Is there a barrier in American society against the Catholic politician who does not intend to compromise his or her Catholicism in the exercise of official public duty? How dense is the wall of separation between Church and State? Or is there one at all? Separation is not a constitutional principle. It was coined as a term in a letter of Thomas Jefferson whose own applications of it do not indicate that he thought it meant anything other than that Congress should not prefer one institutionalized formula to another in stating the transcendent circumstances of the human condition. That spirit of equanimity is also a spirit of commitment to the virtues of natural law structuring the public welfare. So George Washington used his Farewell Address to advise that politics and morality must never be separated.
Liberal idealism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, having abandoned the metaphysics of innocence to embrace the physics of naiveté, assumed that socially constructive obedience to natural law would remain a habit of civilized people. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, for instance, had little doubt that the Mormon practice of polygamy would be overwhelmed by a wider social wisdom; in practice, the opposite has taken place as nearly half of all Americans now practice polygamy in its consecutive form of divorce and remarriage. But his confidence seems abjectly supine when you substitute for polygamy a more elementary distortion of ontology, such as contraception or abortion or euthanasia, the very mention of which would have offended his classical liberality.
A measure of Mill’s confidence in perduring humanism motivated some modernized Christian social theory. In England of the 1920s, William Temple’s Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship was too impractical to move from page to praxis; and later in the United States, John Courtney Murray’s dialogue concept was too frail to survive the-Various misapplications of his often ignored dictum: “The Catholic may not, as others do, merge his religious and his patriotic faith, or submerge one in the other. He must reckon with his own tradition of thought, which is wider and deeper than any that America has elaborated.”
Governor Alfred E. Smith was a more reliable example of the Catholic politician than some more recent ones. He was not a candidate who happened to be a Catholic, but a Catholic who happened to be a candidate. This of course may explain why he was not elected. He explained his Catholic commitment as a Catholic should: with serious respect for the dignity of his cultured despisers, with the same respect for his uncultured despisers and with greater respect for the logic of Catholic systematics.
His open letter to Charles C. Marshall in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1927), written with the collaboration of Father Francis Duffy, is a model of canonical and theological exposition. Another essay, delivered as a speech at Oklahoma City (September 1928) is no less recondite for being a response to a Baptist publication which had accused him of drunken driving down Broadway at fifty-six miles an hour. He does not blush to cite the Catholic convictions of two Chief Justices, Roger Brooks Taney and Edward Douglas White, and is not even adverse to mentioning the word sin in a context which is not without relevance to Catholic politicians today: “A sin of omission is sometimes as grievous as a sin of commission.”
The apologetic, let us confess, is far from that John Kennedy delivered to ‘the Protestant ministers in Houston during his presidential campaign when, against constitutional warrant, he was subject to a religious test. This is a sensitive contention to any who have swallowed the camel of recent social myth, but a fair analysis should illustrate that Kennedy, undoubtedly with the best of intentions, was bidding for an Erastian settlement far more congenial to the accommodating spirit of Frederick II or Mazarin than to the prophetic impulses of Pope John. It is evident, and understandably so, that John Kennedy did not seem driven like Hillaire Belloc who waved his rosary before a Protestant heckler when campaigning for Parliament; it is also evident, and less understandably so, that he felt obliged to assure the Houston audience that his Catholicism would not compromise his affinity for liberty. The expression is innocuous until it is compared with Smith’s insistence that Catholicism rightly lived would enhance his libertarian commitments, being the core of Western culture. Kennedy’s Houston speech did not mark Catholicism come of age, but it was a species of Catholicism reluctant to tell its age. Its eclectic cadences signaled a breakdown in systematic apologetic, opening the field to various Catholics in politics today who imagine a civil need to distance themselves from the ordinary episcopal magisterium as they promote party platforms which appeal to isolated special interests even as they contradict Catholic anthropology. From the time of the Kennedy campaign, it has been easier for a Catholic to be in public life, but it has been harder than ever for a Catholic to be Catholic in public life.
