Saintly institutions

 

       Well, it's happened. Donald Trump is president.  There are no more saintly institutions.

        I grew up in saintly institutions. St. James Parish in Decatur, with its pastor, its church, its school. The city of Decatur, with its parks. The country, the USA, truly a blessed place. Victorious over Naziism and Japanese militarism.

        The Franciscan Order, with its seminary system, and their saintly faculties. And over all, the Catholic Church, with its pope and bishops.

        Added to those saintly institutions, some secular saints: science and technology.

        As a novice Franciscan in 1955 I was commissioned to write the script for a pageant celebrating the 60th ordination anniversary for a priest in our friary. My script celebrated the sanctity of everything in the Franciscan and Catholic world. I incorporated whatever music I could find that illustrated saintly triumph. A few years later I was commissioned to write another script celebrating something--it may have been the 50th anniversary of the founding of the seminary where we were studying. My script was even more triumphalist. I recall featuring a covered wagon and a campfire, with patriotic music. I involved every student in the seminary in its production--even the production had to be saintly. The friars in the Midwest were truly saints combining Franciscan virtue with American virtue.

        In grad school I received a secular vision of saintly institutions: functionalist sociology. The goal was to design perfect institutions that would run by themselves, freeing everyone in the society to pursue happiness. A society was to be like the human body, self-correcting when any outside force threatened one of its functions. Perfect laws would ensure a perfect (saintly) society.

        The nail in the coffin of Catholic saintliness was the revelation of sex abuse by clergy and religious. My experience of living fifty years in a religious community gave me more evidence that not all of us are saintly. More and more revelation brought down the image of saintliness of our American institutions: slavery, treatment of indigenous people in our land, present-day systematic injustice. All the things that Trump politicians label as "woke."

        Our culture says we should tamp down such revelations. Reinstate the vision of saintliness in America. We have no sinners.

 

 "There is no institution that human beings cannot mess up."

        I have promoted that statement for years. It was a statement of my experience. But I did not carry the statement to its logical conclusion: it means that no institution is saintly. There are sinners everywhere. We are the sinners. We will never design the perfect institution. We will never get all the laws needed to wipe out crime. We are not likely to be more virtuous than our ancestors.

        This is an old religious insight. It has not been a popular insight in our society with its image of itself as a saintly society. We keep thinking that one more law or ordinance will fix us. Our vision is too utopian.

  

Our Future under Donald Trump

        Mr. Trump and his allies are likely to mess up many of our institutions, and mess them up badly. In his last administration he allowed the Centers for Disease Control to be led by incompetent people, and when Covid hit, the CDC was not as prepared to deal with it as it would have been had it been better led. We can anticipate a flood of incompetent judges, decimation of efforts to mitigate climate change, legitimized persecution of those among us who are "not like us," (gays and transgender people), resurrection of Jim Crow-like behavior norms. We may see our military used against us. Fox news, talk radio, and social media could become our only sources of information about what is happening in our country and around the world. Foolish economic decisions could lead us into another depression.

        But let's be honest. Democratic administrations have not touched some of the root causes of our problems. The goal of wind and solar farms is to allow us to keep on doing what we have always done. No president since Jimmy Carter has dared to suggest publicly that we might need to do things we don't like to do. We may have to sacrifice something. Carter suggested sacrifice and was branded as a fool. We are living by a divinely sanctioned moral principle: "If I like to do something, you are not allowed to stop me from doing it." The effect of this principle is the legitimizing of monumental inequality. Our systems have risen up and swallowed us.

  

Repent!

      The figure of a hooded figure holding up a sign that says "Repent" is a comic staple. To repent means to stop doing something you are now doing. It means to admit that you are not saintly, and to follow up with that admission and do something to change your behavior.

        There will be saints and sinners in the Trump administration, just as there have been saints and sinners in the Biden administration, and in every bank and investment house and school and church in the country. The popular vote favoring Trump is a plea for someone to do something different. Not all supporters of Trump are sinners.

