In a recent speech, Pope Leo pointed to the widespread mistaken understanding of human flourishing that is causing so much misery:

Today, a flourishing life is often confused with a materially wealthy life or a life of unrestricted individual autonomy and pleasure. The so-called ideal future presented to us is often one of technological convenience and consumer satisfaction. Yet we know that this is not enough. We see this in affluent societies where many people struggle with loneliness, with despair and a sense of meaninglessness.

The Church has a better vision of human flourishing:

Authentic human flourishing stems from what the Church calls integral human development, or the full development of a person in all dimensions: physical, social, cultural, moral, and spiritual. This vision for the human person is rooted in natural law, the moral order that God has written on the human heart, whose deeper truths are illuminated by the Gospel of Christ. In this regard, authentic human flourishing is seen when individuals live virtuously, when they live in healthy communities, enjoying not only what they have, what they possess, but also who they are as children of God. It ensures the freedom to seek truth, to worship God and to raise families in peace. It also includes a harmony with creation and a sense of solidarity across social classes and nations. Indeed, the Lord came that we “may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).

Michael Sean Winters of NCR recently highlighted the Catholic focus on communion, which separates the Catholic worldview not just from excessive individualism but also collectivism and identitarianism:

It was the words of the diocesan (as opposed to titular) bishop of Albano, Bishop Vincenzo Viva that captured my attention.

“In the faces of those seated at these tables today, we see the beauty of the Gospel made concrete — living testimony of who we are as the Church of Albano,” Bishop Viva said. “There is no ‘us’ and ‘them,’ no benefactors and beneficiaries: There are only people sharing bread — and with it, their stories, their struggles, and their hopes.”

This speaks, and speaks beautifully, to our Catholic understanding of a communion of persons. That ecclesial understanding, in turn, shapes how the Catholic Church’s social teaching views society and culture. The ethics flow from deeper dogmatic beliefs, a point that is too often skipped when teaching Catholic social teaching.

For us, the individual is not isolated or solitary as too often happens in modern, liberal societies. Nor is the individual subsumed by the group, as many post-liberal philosophies and practices do. And, in the mundaneness of the activity, “sharing bread,” there is a universal note as well.

This offers lessons for our struggling liberal democracy:

Liberalism has distorted itself in our day by its embrace of autonomy as the preeminent value in society. It too easily and too often lapses into libertarianism. Post-liberalism has not held onto the achievements of liberalism, but shunned them. Just so, post-liberalism is more likely to be led by reactionary populists like Trump, Viktor Orban and others than it is by well-meaning DEI advocates. In the rough and tumble of politics, Sturm und Drang beats affirmation every day of the week.

The most essential pillars of Catholic social teaching are the dignity of every human person and solidarity as the preeminent societal norm, neither the one nor the other alone. Subsidiarity is a means of organizing solidarity and the common good is a means for directing it. These four, taken together and rooted in our transcendent and absconding God, provide the lens through which we Catholics are called to view and critique our society.

Our nation and the whole world desperately need this Catholic vision, this understanding of communion in which, as the good bishop said: “There is no ‘us’ and ‘them,’ no benefactors and beneficiaries: There are only people sharing bread — and with it, their stories, their struggles, and their hopes.”

In the New York Times, David French highlights the dangers of denying human vulnerability, based on an obsession with control and autonomy—and what is gained when we reject this type of thinking:

What happens when we make a transition from understanding that suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition, one that rallies people to love and care for the people they love (or even to love and care for people they don’t know), to it being somebody’s fault — perhaps it’s the parents who wrongly brought you into this world or your own fault for hanging on too long?

…if your value is determined by your productive work, then it’s easy to see how people perceive that they lose their value when they are no longer productive or when their vulnerability limits their success.

Our commitment to individual liberty can also create the illusion of individual autonomy, a sense that we are the captains of our own fates. Taken together, workism and individual autonomy tell us that we are defined by our status and that our status is largely within our control.

Yet our value is defined by our humanity, not our productivity, and when we live in close community, vulnerability and suffering pull us together. It can trigger a feeling of love and care so powerful and painful that it changes us forever. It softens us. It humbles us. It awakens awareness of the needs of other people….

Isolation brings death; community brings life. And we build community in part by recognizing that we are not in control and that each of us will one day desperately need someone else to love us, care for us and cherish us.

This is not because we’re successful or capable or living a life that others deem to be worth living but because we’re human beings of incalculable worth — no matter our vulnerability or our pain.

Also at the New York Times, David Brooks looks at the collapse of America’s social and spiritual environment, once again linking it to our obsession with autonomy:

I would say the most important social trend over the past decade has been the disconnect between our nation’s economic health and its social health. Over these years the American G.D.P. has surged, wages have risen, unemployment has been low, income inequality has gone down. At the same time, the suicide rate has surged, social isolation has surged, social trust is near rock bottom. According to a Gallup survey from January, the share of Americans who say they are “very satisfied” with their lives has hit a new low. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer report, only 30 percent of Americans feel optimistic for the next generation.

What’s going on here?

People thrive when they live in societies with rising standards of living and dense networks of relationships, and where they feel their lives have a clear sense of purpose and meaning. That holy trinity undergirds any healthy society. It’s economic, social and spiritual….

I’d add that we in the West have aggressively embraced values that when taken to excess are poisonous to our well-being. Over the past several decades, according to the World Values Survey, North America, Western Europe and the English-speaking nations have split off culturally from the rest of the world. Since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression than the values that prevail in the Eastern Orthodox European countries such as Serbia, the Confucian countries like South Korea and the mostly Catholic Latin countries like Mexico.

The countries that made this values shift are seeing their well-being decline, according to that Gallup thriving survey. The countries that resisted this shift are seeing their well-being improve. The master trend in recent Western culture has been to emancipate the individual from the group, and now we are paying the social and spiritual price….

But around 2011 something changed. Lower happiness levels transmogrified into higher levels of depression and mental illness, a related but different thing. That year, young progressives began reporting a significant rise in depression rates….

There’s a lot going on to explain these depression rates, but one of them has got to be that progressives are more likely to embrace the autonomy and social freedom ethos described in that World Values Survey, and this hyperindividualistic ethos is not good for your social and spiritual health.

Let’s be clear about what’s happened here: greed. Americans have become so obsessed with economic success that we’ve neglected the social and moral conditions that undergird human flourishing. Schools spend more time teaching professional knowledge than they do social and spiritual knowledge. The prevailing values worship individual choice and undermine the core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth. There’s a lot of cultural work to do.

A society without a measure of autonomy would be brutal and repressive, but in our efforts to secure sufficient autonomy, we have veered off toward another extreme, making autonomy our supreme value. The results have been catastrophic. Only by seeking a more balanced approach can we fix the epidemic of loneliness and resist libertarian assaults on the common good and human flourishing.