In September, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, in his last year as the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America, gave a speech on woke culture, post-liberalism, and the response of the Social Doctrine of the Church. He begins by addressing the crisis in liberalism and two responses (all quotes are in italics):

• During the first decades of the XXI century, the intellectual, political, and cultural debate in the United States has been marked by the emergence of two main ideologies that, although seemingly opposed, share a common root: the dissatisfaction with the liberal paradigm inherited from modernity.
• On the one hand, the so-called woke culture has highlighted the inadequacies of classical liberalism to address the historical wounds of slavery, structural racism, gender discrimination and social exclusions that persist in society.
• On the other hand, the so-called post-liberal movement seeks to transcend the liberal order, denouncing the insufficiency of individualism and the corrosive power of deregulated markets, and proposing instead economic protectionism, as a revaluation of the community, of tradition and, in some cases, of a confessional role of religion in public life.

The pressure on liberalism is intensifying as it faces a series of crises:

• Growing economic inequalities, democratic disenchantment, erosion of trust in institutions, and cultural fragmentation have weakened the liberal promise of freedom, equality, and prosperity.
• The 2008 financial crisis, followed by crisis of the outbreak of the Coronavirus have intensified this perception, sharpening ideological polarization in the United States.
• In this context, both woke culture and post-liberalism are presented as alternative responses. The first insists on the centrality of identity and the need for a restorative historical memory but is often subject to relativism and disconnection with reality. The second stresses the importance of the common good (understood as the good of my community), and of the so-called ordo amoris (first me, then my family, and then my country, not worrying much about the fate of the rest of the world), sliding towards authoritarian temptations or towards a fundamentalism that contradicts the legitimate plurality of modern life.

Both alternatives have a defective understanding of the common good and the dignity of the person, despite any valid critiques of the current order. The Church has a more coherent vision rooted in the nature of the human person:

• In the face of these incomplete or problematic alternatives, the Social Doctrine of the Church offers a more complete vision.
• The Church has denounced false anthropologies that reduce the human being to a consumer but has also warned against those that dilute the universal truth into an irreconcilable multiplicity of identities. Instead, it proposed a path based on universal fraternity, solidarity and the common good, correctly understood as the good of the human family, which in turn is made up of concrete people.
• My central thesis is that neither woke culture nor post-liberalism offer a sufficient answer to the contemporary crisis, because both operate from partial or flawed anthropologies. The former emphasizes identity to the point of fracturing universality, and the latter runs the risk of instrumentalizing religion for power purposes.

He describes why liberalism has gone off track:

• Classical liberalism has celebrated freedom as the absence of external interference, but by absolutizing this impoverishing notion of freedom it ended up weakening the community bonds and the go in between institutions that give meaning to social life. The rise of consumerism and possessive individualism reduced the human being to an autonomous consumer, forgetting its relational and transcendent dimension.
• The exaltation of the free market, especially in its neoliberal version, led to growing inequality, the precariousness of work and the marketing of spheres of human life that should be protected from the logic of profit. The 2008 financial crisis showed the fragilities of this system, revealing that the markets lack internal mechanisms to guide them towards the common good.
• By renouncing to propose a horizon of shared meaning, liberalism opened the door to cultural fragmentation and relativism. Thus, public life was impoverished, reduced to the sphere of technical management or the confrontation of individual interests, without a common language to speak of the good, truth or justice.

We can see the results all around us:

• Disenchantment with politics, polarization, distrust of institutions, the expansion of populist and nationalist movements, and the impact of the digital revolution accelerated the perception that liberalism had lost its ability to integrate societies.

Then he turns to woke culture, one form of identity politics:

• There is no doubt that the woke phenomenon has had positive effects.
• The Church shares some intuitions of the woke culture, particularly the need to recognize and redress historical injustices, as well as the centrality of human dignity.
• In the face of the reduction of identity, it proposes universal fraternity; in the face of relativism, the truth of the Gospel; in the face of cancellation, forgiveness and dialogue; in the face of fragmentation, the common good.
• Only from openness to the other as a brother or sister – beyond any identity category – is it possible to build a just and reconciled society.