        Other countries have elected unwise leaders and survived--think of Argentina and Brazil. We will muddle through.

        We will muddle through and abandon the vision of the saintly institution. We will try to distinguish saints from sinners in whatever institution we live in. We will praise the saints and call the sinners, gently, to repentance. Punishment is not the way to create a saintly institution. We will acknowledge that we are all partly saint and partly sinner, and that it is hard to tell the difference this side of eternity. So we will treat our fellow saintly sinners the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

        This is the way Christianity says we should live. If we live that way we might be able to call ourselves a Christian society.

        But we should quit calling ourselves that. There are people among us who are not Christian and who feel excluded when we say things like that. We should call ourselves sinful/saintly followers of Jesus Christ, trying to live peacefully with people who see God differently from how we see God. We do not own God. We do not control God. We do not have a monopoly on knowledge of God, and still less on living the way God wants us to live.

        We are all learners. Jesus said "make disciples of all nations." A disciple is a learner. To learn means to change your mind.

        To learn means to repent.

  

On abortion as an issue of natural law

[I wrote this in 2007. It still seems relevant.]

      "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

      Thomas Jefferson began his argument for independence with these words.

      Traditional Catholic theology held certain truths to be self-evident, and other truths to be true but not self-evident. The former were based on natural law, while the latter were known only by the light of revelation. For example, it was self-evident, a truth of natural law, that murder is wrong, but not self-evident that one had to be baptized in order to be saved. Natural law was known by all people of good will. Truths known by revelation were known only by people who had been exposed to revelation as taught by the Church.

      This distinction was central to the argument used by John Kennedy in his speech to Protestant ministers in 1960, the speech in which he defended himself against the claim that if he were elected president, he would have to enforce moral precepts held as true by the Church. He argued that a Catholic politician in this country was not bound to enforce moral truths that were known only by the light of revelation. Catholic politicians must enforce self-evident moral truths, but are under no greater obligation to do that than any other person of good will. Issues of natural law have to be decided by following the rules of political debate and decision.

      This argument broke with the traditional European understanding that political leaders had the right and the duty to enforce what they believed to be true, even when those truths were not held by people of other faiths. The maxim was "error has no rights." The argument had proceeded from the time of the Thirty Years War, in which Catholics and Protestants used violence to enforce their beliefs, through the principle cuius regio, eius religio, which could be translated as "whatever religion the king espouses, the people should also espouse." That was a principle that at least reduced violence. In John Courtney Murray's phrase, it was an "article of peace."

      The historical story could be told that the American colonies, through their experience of flight from religious persecution in Europe and of living in relative peace with people of competing faiths, had discovered a strategy that greatly increased the prospects of peaceful coexistence. Catholics could understand the strategy in terms of natural law versus revelation, and this is the distinction that freed John Kennedy and opened the way for his election.

      The distinction between natural law and revelation is central to the stance being taken by Catholic bishops on the issue of abortion. We are not, they say, trying to enforce our denominational beliefs on the rest of society. Everyone should know that abortion is murder, and that murder is self-evidently wrong. We have every right to attempt to punish the behavior by means of civil institutions.

      It is hard for those of us accustomed to a post-Kennedy tradition to appreciate how the discussion has imperceptibly slipped back into a pre-1960 mentality. We have slipped into the pre-1960 mentality by placing the Church in official opposition to a political order. The Church has become a player in the political game, not just in the sense that its members have personal beliefs that they attempt to realize, but in the sense of overt, structural attempts to control. Bishops are denying Communion to politicians.

