Francis Cardinal George Arrives At The Funeral of Henry Hyde, 2007
Francis Cardinal George has a gift of being able to view his country as an outsider. As one who grew to manhood in Japan and lived there for 23 years, I think I experienced more of a wrenching adjustment to American life than I ever did to living in Japan. I’ve also wondered how much this played into my conversion to Catholicism, as it has allowed me to maintain a sense of being a cultural outsider.
Here Cardinal George is able to trace the effects of Protestantism on the United States and to view his own country as an object for the evangelization of the gospel by the Catholic Church. I think that is especially helpful to Americans who are not able to see their country in such a critical light. Sometimes as I debate atheists and others on the Internet I find myself thinking: where do these aliens come from? Of course the answer is right here in my home country. They are my neighbors and yet I feel separated from them by a huge gulf.
If you have ever felt that way (remember Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid looking at the posse in their pursuit repeating over and over again “Who are those guys?”), this exposition on the United States will answer some of that question. For the Catholic Church is being pursued, make no mistake about it. The Church stands in many ways as the only defender of the weakest and most needful members (the elderly, the unborn, the economically unproductive, the mentally and physically disabled) of American society. And the secular left is in full throated opposition to any who express their faith on public issues, claiming it is culturally inappropriate to express “privately held” religious views in the public square.
The Distinctive Contribution of Theology
WHAT ARE YOU DOING to affect the culture in the United States?” Pope John Paul II asked me this question directly when I was in Rome in the late 1990s for an ad limina visit. John Paul often spoke of the Church’s mission as including culture-engagement or culture-transformation. “The faith creates culture” was a frequent refrain of his.
There are, of course, many ways that the Church shapes culture, but one of the most significant means to this end is the intelligent and faithful practice of theology Even in its most technical academic expression, Catholic theology is essentially evangelical in nature and purpose, since its task is to explore the full meaning of the story of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead.
When theologians are no longer taught by the Church and fired by her evangelical enthusiasm, they may become cultural critics or philosophers of religion, but they cannot carry out the full culture-forming task envisioned by the Church. When theologians speak from within the household of the faith, however, their words can create a culture open to Catholicism. How can authentically Catholic theology help announce the Good News to and within a culture shaped by a complex and uniquely American set of assumptions, values, symbols, practices, and convictions?
The Evangelically Ambiguous Quality of Every Culture
Since we have recognized that every culture is a human artifact and since human beings are both made in the image of God and also fallen, we can assume, on strictly theological grounds, that every culture is evangelically ambiguous — that is to say, both fertile soil and rocky ground for sowing the seed of the Gospel. Accordingly, we may search, with Paul Tillich, for the religious ground of the artistic, political, and institutional life of any society; and we may notice, with Karl Barth and John Milbank, the various spiritual distortions evident in those same cultural expressions.
With Ongen and the bishops of Vatican II, we may discern the semina verbi [the seeds of the word] that are present in non-Christian philosophies and religions; and with Augustine, we may craft an appropriate critique of even a great culture grown decadent. Thus it is in a spirit neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither overly enthusiastic nor excessively censorious, that we look, with Gospel eyes, at our American culture. Since this is our culture, all of us can look at trends and values and past history to understand who we are collectively; but each of us can also look within and seek for identity and self-understanding as individuals. Our culture is a locus theologicus, a privileged source for theological reflection.
American Culture as Rocky Ground
What are some of the qualities of our culture that make it hostile, or at least unreceptive, to the proclamation of the Good News? The United States is a nation that has been shaped decisively by Protestantism, with its stress on the power of inner experience. For Martin Luther and other great reformers, justification is mediated less through an external system of sacraments and ecclesial institutions than through the deeply subjective intuition of faith. When this Lutheran insight passed into the thought-world of Calvinism, it became the inner conviction that one had been predestined to salvation.
