Thank you.

Thank you to Bishop Anderson for a very stimulating and thought-provoking lecture with its clarion call to a Christian common life that refuses polarizations, lazy oppositions, and engages in the patient and the difficult work of seeking grace living.

By way of a brief response, I want to pick up on just one thread of the presentation and take it for a little walk via my own Catholic tradition.

I want to focus a little more on a certain aspect of the language of the common good.

And I was very conscious that Anderson spoke more about common life than about common good.

But then when you did talk about the common good, you invoked both its necessity for thinking about the structural dimensions but also the difficulty of that language in terms of its historical complicity.

But I do want to go back to that language of the common good a little because, in truth, I depend on that language in order to help me discern between alternative visions of common life.

So talk to us, Anna, about solidarity and subsidiarity, which are foundational to Catholic social teaching.

Yeah, so the principles of Catholic social teaching, which are basically human dignity, the common good, the preferential option for the poor, solidarity, subsidiarity, care for creation and so forth.

Those principles develop gradually over the course of the last 100, 150 years.

in the teaching of the tradition in a sense.

They're always present as part of it, but they develop with particular emphasis under each successive pope.

And Pope John Paul II was crucially important for generating our current notions of solidarity.

He really focused on solidarity as a virtue that Catholic social teaching needed to emphasise.

So how does

But the pope's concerns go beyond conflict.

He's very concerned that there are particular groups of people in the context of healthcare, in the context of migrants and, and immigration at borders, where AI, um, really turns them further into victims, uh, rather than kind of agents who are able to, to direct their own choices.

He thinks that many of the crises that we face today that might look like separate crises are, in fact, interconnected by a tech dynamic.

Professor Anna Rowlands says the parallels to the new pope are obvious.

He also sees a moment of deep and dangerous dehumanization, um, woven into our economic and political systems.

So for him, the parallels are, are really significant.

It's a moment where those concentrations of power are even more intense than they were then, and yet we're also repeating many of the same cycles and themes.

Can you just help us understand, what, what does being a Catholic, you know, what can the Catholic Church bring to this that all the journalists writing their columns and everyone else looking at it, you know, can't bring?

Well, two things.

Uh, one is obviously you're secular journalists, and so you have to report, as it were, from a kind of plurality of worldviews and a place of a degree of neutrality.

Whereas the Catholic Church is standing in a position where it's able to make a particular set of claims about human life, and it doesn't seek to impose those on others.

But it says, "We believe that human beings are created by a creator who is not us.

We don't make ourselves, and that we have a kind of infinite value.

We have an inalienable dignity, and that there are certain things about, uh, how you order a human life in this world that are kind of non-negotiable.

So will his appeal work?