      What we Catholics too often fail to realize is that many people are opposed to making abortion illegal because of their own sincere religious beliefs. We have become too convinced by the anti-abortion argument that anyone favoring the legality of abortion must be motivated by financial incentives. I have become convinced by conversation with pro-choice people that their statement that they are pro-choice, not pro-abortion, is sincere. They believe that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is not murder. (Recall that, in spite of what we have been told by Church leaders in recent years, for centuries official Catholic Church teaching held the same position. The term used was "ensoulment," which meant that there was a point in time, sometimes months after conception, when the fetus became "ensouled," possessed of an immortal soul.) Beyond that moral evaluation of abortion itself, there are additional reasons why one could be pro-choice. As Robert Drinan once argued, it is not always wise to attempt to enforce a moral principle by legal means. It can be argued that a law against abortion is unenforceable, because it involves behavior that is hidden--in fact, more hidden than almost any other behavior that is not now criminalized. Few people would want to see a woman imprisoned because she had procured an abortion, yet that is what making abortion illegal would do. One can only imagine the kinds of symbolic protests that would follow, similar to the protests in the 1960's that caused legislatures to overturn laws that made contraception illegal. Making abortion illegal would result in women using illegal means to procure the abortion, means which are by nature uncontrolled by open medical practice and which often result in injury or death to the woman as well as to the fetus.

      The bottom line of my argument therefore is that, in light of widespread public disagreement with the belief that abortion is murder, and that it is not wise to attempt to prevent it by law, our position is not based on natural law but on revelation. The belief is not self-evident to all people of good will, but it is a denominational belief, something not to be enforced on those of other faiths.

      By framing the argument in terms of natural law, we have allowed the Church to be dragged back into the same position that it traditionally had in Europe, where Church leaders defended their right to tell the State what it should do. The result has been the same here as it was in Europe: a divisiveness that poisons political discourse, causing people to accuse their opponents of bad faith, people to be dealt with not by political discussion, but only by means of naked political power.

      The smell and taste of power is seductive. Fundamentalist Protestants may be excused when they taste it for the first time, after a tradition of rejection of politics. We Catholics should have learned from our experience. Things go better when we refrain from trying to run the state. Abortion should be dealt with as a matter of faith, not as a matter of self-evident truth. We should concentrate on persuading our own people of the values that we believe are at stake. We are under no obligation to make everyone else come along.

Where to go in Ukraine

        The war in Ukraine is reaching a crisis point. It is becoming accepted that without substantial outside help, Ukraine cannot withstand the forces of its much larger neighbor. Now that neighbor is enlisting troops from North Korea. If Ukraine begins to accept troops from other countries in large enough numbers to make a difference, we are on the verge of another world war.

 

        It is time for Ukraine to admit that it cannot continue to resist militarily. Now is the time for Ukraine to move to a nonviolent strategy of opposing occupation. Ukraine is where Denmark was when, at the beginning of World War II, it accepted the fact that it could not withstand German power and adopted a nonviolent resistance strategy.

 

        Nonviolence can only be effective if it has the support of the vast majority of a population. Ukraine is in that situation. Its people are weary of having their infrastructure systematically destroyed and their manpower systematically killed off. Yet they do not want themselves to be defined as subjects of a legally accepted occupying power.

 

        The Ukrainian government should announce that it is ceasing violent resistance to occupation, and that it opposes Russian occupation as legally and morally unacceptable. It should at the same time announce that it welcomes soldiers in the occupying power to become citizens of Ukraine, ceasing their violent attack. Both Russian and North Korean soldiers, who are now cannon fodder, might welcome the invitation to join a state that recognizes freedom and equal citizenship. Former soldiers will be welcomed into Ukrainian society, offering the world an example of how a multicultural society can grow from an armed conflict.

 

        Ukraine has the high moral ground. All the nations now supporting it will welcome a strategy that relieves them from the danger of armed conflict with Russia. Russia will be forced into an even lower moral ground than where it already stands, except that it will now be isolated even more.

 

        The more troops Mr.Putin pours into Ukraine, the more new citizens Ukraine will gain and Russia lose. 

 

        If there was ever a situation where nonviolence seems a promising strategy, it is today in the Ukraine conflict with Russia.