Several MOJ contributors (including Rick Garnett, Richard Stith, Michael Perry, Michael Sacperlanda, and Tom Berg) have recently addressed issues relating to the roles of Catholics and other Christians in public life—be that life in the liturgy of the Church, in prayer, or in the political and public events of the day. I think that many well informed people (lay, clerical, and religious) have the impression that the role of the laity in particular is something new in the Church that resulted from various promulgations of the Second Vatican Council that would include the Decree on the Laity and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. But this would not be an accurate assessment. While the role of the laity can be traced back much earlier (and I agree with Michael S. that Professor Eamon Duffy’s excellent book The Voices of Morebath demonstrate this in one particular country, i.e., England, but we should also not forget about the roles of people like Thomas More) we need to take stock of what Pope Pius XII said in his first encyclical letter Summi Pontificatus:
This collaboration of the laity with the priesthood in all classes, categories and groups reveals precious industry and to the laity is entrusted a mission than which noble and loyal hearts could desire none higher nor more consoling. This apostolic work, carried out according to the mind of the Church, consecrates the layman as a kind of “Minister to Christ” in the sense which Saint Augustine explains as follows: “When, Brethren, you hear Our Lord saying: where I am there too will My servant be, do not think solely of good bishops and clerics.” You too in your way minister to Christ by a good life, by almsgiving, by preaching His Name and teaching to whom you can. (N. 89)
Throughout this letter, Pius XII identifies and discusses the important role of lay Catholics, especially in the temporal spheres of human existence.
When times get difficult for people, as Michael P. points out regarding the junta years in Argentina, what happens? Where is the Church? What are its members doing to avoid catastrophe? As Rick points out, we are sinners, and we do not always respond well to the circumstances at hand. But, by the same token, it is important to recall that some folks do what they can to stop the nonsense of the day. It may not be much, but they do what they can—which people later down the line may say was not enough. But what would these post-event critics have done differently if they could have done anything?
Questions have certainly been raised about what did Catholics do during the Third Reich in Germany. Let me pose three illustrations that develop this.
The first comes from a story related by Archbishop Raymond Burke in his 2004 Pastoral Letter On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good. In the early 1980s he spent a summer in Germany while he was doing his graduate studies in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He went to Germany to improve his German language skills useful to his academic work. But this opportunity to study in Germany also presented him with the occasion to serve the local church. Archbishop Burke relates that during this period he had some conversations with the lay sacristan at a parish. This man was a teenager at the time the Nazis came to power. As the Archbishop relates (N. 2), this person was “haunted” by the question how the people of his beloved country “could have permitted such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long.” Other conversations in which the archbishop participated suggested that some Catholic bishops did little if anything to teach against the evils of the day, i.e., Nazism. But as I have said, people tend to do what they can to combat the evil of the present moment. History may judge that this was not enough notwithstanding what was attempted to rectify a difficult situation. And this brings me to the second illustration that involves Germany.
This story relates the work of Father, then Bishop, then Cardinal Clemens August von Galen. The Third Reich did not care for von Galen, and, because of what he tried to accomplish in the name of God and the Church, he did little to improve his image amongst the Nazis. But improving his image held by this regime was not his particular concern since he was a dedicated pastor. In a homily that he delivered in the summer of 1941, he exhorted the faithful to withstand the evils of the Nazis with these words:
[S]teel yourselves and hold fast! At this moment we are not the hammer, but the anvil. Others, chiefly intruders and apostates, hammer at us; they are striving violently to wrench us, our nation and our youth from our belief in God. We are the anvil, I say, and not the hammer, but what happens in the forge? Go and ask the blacksmith and see what he says. Whatever is beaten out on the anvil receives its shape from the anvil as well as the hammer. The anvil cannot and need not strike back. It need only be hard and firm. If it is tough enough it invariably outlives the hammer. No matter how vehemently the hammer falls; the anvil remains standing in quiet strength, and for a long time will play its part in helping to shape what is being moulded.
Von Galen did what he could with the resources available to him to stem the evil of his day.
A third illustration is the life of another German, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the army officer and Catholic who also understood the evil ways of the Nazis. He was one of the principals in the unsuccessful attempt made on Hitler’s life in 1944. When the assassination attempt failed, Von Stauffenberg was summarily executed and his family was punished by the Nazis.
While his particular method of countering the evils of Nazism may well be critiqued, von Stauffenberg did what he could to stem the evils of his day.
