There is a duty, as a human being, to love one’s mother and, likewise, to love one’s motherland. This is all the more true for the Catholic, who sees in both a real gift from the eternal God. Yet, like every rightly ordered affection, patriotism must prompt real action. If it never rises above stirring sentiment, then it is not genuine affection at all, much less genuine love.
Sometimes our affections fail to produce action because they are directed towards the wrong object. The Lord commanded us to love our neighbour as ourselves; one might add that this includes loving our neighbourhood. Although patriotism is not indifferent to geopolitics or national affairs, it does not begin with them. Local responsibility does not excuse national indifference; rather, it trains us in the habits of attention, sacrifice and stewardship without which national patriotism becomes merely rhetorical. Love of one’s homeland begins in the home and radiates outwards, one level at a time. As Catholics, we honour God’s gifts by caring for them and passing them on as faithfully as we can. We must learn to love where we live.
As any good Thomist knows, before the will can love something, the intellect must first know it. It follows that, before we can love where we live, we must come to know both the place itself and the people with whom we share it.
The first step is simple: meet our neighbours. During an OCIA class this past winter, a candidate innocently asked how he could love his neighbour when the man kept stealing his parking space. Too often, we expand the word “neighbour” to include almost everyone except the people who actually live near us. The rest of the world receives our pity and charity, while Steve across the street receives our irritation. In reality, he probably does not even receive that, because we have never bothered to meet him.
There’s a saying commonly attributed to Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day: “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” God has given us our neighbours with the express intention that we should love them as an expression of our love for Him. Yet we cannot truly love people while remaining determined not to know them. We should therefore make deliberate efforts to meet the men and women who live around us, even when those encounters never mature into close friendships.
Alongside learning about our neighbours, we must learn about our neighbourhood and town. This can begin with something as simple as attending a meeting of the local city, town or parish council. Such meetings are among the most natural places to discover the problems facing a community. They can also provide practical inspiration for how we might begin to help.
Localism can take many forms. Organisations such as Strong Towns, for example, help communities rethink urban design and infrastructure so that towns better serve the people who inhabit them. Becoming involved in such an organisation – or in a smaller local initiative pursuing similar ends – may be one concrete way to love the place in which we live.
At the risk of letting the capitalist in me show, business must also be recognised as a genuine means of contributing to the common good of a town. Creating a business can be a concrete act of love for one’s neighbour, both through the dignity of employment and through the production of goods and services that the community can enjoy.
Where I grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, few people have done more visible good for the city than the Nelson family of Nelson Fine Art and Gifts. Mark Nelson has spent years using his business to reinvest in Steubenville, improve the surrounding area and create meaningful opportunities for employment. His example demonstrates that commerce need not be merely extractive. Properly ordered, it can become a form of stewardship.
Communities have especially languished since Covid-19. We therefore need concrete occasions for people to come together in pursuit of the common good. The parish is an excellent place to begin.
At our local parish, one member established a men’s group by preparing and hosting a free weekly meal throughout St Michael’s Lent. In doing so, he created real friendships and inspired many of us to redouble our efforts at self-discipline. Another parishioner helped organise monthly Adoration and Benediction, followed by drinks at the pub down the street. This simple pattern of worship and fellowship has encouraged serious conversation, mutual support and spiritual strengthening.
These examples may appear modest, but localism is necessarily built from modest acts. Communities are rarely restored by grand programmes alone. They are restored when people open their homes, attend meetings, start businesses, organise meals, beautify streets, worship together and remain present to one another.
Politics has acquired a bad name largely because people disagree so deeply about the nature of the common good and the means by which it should be pursued. Yet politics, properly understood, concerns our shared life. If Catholics hope to demonstrate genuine patriotism and fulfil Christ’s command to love our neighbour, then we must become more involved in our local communities and more firmly rooted in them.
Part of this means remaining in one place long enough to care about its fate. A society of perpetual transience will struggle to produce either responsibility or affection. We cannot love a place merely in the abstract. We must learn its streets, know its people, share its burdens and contribute to its future. Localism is simply patriotism made concrete: the decision to love, serve and take responsibility for the place God has actually given us.
