By Stephen P. White

It's a presidential election year, so Americans everywhere can look forward to being bombarded by very important messages from super serious celebrities reminding us, ad nauseam, that we have a responsibility to exercise our rights as citizens by voting.

Now, I'm not opposed to voting. Nor to good citizenship, rights, or even responsibilities. In fact, I think those are all fine and important things. I confess that I find most celebrities somewhat suspect, and my suspicion increases in direct proportion to their tendency to take themselves too seriously. If they start singing John Lennon's "Imagine" at me, things are liable to get ugly.

But this is an election year and, perhaps even more than most election years, this one promises to expose Americans to unusually high doses of both ridiculousness and rancor. And that makes it all the more important for Catholics to think seriously, not just about voting, but about rights and responsibilities and, in particular, what it means to be a good citizen.

Of course for most of us, voting is one of the most concrete expressions of our participation in the political communities of which we are members. But the reality is that the work of citizenship begins long before any of us sets foot in a local polling place. The vast majority of the work we do to strengthen and edify - or erode and destroy - the good of our political communities happens outside the voting booth.

First and foremost, citizenship is about love, that is, about willing and acting for the good of a particular community. A good citizen loves the political community to which he belongs. He loves it well when he acts in a way that places the good of his community - the whole good, the common good - ahead of his own personal or tribal interests.

The citizen ought to love his political community because it is his, not merely in exchange for the material benefits it provides. The good citizen must love his home enough to desire to fix what is broken in it and preserve what is good in it. And citizens who love their own with a proper love will transform it into something greater.

If that sounds a bit Pollyannaish, consider Chesterton's remarks in Orthodoxy about the London neighborhood of Pimlico:

Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Now, not every city that is loved by its citizens becomes Rome. That's not the point. The point is that no city or country becomes great, nor persists in greatness, which is not first loved. So a good citizen must first love that to which he belongs.

No one learns to love as he ought unless he first learns to properly distinguish good things from bad things. Now this might at first seem obvious, but a cursory look around this country of ours suggests that Americans are profoundly divided about which things are good (and therefore to be pursued and loved) and which things are bad (and therefore to be avoided and despised.)

One reason for the profound divisions about the nature of good and evil in our society is the erosion of those social institutions which, in accord with reason and nature, are so vitally necessary to shaping the character of a people. I'm thinking especially of the family, but this is also true of many of our schools and universities, workplaces, social clubs, labor unions, neighborhood associations, and so on.

Think of where you learned the most important lessons of your life: what to love and how to love it well; how to forgive and ask forgiveness; how to work hard and celebrate joyfully; how to help others and rely on others; how to trust and to keep trust; how ...