If we recognize the difference between the German concept of Kultur, or civilization, which is an inclusive structure of institutions and norms crystallizing a philosophical climate, and the classical practice of paideia, or culture as the devoted pursuit of knowledge for its own integrity, we can then anticipate how a civilization without the latter is contradictory and self-destructive. In politics this boils down to the contrast between the Periclean ideal of the educated man which Al Smith, who boasted of having been an alumnus of the Fulton Fish Market, was not restrained by pedantry from resembling, and the modern technocrat politician whose perception of the common good is reduced to an admixture of sentimentalism and cynicism. The classicist will contradict the current romantic images, for instance, as he detects in the human and urban sturdiness of Al Smith a thing more valued by the Attic peripatetics and poets than by more recent and popular Catholic politicians whose style is less humane for being self-consciously urbane, and whose rhetoric, typically a compendium seriatim of secondary sources, seems cultured to those who in their civility have lost their culture.
It does not readily occur to the technocrat to pursue the metaphysical question behind all social problematics: “What do we believe we are dealing with when we deal with a human?” But the far different public figure, according to Plato, or Dante for that matter, would undertake the administration of human welfare only after determining what makes man fare well. The most useless public figure is the utilitarian who does not address humans when he addresses humanity; without humans, after all, humanity would be conspicuously vacant. Any estimable assessment of the human condition has to be religious if it is to avoid the doublespeak which tries to improve the quality of life by eliminating lives.
Monsignor Josemaria Escriva wrote: “Nonsectarianism. Neutrality. Those old myths that always try to seem new. Have you ever bothered to think how absurd it is to leave one’s Catholicism aside on entering a university, or a professional association, or a scholarly meeting, or Congress, as if you were checking your hat at the door?”
But so persistent is the religious imperative that hostility to it becomes a religion of its own. The most demanding new religions have been those of Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-Tung. The practice of secularizing humanisms is as un-natural as the practice of splitting atoms, and the moral result is as explosive. This means that while Church and State may be separate, they must not be split: the rupture of the social from the transcendent eliminates the possibility of a functioning culture. Pope John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris of the diminishing influence of Christianity on modern society. This passage appears in Sigrid Undset’s life of Saint Catherine of Siena:
The artificial division of religion and politics did not exist for the people of the Middle Ages. If they thought over the matter at all, they were completely aware that all the problems concerning the community — good or bad government, the welfare or misery of the people — are in the final instance religious problems…. If a man loves God, he will be able to love his neighbor, to attain wisdom, and to be just and truthful. Because God is our eternal blessedness, a child of God becomes a blessing for his fellows. Love for one’s own ego, for something which is in reality nothing, leads to an abyss of nothingness. The love of a selfish man is nothing, truth escapes between his hands, his wisdom will show itself to be foolishness, his justice injustice, and in the end a series of disappointments and mistakes will lead him to hell — to the devil who is the spirit of disappointment and barrenness.
The present social order, as it lacks such unity, does not abandon the attempt at governing human acts, but it creates an inconsistent policy for determining what they should be. It is hardly an advance, and it is in fact a retreat of the human effort toward peace, justice, security and order. This must certainly be the explanation for one politician enjoining the elderly to “die and get out of the way.” The idea was so regressive that when the New York Times, a voice not to be ignored, said that “his mind was in a decent place,” it had to hark back to the wisdom of Homer to justify such pagan fatalism: “… one generation of man will grow while another dies.” But if editorial writers choose to comb the lawns of Ionia, they should bear in mind, as Hippolytus warned about the typology of the pseudonymous Simon Magus (Philosophumena, 6.14), that selective citation of the Iliad is as quirky as the similar mining of the Scripture of the Jews. More poignant would have been the words which Homer placed on Priam’s lips: “Think of thy father, godlike Achilles, and pity me. He is old, as I am and, it may be, his neighbors trouble him, seeing that he has no defender …
This is a knowledge particularly in the possession of the Christian who knows about a Good Friday death which was as foolish to the Greeks as it was scandalous to the Jews. The foundational documents of the United States were not oblivious to it in any final degree, and consequently, a figure in a position of public trust is obliged to secure a vision of life and death which is more providential than fatalistic; he should deliberately do so when it is obscured in the public statutes. Pope John Paul II was speaking not only to Catholics when he said in his message for the 17th annual World Day of Social Communications (June 3, 1984): “The same public power which is rightly interested in the physical health of its citizens has a duty to provide with diligence, through promulgation of laws and their effective application, to see to it that there be no grave damage to public morality.
