In CRISIS
“I grew up in Kansas. When
I began my book Render Unto Caesar in 2006, I had in my mind the
America I always knew—or thought I knew. But that America, I admit, has been
passing for fifty years, and probably longer.”
—Charles Chaput, September 2010
—Charles Chaput, September 2010
The Catholic thinkers, in the past century or
so, argued that the Church’s tenets and principles are basically compatible
with the intellectual framework of the Founding Fathers. Indeed, contrariwise,
they argued that the American Founders discovered their basic principles,
knowingly or not, from the Catholic tradition. One can dispute this assumption.
Many of the founding principles, on further examination, were modern in origin
even though they could look like holdovers from the earlier traditions of
ethics, law, and metaphysics. Moreover, the present understanding of American
culture has little to do either with the founding fathers or classical
tradition.
Nothing is more volatile
than the word “rights” and basing one’s political philosophy on its shifting
premises. The intellectual “justification” for current and increasing attacks
on the Church, insofar as they have any substance, is founded on this charge:
the Church is against human “rights.” The word’s modern usage is from Hobbes,
not Aquinas. It means that, because of individual autonomy, for whatever I need
or want, I have a “right.” Since everyone else has the same “right,” yet
disparate “rights” conflict, government is set up to adjudicate who gets what.
The government’s own criterion for enforcing this or that “right” is based on
the same principle: whatever it decides is law. The failure to notice the
dangers of such an understanding of “rights” is coming home to haunt us.
Many writers and thinkers
are struck by the rapidity with which the Catholic Church itself, from being
relatively comfortable in Zion, has suddenly come under fire as the object of
ever-increasing government control and cultural ostracism. It finds itself
having to resort to “freedom of religion” and “freedom of speech” in a world in
which such “freedoms” are either ignored or simply contradicted. The reason for
this change is that the Church is now perceived as the principal obstacle to
establishing a fully “rights-oriented” political society. This is evidently the
goal of the Obama administration as revealed in its ever more invasive
“decrees.” In this “rights” republic, in lieu of any dramatic action of the
Supreme Court, the sole arbiter and definer of what “rights” mean is the state
and what it decrees and enforces.
Many Catholics profess to
be surprised by this sudden drawing of the logical conclusion to what Mary Ann
Glendon called “rights talk.” Many Catholics so want “rights” to mean what they
claim it means that they blind themselves to what the intellectual history of
the word does mean and imply by this enigmatic term. All through recent
decades, the provisions of freedom of speech and freedom of religion have been
used against the Church. It was held to be against free speech and free
religion. The irony today is that it is the Church that finds itself appealing
to these standards over against an administration which claims the same
standards. The decrees that the Church finds contrary to “rights” are precisely
the ones said to be based on “rights”—abortion, contraception, sterilization,
gay marriage, the works.
Numerous writers in recent
years have pointed to the decay of the American family. Since the time of
Aristotle’s response to Plato’s famous proposal of communality of wives and
children, the family has been looked on as a bulwark, not enemy, of the
political order. But there has always been in modern utopian and Marxist
thought a strand that saw the elimination of the family as the key to a
successful social order. What would take the place of the family?–schools,
health agencies, bureaucratic employment institutions, welfare under another
name. Most of these extreme notions are proposed in the name of common good and
human dignity.
We’re All Rome Now
In his essay on
Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, Allan Bloom remarked: “The
corruption of the people is the key to the mastery of Rome.” We need only to
change the name of the capitol city to suspect that this observation applies to
almost every democratic entity, including our own. And what is striking is that
it is precisely a corruption that in almost every way concerns, touches upon,
or affects the family by the institution of policies that are put forth in the
name of modern “rights.”
I began these remarks by
citing a brief comment of Archbishop Chaput. What struck him was the rapidity
of the change in this country from the land that he “thought” that he knew. It
is said by several historians of civilization that once the core principles of
a culture are corrupted, the decline of that society is precipitous. The will
to acknowledge the problem or the failure to see the consequence of “rights”
once put into effect portend a paralysis of the good.
Since much of the culture
has now accepted as “human rights” the issues that the Church has taken a firm
stand against as themselves unnatural and immoral, it follows that the effects
of these “rights” will henceforth dominate the public order. Single parent
families, in virto families of one or another parent, free “health”
service to effect abortion, contraception, euthanasia, and fetal experiment
will all be available. Opposition to these issues will not be seen as “free
speech,” but as “hate language.” No discussion will be allowed largely because
the government understands implicitly the tenuousness and lack of validity to
its own positions. The government will claim the “right” to define what
religion is.
Many, if not most,
religions will go along with this cultural pressure and fact. To oppose it
invites marginalization and probably legal persecution. In any case, in the
name of “human rights,” the government will assume control of both the public
and familial orders. No longer will we find any recognition of an order of
truth that is independent of the state’s own definition of itself.
Is this concern for the
rapid decline of the culture far-fetched? I think not. Even a year ago, few
would have suspected the rapidity with which the Church has become an object of
direct political concern over its own teachings and doctrines. It will get
worse if the present government and its general principles remain in power.
This observation goes against the grain of many, especially of those who agree
with the government’s principles and decrees. But the logic of decline and fall
is already in place. We cannot stop erroneous principles from taking effect
except by acknowledging their falsity. Otherwise, they carry themselves and
those who hold them to their logical conclusion.
The Speed of Change
It can be delayed, but not
stopped until we recognize where the problem lies. It lies in the rejection,
implicit or explicit, of the nature and centrality of the family. In a sense,
we have here an ancient issue. But it is now ever so present. The Catholic
Church is admired for what it stands for. The Catholic Church is hated for what
it stands for. The reason for this paradox lies in the logic of reason.
Etienne Gilson remarked
that once we lay down our first principles, we no longer think as we may but we
think as we can. We are seeing the “logic” of “rights” being carried out before
our very eyes. The undermining and elimination of the family are no accidents.
They follow from certain premises, the premises that place our private good at
the center of reality. The rapidity of change means, I suspect, that “it is
later than we think.” We are not at the beginning of the change but, as
Archbishop Chaput intimated, at the end. That is why is seems so rapid. Little
is left to oppose it.