A particularly powerful insight into the psychological dynamics of this Calvinist feeling of being saved is given by John Henry Newman in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He recounts there the story of his embrace of evangelical Christianity at the age of fifteen. By an “inward conversion” of great intensity; Newman became aware of two “luminously self-evident beings,” himself and his Creator, and of the fact of his final perseverance in grace. At the beginning of the modern age, such subjective certitude had come to replace the objective givenness of participation in Church and sacramental rites as assurance of salvation.
The Emphasis on Experience in American Theology
When, in the seventeenth century the Reform became more rationalized through the efforts of the Protestant scholastics, the focus on interiority and experience was preserved on the continent in such groups as the Hutterites, the Anabaptists, and the Moravians and in England by the Puritans and the Quakers. Many of the earliest settlers of colonial America were members of these more radical and marginalized Protestant groups. An already subjective Protestantism was expressed in a more markedly inward and experiential form.
Think, for instance, of the Quaker emphasis on the inner light and the Puritan — and later Wesleyan concern for tracking the movement of the divine spirit within one’s soul. And in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the various “Awakenings” that swept the country, preachers confirmed these tendencies by encouraging their listeners to feel their conversion to Christ in an intensely emotional way and to express it vividly and physically. This is the ground of our contemporary search for what might be called spiritualities without faith.
Experiential Protestantism assumed a new and more intellectual form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the thought of the founder of theological liberalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Trained in a Moravian community; Schleiermacher never lost his fascination with the subjective ground of faith. He simply transposed it, in line with the romanticism of his time, into the “feeling of absolute dependency,” claiming that intuition as the self-verifying foundation for Christian dogma. This Schleiermacherian liberalism profoundly shaped the religious thought of both Europe and America, helping to give theological legitimacy here to Unitarianism (Schleiermacher placed the Trinity beyond the range of what could be verified through religious experience) and Emersonian transcendentalism (in his early writings, Schleiermacher spoke of a mystical union with the Universe). Though these more liberal forms of religion strayed far from the classical Christianity of the sixteenth-century reformers, they retained the powerful subjectivism and experientialism of the Reformation.
Paul Tillich, the twentieth-century Protestant theologian standing most clearly in the tradition of Schleiermacher, found a receptive audience among American intellectuals for his correlational version of Christian theology; Tillich understood religion, subjectively enough, as “ultimate concern”; as he saw it, the task of the theologian was to relate the anguished questions of finitude to the answers of the biblical tradition. Through a kind of trickle-down effect, the thought of Tillich has found its way into much of popular narrative theology and into many forms of theological reflection done in pastoral contexts.
And even as our Protestant-formed culture shades today into a post-Christian secularism, the emphasis on subjectivity and experience remains. It can be seen, for instance, in the numberless talk shows, those public confessionals where people discuss their deepest feelings and anxieties and are urged to act them out, sometimes histrionically. And it can be discerned in the myriad forms of New Age spirituality most of which are grounded in a mysticism of the divinized self.
The Challenge to Revelation and Authority in American Culture
All of this, quite obviously, renders extremely difficult the proclamation of a revealed and doctrinally developed faith. For classical Catholic Christianity, the truths of faith do not arise from common human experience; they come to us through God’s gracious self-revelation. More to the point, they cannot be verified, measured, or contained by our subjectivity. In the very first question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that a revealed sacra doctrina is required beyond the philosophical discipline of metaphysics because human beings are oriented to an end beyond what they could in principle grasp through their own powers. Revealed doctrine, and its theological elaboration, are necessary, in other words, because God has not intended that we rest in ourselves, trapped, as it were, in our own experience.
In his critique of Tillich’s correlational method, Barth said that the “answers” of Scripture are so surprising and strange that they confound any and all questions that we ask. And in his critique of Karl Rahner’s more experiential approach, Hans Urs von Balthasar compares Jesus to a mountain torrent. The torrent cannot be exhausted by the various human channels made to receive its water. What Aquinas, Barth, and von Balthasar suggest is this: experience and subjectivity are most themselves when they are graciously overthrown by the revelation that surpasses them. The exaggerated subjectivism of American culture renders this overthrow problematic.