He then does the same for postliberalism, looking for the commonalities and differences:

• The Social Doctrine of the Church shares some concerns of post-liberalism: it criticizes individualism, denounces the injustices of the deregulated market, stresses the centrality of the common good (in the sense of seeking the good for the family of all peoples) and vindicates the community dimension of the human being.
• However, the Catholic Church cannot endorse a return to models of Christianity that confuse the spiritual and the temporal.
• In this sense, Fratelli tutti constitutes a correction to post-liberalism: it recognizes the need to overcome individualistic liberalism, but warns against exclusionary nationalism and authoritarianism.
• From the Christian perspective, the person cannot be reduced to a partial identity, because its value does not depend on social categories but on its condition as a child of God. Christianity, therefore, holds that every identity finds its fullness in communion.

He provides the Catholic understanding of the person and its consequences:

• In the face of these reductionist anthropologies, the Christian proposal is articulated around three fundamental axes:

1. The inalienable dignity of the person: every human being, created in the image of God, possesses an absolute value that does not depend on its economic utility or its belonging to a group.
2. Constitutive relationality: the human being is only understood in relation to others. For this reason, each person can only fully find himself through the sincere gift of himself.
3. The universal vocation to communion: all people are called to form one family in God. This excludes both individualism and tribalism.

• This Christian anthropology has concrete consequences:

1. In the economic sphere, it requires structures that respect the dignity of each worker and promote solidarity.
2. In the cultural sphere, it calls for overcoming identity divisions and recognizing the richness of diversity in unity.
3. In the political sphere, it demands institutions that guarantee freedom and participation, avoiding both fragmentation and authoritarianism.

• The current challenge is to recover the authentic sense of the common good in the face of its caricatures:

1. It is not a mere sum of interests (liberal vision).
2. It is not fragmentation into partial demands (woke culture vision).
3. It is not the imposition of an ideological order (post-liberal vision).

• Policy, when conceived as social charity, becomes one of the highest forms of charity. It is not a matter of mere technical management or a struggle for power, but of service to the common good. Some specific applications would be:

1. Promotion of a long-term policy: in the face of short-term electoral logic, the Church invites us to design policies that think about the next generations, not only about the next elections. This is essential to confront the ecological crisis, structural poverty, migration and the search for world peace.
2. Defense of the dignity of all citizens: policies must guarantee fundamental rights such as education, health, housing and decent work, avoiding all forms of discrimination.
3. Building social consensus: instead of fostering polarization, a policy of dialogue is required, which integrates diverse sensitivities around the common good.

• In this sense, Fratelli tutti opposes both technocratic elitism and exclusionary populism, proposing instead a policy that is born of listening to the people and an openness to diversity.
• The global economy faces the challenge of overcoming the neoliberal logic that has generated inequality, precariousness and exclusion. The Social Doctrine of the Church offers very concrete guidelines here:

1. Subordinating the economy to the common good: legitimate profit cannot be the only criterion of economic activity. For this reason, the economy needs to integrate the logic of gift and gratuitousness.
2. Promote decent work: employment should not be reduced to a cost of production but should be recognized as an essential dimension of human dignity and the integral development of the person.
3. Promoting the social and solidarity economy: cooperatives, benefit societies and other forms of association are concrete ways to put solidarity into practice. A system where a small group of people owns the production and distribution of goods and services, seeking, in each of its decisions, the maximization of profit over the well-being of the workers is unjust.
4. Integral ecology: production and consumption must take into account not only the immediate profit, but also the care of the common home and the future of the next generations.

• The Church’s proposal implies a cultural renewal based on fraternity. Some applications would be:

1. Overcoming relativism and populism: contemporary culture needs to rediscover the possibility of a shared truth and a common language to speak of the good and justice.
2. Promoting interreligious and intercultural dialogue: Nostra Aetate and Fratelli tutti agree that peace is built through the sincere encounter between cultures and religions.
3. Revaluing historical memory in a reconciling way: in the face of the cancellation or ideological manipulation of history, the Church proposes a historical memory that recognizes the pain of the victims, but that opens paths of forgiveness and reconciliation.
4. Educating for fraternity: schools, universities and the various formation courses should train not only in technical skills, but also in civic virtues and openness to others.

Ultimately, Cardinal Pierre makes the case for a personalist foundation in human dignity, a communitarian rejection of libertarianism, a universalistic rejection of sectarianism and narrow forms of identity, and a pluralistic, participatory rejection of authoritarian and totalitarian fantasies. This approach would address the failures of liberalism, from consumerism to excessive individualism to outrageous economic inequality, without taking a path that would destroy democracy and create further fragmentation. Economic justice, a culture of encounter, and increased fraternity and solidarity have the potential to provide democracy with a stronger foundation, helping it to survive the threats it faces in far too many places, including the United States.