Health Care Decisions for the Common Good

The Second Vatican Council developed the church’s classic definition of the common good more than 50 years ago when it described the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups, and their individual members, relatively thorough access to their own fulfillment.”¹ This is a theological, and not simply a political, description. As such, it needs a bit of explanation, especially when it comes to understanding what “access to one’s fulfillment” means in the Catholic theological tradition.