But there is yet another story that I would like to relate today involving our own country, the United States. We are troubled by a war, by poverty, by white collar and conventional crime, by infidelity, by drugs, by terrorism, and by many other problems. To borrow from Michael P.’s question: “will someone please tell us what the… bishops of the Catholic Church—my Church, our Church—were doing during” in these times? But this question should not be restricted to the successors of the Apostles since it involves all of us. Archbishop Burke’s formulation of the question seems more appropriate to me: how can the people of our beloved country permit such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long? Again I will suggest that people tend to do what they can. Individual bishops, individual dioceses, individual parishes, individual priests, individual religious, and individual members of the laity do what they can and what is proper to their calling to address the evils of our time. The fact that we individually and corporately may be doing something is not to say that we are doing everything that we can.
I would like to conclude this posting with this thought. I, for one, think that one of the greatest evils that has been going on in this United States is the wake of Roe. I suspect that I have not always been welcome by colleagues in the teaching profession because of my views on this grave matter, but I try to do what I can to stem the tide of this evil even though my actions are at best very modest. But I must acknowledge that other brave souls have shown me how to use the tools of reason and explanation to meet the challenges of this calling to which all of us have been summoned and to which some of us have responded. As of the most current count, there have been over forty million abortions performed in the U.S. since Roe was decided. That is a lot of death with no end in sight despite the claims by some persons in or seeking public office that the nation must keep the procedure legal but rare.
What can be said of those who are haunted by this iniquity? And how can the people of our beloved country permit “such horrible evils to happen at all or to go on for so long”? Let us begin by realizing we do what we can do and what we cannot, but let us also not fail to ask what more can we do? We can be a minister to Christ, that is what we can do, and there are many ways of responding. RJA sj
In "Outsourced Wombs" an essay in the NYT, Judith Warner sees clearly the inhumanity of the surrogacy business but can't bring herself to condemn it completely because of the "good" it does by providing the poor with much needed cash and the infertile with babies. What do you think of her analysis?
HT: Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda
Here is an excerpt:
“... [W]hat’s going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” (One “medical tourism” website, PlanetHospital.com, refers to the Indian surrogate mother as a mere “host.”) Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.
I say “feels like” and “look like” because I can’t quite bring myself to the point of saying “is.” And in this, I think, I am right in the mainstream of American thought on the topic of surrogate motherhood.
Unlike in France, where commercial surrogacy is banned, or in Italy, where almost every form of assisted reproduction is now illegal, laws in the United States are highly ambivalent on this most drastic use of reproductive technology. Commercial surrogacy is legal in some states, illegal in others and regulated differently everywhere, and little that’s clear and conclusive about where a birth mother’s rights to a baby end and where the fee-paying mother’s rights begin.
Perhaps that’s all as it should be – murky, ambiguous and confused. The confusion, at least, acknowledges that there is more to the process of carrying a baby and giving birth to it than being an incubator on legs. It acknowledges that there are physiological and psychological factors that bind a mother and baby together at birth and a violence — perhaps temporary, perhaps not — that is done to each of them if you sever that unique bond.
“The human body is not lent out, is not rented out, is not sold,”
France’s highest court ruled back in 1991, when it outlawed surrogate motherhood. In the United States, lip service has long been paid to the notion that women can’t be instrumentalized as baby-making machines. …
But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering. …
Which brings us back to the fertile question of the “feels like” rather than the “is.” In an awful world, where many women are in awful circumstances, how do you single out for condemnation an awful-seeming transaction that yields so much life betterment? …
Maybe when greater steps are taken toward improving international adoption procedures, maybe when more substantive steps are taken to improve the health, status and education of women world-wide, it’ll be easier to say with a clear conscience that what feels like callous exploitation really is just that.”
Tom asks "hasn't the invigoration of the laity in the last 40 years contributed to [inspiring huge numbers of average people to intense personal commitment, including commitment to the pro-life cause], and haven't those same 40 years also seen the emphasis on mystery in the Mass reduced and the emphasis on accessibility increased?" My first reaction to Tom's question was "yes" but after reflection I don't have clear answer. In the end Tom's question raises several more questions for me.
Has the faith become more accessible to Catholics with the liturgical changes post-Vatican II? While in some ways, I think the answer is "yes" (mass in the vernacular, for example), in other ways I am not so sure. This was driven home to me this past Sunday at Mass. During the homily the priest was encouraging personal prayer, and he was instructing those assembled on how to undertake a daily examination of conscience. Would this have been necessary forty years ago? Or, would this have been an assumed part of a Catholic's daily commitment (whether or not done well), a part of personal commitment that has been lost along with the liturgical changes?
Has there been an invigoration of the laity in the last 40 years? Lay persons are more visible in church in some ways - as communion ministers for example. And, my sense is that there are more lay theologians and catechists than in years past. But, ... In reading Eamon Duffy's "The Voices of Morebath" I get the sense of an engaged laity in a 16th century rural English parish. Every head of househould, for instance, had to take a turn as finance chair for the parish. I also think of Dorothy Day's work and the whole Catholic Worker movement; Frank Sheed and Maise Ward, their publishing company and the Catholic Evidence Guilds; and the Maritains all in the early part of the 20th century. Were they the exception to the rule or were there a number of lay Catholics with intense personal commitments (in prayer, in the quotidian tasks of running parishes, and in engagement with the culture) during earlier periods of church history? Has the number of invigorated Catholics increased, decreased, or stayed the same since the liturgical reform?
