There is a phrase that captures a mindset that Catholics—in particular, American Catholics, I believe— need to guard against. This phrase is “mater si, magistra no.” The mindset it captures is affirmation of the Church as mother, but rejection (or at least non-affirmation) of the Church as teacher. This phrase arose out of the response of certain Catholics in the United States to the 1961 papal encyclical promulgated by Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra.

One healthy way of considering this mindset may be to observe the separation of eschatology and politics, as Russell Hittinger and Scott Roniger explain in account of Joseph Ratzinger’s thought:

Ratzinger treats the fundamental distinction between morals by nature and the formal, efficient, and final causes of initiation into the Kingdom—properly understood as eschatology. First, the Church imitates Christ, who himself taught the rudiments of the moral law and virtue. Such teaching is given to all the nations. But the Kingdom, which is the locus of eschatology, is not an institutionor association in the familiar sociological sense. The Kingdom is the Person of Christ, and its inhabitants are those who draw close to him by grace. It is not a sphere within other spheres, but an event. “The message of the Kingdom of God has something very important to say to politics, It is healthy for politics to learn that its own content is not eschatological. The setting asunder of eschatology and politics is one of the fundamental tasks of Christian theology.”

Russell Hittinger & Scott Roniger, “How to Inherit a Kingom: Reflections on the Situation of Catholic Political Thought,” 21 Nova et Vetera, English Edition 971, 984 (2023), quoting Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 59.