Catholicism does not suggest political systems nor does it disapprove all pragmatic solutions to difficult questions. But conscience does draw a line. The Wethersfield Institute invited sensitive observers of unadorned politics to find the line that conscience draws between the clever and the destructive. Six fine thinkers, Russell Kirk, Russell Hittinger, Fr. Francis Canavan, William Bentley Ball, James Hitchcock and Mary Ellen Bork carried their studies beyond contemporary practice into those particular strengths required of any good citizen, especially a Catholic wanting to serve the nation through politics and survive the process.

Russell Kirk surveyed the concept of the establishment of religion from which Catholics have suffered and of whose advocacy Catholics are now oddly accused; Russell Hittinger raises the unthinkable: will a politically hostile majority cause Catholics to decide they have no political home here? Father Canavan asks an intensely personal question of candidate and voter: when does private conscience limit political choice? William Bentley Ball charts the course of judicial tides sweeping religion out of public life. James Hitchcock sifts the moral values in current issues; and Mary Ellen Bork describes pressures that tend to drive persons of principle out of the political world.