Tom, thanks for asking the question, and I await an answer from someone with more knowledge than I.
Monday, January 14, 2008
In reponse to Rick's question about the Church's activity during Argentina's "dirty war," my friend Andy Connolly, a diocesan priest in New York, writes: "As so often happens in Latin America and elsewhere, The Church (hierarchy & some laity) and the Church (some priests, religious and laity) are split. There were some real Christian martyrs who died defending the defenseless. Then there were members of the hierarchy who were fundamentally supportive of the military dictatorship from the outset and did nothing to stop the murders, torture, disappearances, etc." (I gather from him that although there is not a lot of information accessible on the web in English on this subject, there is quite a bit available in Spanish.)
The New York Review of Books
Romney and JFK: The Difference
The situations are superficially the same—presidential candidates
trying to remove an obstacle to their election arising from their
church membership. But the obstacles are quite different. The
objections some have to Mitt Romney's religion are twofold, theological
and cultural. Those against John F. Kennedy when he gave his 1960
speech in Houston about his Catholicism were more solidly political.
The theological problems with Romney come from evangelicals, who know
that his Jesus is not a member of the divine Trinity. Romney has
assured them in his speech on religious liberty, also given in Texas,
in early December, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and
the Savior of mankind." That may not be enough for those insisting on
their own orthodoxy, since Brigham Young wrote that "intelligent beings
are organized to become Gods, even the Sons of God," and that these
divinized believers may be the saviors of the worlds they dispose of.
But Romney is right in claiming that such points of theology are
irrelevant to the practical morality involved in politics. "Sons of
God" is not a political slogan.
...
The only objection to Mormons on political grounds would be their
record of polygamy and racism, both of which have been officially
abjured. But Kennedy's problem was precisely political. Catholics were
familiar enough to Americans—there was no weirdo factor. (People
wearing white hoods over their heads had little right to call others
weird.) And Kennedy's opponents were not interested in theological
questions like transubstantiation. But there were solid grounds for
political doubts about Catholics. The Vatican had not, in 1960,
formally renounced its condemnation of American pluralism and
democracy. In fact, one of Kennedy's advisers on his Houston speech,
the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, had recently been silenced by the
Vatican for defending religious pluralism.
There was a cogently argued case against papal politics. Paul Blanshard had maintained, in the best-selling American Freedom and Catholic Power
(1948), that Catholics were just pretending to be democrats till they
could get into power and imitate such Vatican-approved regimes as that
of Francisco Franco in Spain. A strong lobby, Protestants and Other
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, had continued to
argue the Blanshard position. It had successfully blocked the sending
of a full ambassador to the Vatican. The Protestant ministers who
organized against Kennedy's campaign, under Norman Vincent Peale,
feared the Pope's power more than his doctrines—just as they had when
Al Smith ran for president in 1928.
Kennedy could not openly do what the Catholic historian Lord Acton
did when Pius IX attacked democracy. Acton told Gladstone that he did
not know half the papal atrocities, but these did not matter, since
British Catholics paid no attention to them. But Kennedy sidled up to
such a statement. Not only had he, too, opposed the Vatican ambassador
and financial aid to Catholic schools; he also declared that "I believe
in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."
This went beyond what Father Murray was advocating. It was as open an
attack on Spanish "integralism" as anyone could wish. Kennedy said he
would follow his own conscience, not allowing any church interferences
with what his conscience dictated: "I believe in a President whose
religious views are his own private affair." In his speech, he faced
squarely points on which the Vatican might like to interfere:
Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should
be elected—on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other
subject—I will make my decision...in accordance with what my conscience
tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside
religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment
could cause me to decide otherwise.
If his conscience and his public duty were ever in conflict—which he thought impossible—he said, "I would resign the office."
...
Kennedy said that the democratic values of America are "the kind I
fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in
Europe." Romney and his strapping sons never wore the uniform—they
think running for president is their way of waging a war they support
in Iraq. But Romney invoked the war service of George H.W. Bush, who
introduced him in Texas. It was heroism by proxy.
Has Romney been able to "do a Kennedy," as his speech was billed in
the press? Far from it. Kennedy was on the side of the future. He
defied the Vatican's ban on American-style democracy, which was
rescinded in the Second Vatican Council, convened after his election.
Romney—looking to the past, and specifically to the current Bush
administration's position—kowtowed to the religious right. Saying that
he opposes religious tests, he passed that one.
[To read the whole essay--which, like all of Wills's work, is provocative--click here.]