A related difficulty is that of authority especially religious authority. When subjective experience is the source, measure, and criterion of truth, any and all authority is seen as arbitrary and invasive. But a doctrinal tradition that is grounded in objective revelation must be preserved and monitored by an authority that transcends subjectivity and is thus capable of real judgment. Newman argued, throughout his career, that the existence of a developing and historically situated dogmatic faith requires an infallible authority in order to discriminate between legitimate evolutions and corruptions. As even a casual survey of American religious culture reveals, acknowledgment of such an authority is problematic.
Another theologically negative dimension of our American culture is what could be called its fundamentally antagonistic social ontology. In addition to John Calvin’s influence in America, we have to recognize the presence of Hobbes. As noted earlier, at the heart of the medieval Catholic theological worldview was a metaphysics of participatio. God was seen, not so much as a supreme being, but the sheer act of to-be itself (Thomas’s ipsum esse subsistens), in which and through which all created things exist. This analogical conception of being allowed the medievals to see God in creation and thus to appreciate the essential connectedness of all things to God and, through God, to one another. Because human beings participate in God, they are, willy-nilly, linked to each other in the deepest ground of their existence. This powerful underlying metaphysical account led medieval Christians to appreciate the connectedness of social/political life as natural to human beings and, consequently, to see violence as not only ethically improper but ontologically inconsistent.
This vision began to break down under the influence of Duns Scotus’s univocal conception of being (which turned God into a supreme instance of being, set over and against finite realities) and Nominalism (which radically individualized and hence separated God and creatures). Pope Benedict XVI laid great emphasis on this problem in his 2006 address at the University of Regensburg, where he spoke of the relation between social violence and a God totally transcendent to His creation. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the total dissolution of the medieval ontology was realized only in the early modern metaphysical and political thought of Hobbes. Having bracketed the creator God, Hobbes saw, consequently, that the basic form of human existence must be antagonistic and individualistic. If there is no universal ground in the divine being, the war of all against all is the natural state of affairs, and sociality; an artificial contrivance for the preservation of life, is no reflection of ontology. On this Hobbesian reading, the purpose of government is no longer — as it was in classical and Christian thought — civic virtue and social justice, but rather the protection of each individual from the potential threat posed by every other individual. A social ontology of peace gives way to one of violence. “Ought” can find no foundation in “is”; and metaphysics no longer functions as meta-ethics.
This basic Hobbesian view goes through various shadings and permutations in Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the other American founders, but they share in a common understanding of the essential nature of government. Thus, in the Declaration of Independence, it is the right to life, liberty; and happiness that is affirmed; the form of that life, the purpose of that liberty; and the proper ground of that happiness are left completely unarticulated. And the role of government is still exclusively protective rather than directive, since ontological antagonism is taken for granted.
When John Paul II spoke against a Western conception of freedom that is detached from justice and truth, it was this peculiarly modern, Hobbesian sense of freedom that he had in mind. When the free choice of the individual is incontestably paramount, the consequences are the materialism, self-absorption, litigiousness, and, above all, violence that so obviously mark our culture. Abortion and domestic abuse, human trafficking, capital punishment, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the appalling violence on our city streets often fueled by drugs, our sometimes arrogant and aggressive nationalism all flow from an apotheosized freedom rooted, in turn, in an antagonistic, disenchanted metaphysics.
One of the most remarkable and disturbing expressions of this Hobbesian freedom is the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992, dealing with abortion rights. The majority of the justices determined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” What we see here, with breathtaking clarity is the complete eclipse of truth by freedom and hence the subjectivizing of any and all moral, metaphysical, or religious claims.
In the City of God, Augustine mocked the order of the Roman Empire as a pseudo-justice, based more on fear and oppression than on a dedication to real community And he clearly showed the relationship between the phony social order of the empire and its inadequate theology: the worship of vain and violent false gods led to a dysfunctional political system. What he proposed to replace it was the communio of Christianity, grounded in the love, forgiveness, and compassion of Christian believers, and ultimately in the communio of the Trinitarian persons: a good society rooted in right worship. In Pope John Paul II’s warnings to the West, we hear an overtone of this Augustinian critique. A freedom that is disengaged from the worship of the Creator God, one that is thus correlated to a false metaphysics, becomes poisonous.
