Response to Father Araujo

Many thanks to Father Araujo for responding to Eduardo and me.

I note that Father Araujo is silent on the question whether the doctrinal perspective he took in his post (that a Catholic can not in good conscience disagree with the Church on questions of morality) is consistent with American democracy.

He asks me to support the view that an overwhelming majority of American Catholics reject that perspective. I had principally in mind the very high percentage of Catholics that reject the
Vatican’s position on contraception. Clearly they know what the leaders of the Church think, but they do not feel obligated to follow their lead. Andrew Greeley has detailed the extent to which American Catholics do not feel obligated to adhere to Vatican pronouncements on morality in much of his work (see, e.g., The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council Now).

I agree with Father Araujo’s implication that Kennedy’s address to the Houston Ministerial Association was misconceived. I would have preferred it if President Kennedy had said that he was a Catholic, had deeply internalized Catholic values, but believed that Catholics had the right and the duty to follow their conscience when they disagreed with the leaders of the Church. In other words, he did not submit to the dictates of a foreign power. In this connection, I think any Catholic who publicly endorsed Father Araujo’s doctrinal perspective could not be elected President of the United States.

I do not contend that speaks against Father Araujo’s theological position. I think it is a mistake to suppose that theology must fit the needs of politics or the state (Stanley Hauerwas has spoken eloquently on the latter point (see A Christian Critique of Christian America in The Hauerwas Reader). Although I do not agree with Father Araujo’s position, the point of my post was exclusively political. Consequently I think the quotation from John Courtney Murray is relevant to Father Araujo’s theological position, but not to the point of my post (though I would be grateful for the citation, on or off line).

Father Araujo is puzzled by my reference to First Things Catholics. I certainly do not maintain that readers of First Things are necessarily First Things Catholics (I, in fact, suggested that Robert George, a contributor to First Things may or may not be a First Things Catholic). I had in mind the description of the First Things project in Damon Linker’s excellent book The Theocons (which is not to say that I wholly agree with his conception of the role of religion in politics). Linker maintains that the First Things project is to show that Catholic values of a particular stripe are American values. He maintains, as do I, that the effort is a failure. As I have suggested, I think the principles propounded by the Vatican and by First Things are far more absolute than those typically followed in this country.  I think that efforts to show that the United States is really a Catholic country or a Kantian country or any other deontology run up against the relentless tendency of the country to compromise. The Church can play a prophetic role; it can be influential; it can speak truth to power. But it is a pilgrim church and a divided church in a pluralistic, pragmatic country. The First Things project seeks to argue that a divided part of a minority church is really at the center of American political philosophy in a country dominated by Protestants. Not very likely, but the project has had far more political success than could have been predicted.