Fifteen years ago the U.S. Catholic bishops, in a document on political responsibility, made some perceptive comments about the state of American public life that echo with much validity today.

The bishops noted the widespread cynicism and frustration among Americans about public life. Many citizens don’t vote, they said, and many “seem disinterested or disenchanted with politics.”

“This alienation is a dangerous trend, threatening to undermine our democratic traditions,” they added. “Sound bites and symbols, war rooms and attack ads are replacing civil debate and the search for the common good. Too much of public life reflects our fears more than our hopes, dividing us by age, race, region and class. Too often the voices that set the agenda of public life are not those that seek the common good, but those who seek to divide us. The politics of money and polarization may help fund raising and ratings, but it is a bad way to build community.”

However, it doesn’t have to be this way, the bishops said. What’s needed, they wrote, is a renewal in “reorienting public life to reflect better the search for the common good (i.e., reconciling diverse interests for the well-being of the whole human family) and a clear commitment to the dignity of the human person. If politics ignores this fundamental task, it can easily become little more than an arena for partisan gamesmanship, the search for power for its own sake or interest group conflict.”

Fast-forward to several weeks ago and we find a member of Congress — one segment of our public life — saying many of the same things. U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana announced he was retiring from the Senate and would not run for re-election because of his disillusionment with the workings — or non-workings — of Congress.

Bayh, who has served in the Senate since 1998, said the American political system was “dysfunctional” and riddled with partisanship. “I love helping our citizens make the most of our lives, but I do not love Congress,” he said.

Bayh is not the first to have made the decision to leave public life in Congress. Others of both political parties have done the same and have expressed the same disillusionment.

And it’s evident that many Americans share the same sentiment. Various public opinion polls over the past several years, for example, have shown a strong disapproval of the work of Congress. A Newsweek poll of 1,006 adults in February said about six in 10 people disapproved of the job Congress was doing, and this included members of both major political parties.

At the heart of the public disillusionment and frustration is the seeming inability to break through the deadlocks that exist on some of the major issues facing the country. There are obviously genuine differences of opinion on how to address these problems, and this is to be expected. But there also needs to be a resolve to work through them, to find common ground, to put the common good — the public interest — ahead of everything else.

One of the difficulties is that we have become so polarized that even the ability to discuss differences of opinion civilly and to be open to finding common ground for the common good appear to have become impossible. This often happens when excessive partisanship on all sides becomes the guiding mode of operation.

As the heads of three U.S. bishops’ committees said last week on the issue of health care reform: “It is time to set aside partisan divisions and special interest pressures to find ways to enact genuine reform. We encourage the administration and Congress to work in a bipartisan manner marked by political courage, vision and leadership.”

Bipartisanship receives a lot of sound bites these days, but practicing it is another thing. The late Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois had something to say about this during debate in Congress on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He noted that both political parties had a civil rights plank in their platforms, and he asked: “Were these pledges so much campaign stuff or did we mean it? Were these promises on civil rights but idle words for vote-getting or were they a covenant meant to be kept? If all this was mere pretense, let us confess the sin of hypocrisy now and vow not to delude the people again.”

Bridging the partisan divide will be required to restore confidence in our democratic system of government and to elevate the common good above everything else. But no one seems to be willing to take the first step.