Finally, Andrew Willard Jones restores our understanding of friendship as a political virtue. Modern politics, he argues, has eroded the polis of friends and neighbors into the sterile individualisms of the tyrant’s bureaucracy of unaccountability or the atomised camp of identity politics apart from charity. Drawing on the classical and Christian tradition, Jones suggests that friendship, seen as mutual goodwill rooted in a shared vision of the good, is central to healthy civic life.
In Catholic terms, friendship is not simply sociable liking, but the participation in the good for the sake of the other, and ultimately for the sake of God. For St. Thomas, the true friend loves the good for the other, and political friendship is tied to the overall life of virtue and justice. When politics merely becomes a system of appetites or attachments, it can only encourage a hierarchy of slavery, but friendship provides an alternative horizon. Within a friendship sublimated by charity, we can see persons bound not just by interest but by a shared love of the good that is both natural and divine.
Therefore, a politics of friendship is the most real politics. It invites us to see fellow citizens not first as competitors for resources, beasts to be subjected by contract, or identification tags to be irrationally embraced or rejected, but as friends, or at least potential friends, on a journey from sin to grace. This does not eliminate conflict or difference, but frames civic activity in a field of shared flourishing and mutual virtue, a field rooted in truth, not merely affections or appetites.
Toward a Politics of Integral Flourshing, Friendship, and the Real
Putting these strands together, what might a Catholic political action look like when we move beyond a politics of appetite and attachment?
First, we ground politics in integral human development. We affirm that politics must attend to the whole human person and the whole of society: from the bodily, cultural, and economic to the spiritual, moral, and communal. Because the good of each person is interlinked with the common good, political life must not simply deliver material and legal foods to satisfy appetites or protect attachments, but it must seek to foster flourishing in light of the true anthropology of man grasped through reason and revelation.
Second, we seek the politics of the real. We resist reducing politics to competing appetites or static attachments. Instead, we ask what the good of the polis actually is using the fullness of prudence in light of the fullness of history. Authority, law, and public institutions must be ordered to authentic freedom, virtue, and participation in the good, truth, and beautiful. We can no longer reduce politics to the modern understanding of rights, power, or identity. We must re-orient to act (actual goods) rather than potency (mere possibility). Slogans are not real. Reality is greater than ideas. Hence, we resist a politics in which people become objects or partners in appetitive satisfaction or instruments of identity attachments and insist they are subjects of the real with a dignity rooted in the image of God and the possibility within redemption of a greater perfection as they embrace and are transformed further into the likeness of God in Christ.
Third, we cultivate authentic friendships. In civic life we foster the relational dimension of politics: neigbors, citizens, and friends bound by shared pursuit of the good, not simply by contract or fear. This means fostering the virtues of solidarity, subsidiarity, mutual aid, and also transcending rigid attachments to part, ideology, or identity. We remember Aquinas’s insight that true friendship contributes to political order because man needs friends. Politics thus becomes the art of enabling friendship across differences toward the common good.
Fourth, we must all personally seek to re-order appetite and attachment. A Catholic politics must attend to the interior life of persons. We cannot ignore the appetites that seek what is lesser, and the attachments that bind, often unjustly. By orienting appetites toward what is true, good, and beautiful (and directing attachments into friendship and communion), we deepen civic virtue. Political structures should thus support cultural, moral, and spiritual formation, not just economic incentives or identity rewards. These structures need not be at the largest scale of political power, but certainly at the smallest and up towards the degree they can be charitably sustained.
Fifth, we must embed the transcendental and the cross into the horizon of our imagination again. All of this is undergirded by the Christian vision: human persons are made for communion with God and neighbour and this communion consists in Jesus Christ. Political life thus participates in a higher order. As Schindler (both father and son) insist, liberalism’s error is to detach this transcendental dimension, reducing freedom to choice without end. The alternative is a politics ordered to Being, to act, to the Real. And Jones reminds us that friendship presumes the good to be shared, ultimately the good of God. We must not forget the Angelic Doctor’s counsel: look to the Cross daily and grow in all virtues.
Conclusion
In short, a Catholic politics that goes beyond a politics of appetite and attachment refuses to reduce public life to the satisfaction of desires or the organization of identities. It grounds itself in integral human development, orients to the real rather than the merely possible, and cultivates friendship among citizens as the living substance of the polis. In that way, appetite is transfigured, attachment is liberated, and politics becomes a real pathway toward human flourishing in this life and beyond.
This is no sentimental call to sweet-talk neighborliness. It is a robust invitation to transformation in Christ: of persons, communities, institutions. And as the Church’s social teaching reminds us, the political sphere is not extraneous to faith but immersed in the call to love and to truth.
By embracing the insights of David L. Schindler, D. C. Schindler, and Andrew Willard Jones, we may begin to carve a path for politics that is neither appetite nor attachment but communion, flourishing, and friendship.