Proclaiming a Christian metaphysics of participation, connection, and compassion is, obviously, difficult in a culture predicated on Hobbesian social and ontological assumptions. In a nation formed by an antagonistic and individualistic sense of freedom, it is awkward to say that our lives do not belong to us, that our liberty is for the sake of the Gospel, and that happiness lies in surrender to the divine will. Ignatius of Loyola is speaking a profoundly Christian language when he says, “Take, Lord, receive all my liberty my memory my understanding, my entire will. You gave them to me, now I give them back to you.”
What Ignatius assumes is a metaphysics of participation and creation: our being is, first and above all, given and then received, and therefore the task is to give it away in love rather than cling to it. “What you have received as a gift, give as a gift.” Americans often find this language of self-sacrifice hard to grasp. But not only our values and patterns of thought are evangelically ambiguous — our institutions and social patterns are as well. Political democracy and religious pluralism, both characteristic of America, require extensive theological analysis as carriers of culture, as do the worlds of entertainment and the professions.
American Culture as Receptive Soil
The theological assumption I made at the outset, that every culture is evangelically ambiguous, now compels us to explore the other side of this question: To what degree is American culture receptive to the sowing of the Gospel seed? As we saw, John Paul II was a trenchant and honest critic of the modern West, but he was also an admirer of the American experiment, and his theological analyses and meditations on the value of our society can guide us effectively in this section.
Pope John Paul II visited the United States in 1979, 1987, and 1995. On each occasion, he found much to praise in America. During his 1979 pilgrimage, he preached at the Chicago lakefront on the theme of the national motto e pluribus unum. Looking out over the throng of about a million people, he reminded them that they had come from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. He exulted in the fact that from this diversity they had created something new: “You brought with you a different culture and you contributed your own richness to the whole; you had different skills and you put them to work, complementing each other, to create industry agriculture, and business; each group carried with it different human values and shared them with others for the enrichment of your nation. E pluribus unum: you became a new entity a new people.”
This new people was forged for the purpose of pursuing material wealth, fellowship, and social progress, but, the pope reminded them, “history does not exhaust itself in technological conquest or in cultural achievement only.” There is a deeper reality, signaled by the very act of gathering around the table of the Eucharist: “your unity as members of the People of God.” What John Paul underscored was the analogy between the secular national communio of the United States and the sacred, transnational communio of the Church. Like America, the Church gathers people from every corner of the world, benefits from their distinctive contributions, and then draws them into oneness around a common principle: “The Body of Christ is a unity that transcends the diversity of our origin, culture, education, and personality”
John Paul meant to highlight this analogy not only theoretically but practically: the praxis of America, as it has painfully but effectively forged unity out of diversity, echoes the praxis of the Church as she has brought, throughout the centuries, peoples to Christ. Thus, when America has successfully produced the one from the many, it has participated, however imperfectly, in the divine unifying principle on full display in the Church, namely, Christ’s love for the world.
This insight was never more dramatically expressed than in the homily the pope delivered at Dodger Stadium during his 1987 pilgrimage. Once more looking out on an audience of striking ethnic diversity; John Paul said, “Christ is Anglo and Hispanic, Christ is Chinese and Black, Christ is Vietnamese and Irish, Christ is Korean and Italian, Christ is Japanese and Filipino. . . and many other ethnic groups.” And this is why the idea and practice of e pluribus unum make American culture receptive to the proclamation of Christ’s Gospel in universal communion.
When the Puritan settlers arrived in the New World, they expressed the significance of their pilgrimage in explicitly biblical terms. Having passed through the Red Sea waters of the Atlantic Ocean and having left behind the divisiveness and superstition (as they saw it) of Europe, they sought to establish on these shores “a city on a hill,” a New Jerusalem where a purified Christian community would gather. This sense of America as a divinely sanctioned place of fresh beginnings worked its way quickly and deeply into the national consciousness.
