charter schools as an extension of that educational mission and support any effective and constitutionally sound efforts to encourage, empower, and support all parents in extending their educational mission, no matter what their economic conditions, through parental choice.
COMMON GOOD is committed to a fundamental vision of freedom that is consistent with classical Christian thought. Freedom has two sides to its reach; a freedom "from" and a freedom "for." Though we may be free to choose we are not free to make the objects of our choice good or evil, right or wrong. Freedom must be bounded by truth and has a moral constitution within which it must be exercised. It also carries within its embrace and promise an obligation to our neighbor.
At the foundation of our commitment to freedom is our dedication to promoting religious freedom for all men and women. We embrace the American proposition that religious freedom is best protected by the principles of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that there should be no establishment of religion in the sense of a Federal or State sponsored Church, which mandates adherence. Nor do we believe that coercion has any place in authentic religious expression or practice.
However, we also believe that religious faith is a human and social "good" and that the values informed by faith as applied to our life together have been the very foundation of our freedom. Therefore we support religious freedom; rightly understood and applied, as a freedom for religious expression not a freedom from such expression. This entails a freedom for people of all faiths, or no faith, along with all Americans, to participate in the public conversation and in the public square.
COMMON GOOD is dedicated to an understanding of the Christian mission that requires that we have a "heart" (in the biblical sense of a fundamental core commitment) for the "poor" in all of their manifestations in our midst. We are dedicated to supporting our members in solidarity in their relationships with one another as well as in their full participation in society at every level. We also believe that a commitment to solidarity entails an obligation to those who have no voice and compassion toward all those in need.