Responsibility

I have read with great interest many of the recent MOJ postings that cover a wide variety of issues, and I have pondered two interrelated questions: to which do I respond; and, how do I respond? But other reports have also caught my eye in recent days. I just read several of the news reports covering the group of learned people who are predicting dire consequences for our planet and its inhabitants over the coming decades. More close to home in institutions of higher education that claim affiliation with the Church, I have read about initiatives to increase the number of opposite sex living arrangements and the distribution of condoms to enhance and protect the “rights of students in the face of reality” (I can just imagine what that means to some!).

My search for answers to the questions to which of these do I respond and how do I respond on the investigations of others concerning human rights, caritas, Catholic higher education, the economy, ecological concerns, terrorism, and on and on appeared rather hopeless until I recently decided to reply to an invitation to present a paper in a symposium on responsibility during the summer of 2008.

I have been told by some wise people who have now gone home to God that as they entered the twilight of this life, each experienced an epiphany or manifestation of sorts. While their respective contexts were diverse, each of the individuals who had mentored me raised the same question: what will your answer be to God when He seeks an accounting from you? The response is not to be one expected to please or to entertain or to win approval. It is to be truthful (we may fool others, but it is not possible to fool God or ourselves). I think some of what I am suggesting about responsibility is represented in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. When Oscar Schindler is reflecting at his twilight on what he did and what he failed to do during his life, he says: “if I had sold this, I could have bought one more life; if I had done that, I could have bought one more life…” That is the sort of human accounting that I can see in the future that each of us will face.

This seems to be an appropriate way to begin to examine the matter of responsibility—of answering to ourselves and others when an accounting of acts and omissions is expected. The direction in which I am presently headed with this reflection that has some bearing, I think, on Catholic Legal Theory is this: are we not to be held accountable for the things we did and the things we did not do but could have done in our lives before the time God has allotted us expires? I submit that the answer to this question is yes. For that is what responsibility is: answering/responding to God, our neighbors, and ourselves, who share a proper claim to an accounting of our acts and omissions. The vocation of responsibility is certainly that of each Christian, but surely it is the special vocation of those who claim to be teachers who lead others in the search for wisdom and truth—not only human, but also divine.    RJA sj