It can be sensed in the rhetoric of the writers and activists of the Revolutionary period, in the western movement of the pioneer generations, in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in the poetry of Walt Whitman, and in the hope against hope of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants. American culture is shaped significantly by the intuition that we are not the victims of history, inescapably caught in a maelstrom of war, recrimination, and social oppression. Rather, we sense that, here, the rejected are welcomed and even the lowliest, by dint of imagination and courage, can move confidently into an open future.
On October 3, 1979, John Paul II gathered in the rain with three hundred thousand people in Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. There he spoke of this quality of the American soul. “It will always remain one of the glorious achievements of this nation that, when people looked toward America, they received together with freedom also a chance for their own advancement.” In the cadences of our own literary tradition, the pope urged us to realize the fullness of this vision: “Break open the hopeless cycles of poverty and ignorance … the hopeless cycles of prejudices that linger on despite enormous progress. . . the inhuman cycles of war that spring from the violation of man’s fundamental rights.”
What the pope counseled was that the biblical understanding of history as hopeful, open, and providentially guided would find an echo in the American mythology of opportunity and advancement, and hence that prophetic calls to radical social transformation, which might sound strained and naïve elsewhere, would here find a receptive ear. At the very heart of John Paul’s assessment of our culture is a deep and often-expressed appreciation for our ideal of human rights.
The Hobbesian conception of rights and freedom, as we saw, has, to some degree, haunted us from the founding of the nation to the present. But it would be an oversight if we ignored the pope’s equally passionate endorsement of a properly directed and grounded freedom. In a homily delivered on October 3, 1979, in Philadelphia, John Paul drew attention to the Declaration of Independence, which had been composed and ratified in that city two hundred years earlier. He cited the prologue of the document, which contains “a solemn attestation of the equality of all human beings, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
The key word in this sentence is “Creator.” In pre-Christian political and social thought, the radical inequality of human beings was taken for granted. In Aristotle’s Politics, our fundamental differences in intelligence, courage, and physical ability provide the justification for clear social distinctions and hierarchies, including that of master and slave. But with the Judeo-Christian revelation, something radically new was introduced: the idea of a creator God in whose presence all of us, despite our differences, are respected and loved. In light of this biblical idea, it became clear that human social status could never be simply a function of natural abilities or accomplishments. It must rather be rooted in our identity as beloved children of God.
Inasmuch as Locke and Jefferson spoke of creation in their articulation of human rights, they showed the influence of this Christian heritage and their departure from a purely Hobbesian construal of the question. In that same Philadelphia sermon, John Paul drew attention to the Genesis account of the creation of human beings in the image and likeness of God. It is this biblical intuition, he implies, that informed the best of the language of “rights” from the founders of the American political culture.
Therefore when the Church speaks — as she must — of the dignity of each individual, created by God and redeemed by Christ, she ought to find a receptive audience in Americans formed by the civil tradition of human rights. ‘When, on Gospel grounds, she defends the weakest and most vulnerable members of a society– the elderly, the unborn, the economically unproductive, the mentally and physically disabled — her words ought to resonate with the deepest convictions of the American soul. In the measure that these “least” among us are legally unprotected, our culture has rejected a creation-centered understanding of rights and chosen a Hobbesian conception. A theological analysis of our rights language would be a powerful contribution to culture and society.
At the end of my approaches to God post the other day, I threw in my personal approach to God, the notion that a conclusive argument for theodicy makes it hard to find room for the idea of redemption and obviates the need for Jesus’ ministry. I found that idea in Fr. Aidan Nichols’ marvelous book, The Shape of Catholic Theology, a text that most of my fellow students disliked – thereby creating an almost automatic condition under which I would grow to love it.
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
This is a very strange time in the history of the pro-life movement. As Micah Wilson, Director of the Center of Politics and Religion and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee has written recently: “The lines of disagreement in the philosophical debate over abortion have never been clearer. While the politics of abortion remain as tumultuous and contested as they have ever been, the underlying philosophical, ethical, and scientific issues have been clarified to the extent that any careful person can examine the arguments of both sides and come to a principled and informed position.