The enemy of the rightly ordered moral life is to be located in the secular form of egocentrism which has developed in consequence of the individualism of the various Protestant and Enlightenment movements, driving a dualist wedge between the private and public moral constructions. Through indirect Latin influences, Jefferson had succeeded remarkably in preserving for his federal declarations a Thomistic wholeness which not even his Deism wiped out. New York Senator John Marchi had a good grasp of this when he pointed out that to say you cannot legislate morality is to say you cannot legislate anything at all. English common law, for example, actually adapts ecclesial definitions in the parallel concepts of felonies and misdemeanor crimes in civil law, and mortal and venial sins in moral law.
This relationship is simply not understood when the entire economy of moral associations is rejected. One Catholic politician has said in published reports that the regulating principle for him in all actions public and private is his conscience. This affirms the fundamental Catholic guide to human acts, but it parts company with orthodoxy when it ignores the obligation to inform the conscience, concluding that the private conscience does not have the privilege of public representation. As for the first error, there is helpful recourse to what Cardinal Newman wrote in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in 1874:
The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a longsighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its preemptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be. in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.
As for the second proposition, that the conscience has public access only when it is a statement of manifest individualism, a private opinion disclosed rather than an interior conviction externally disposed, Newman says a bit later:
Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the very right and freedom of conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligation. It becomes a license to take up any or no religion, to take up this or that … to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them.
Newman spoke to a civil structure which had often been at odds with Catholic morality. Conscience had its valiant play from the start of the divorce between Church and State in moral formulations, when Saint Thomas More had vowed: “I never would pin my soul to another man’s back.” Unlike others for whom the silence of consent satisfied guilt, he recognized the limits of a passive conscience in the exercise of public duty. It cost him more than an election or preferment. It cost him his breath. We would not say it cost him his life, for in fact it extended his life to the length of eternity: “I die the King’s good servant. But God’s first.”
The press has told of one intelligent and widely ad-mired Catholic, prominent in national politics, who, having announced for higher office, removed a portrait of Saint Thomas More from his office, saying that it made his non -Catholic associates uncomfortable. It was not the first time the saint had his head removed; but while in Tudor times the loss of one’s head signaled the end of a career, it has come in these late democratic times to be a requirement for starting one.
When a Catholic figure gives the impression of wanting no more of Mr. More, even when this is probably not his actual disposition, it almost appears that the saint has stopped interceding and started haunting. Especially troublesome, necessarily more so to the Catholic for whom he is a saint than to others for whom he may be a heroic anachronism, are More’s words on the association between personal con-science and objective conscience in the external forum. In the ubiquitous dank of the Tower of London, he brightly told his daughter Margaret: “I know my own frailty full well and the natural faintness of my own heart, yet if I had not trusted that God should give me strength to endure all things than to offend him by swearing against my own conscience, you may be sure that I would not have come here.” His obedience is to that “aboriginal Vicar of Christ” which does not part from the truth pronounced by the Vicar of Christ himself, however much one might distance oneself from Rome, as both are instruments of the Author of immutable natural law.
The public Catholic is in a position to limit offenses against the natural law which must be regarded as the social standard, and not an arbitrary interior affinity, if civilization is not to diminish culture. Solzhenitsyn presented morality as the evidence of natural law autonomous among all laws (Speech to the AFL-CIO, 1983):
Morality is higher than the law! Law is our human attempt to somehow embody in rules a part of the moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth and present it in the form of laws. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes less so. Sometimes you have, in fact, a caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law, this view must never be abandoned.
There had not been a change in the Catholic policy which recognizes this, nor in the Catholic insistence on promoting it by cultivating all the natural virtues as they are rooted in the primary ones of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. But the same Catholic politician, who no longer looks upon the face of Thomas More, recently took to the pulpit of a non-Catholic church to explain Catholicism’s strengths and weaknesses as he understands them. In particular, he stated that there have been “two Catholic Churches,” one pre-Vatican II and one post-Vatican II. From the purview of inspiration, this is tantamount to the resolution of the mock innocent abroad who, having been shown two skulls of Alexander the Great, decided that one must have been Alexander as a boy. Not content to leave it at that, the speaker insisted that the pre-Vatican II Church had been largely occupied with “weeding out those who were unfit for the joys of heaven,” while the post-Vatican II Church provided latitude, presumably, to do this yourself.
The first thing that comes to mind is the remarkable fact that no one, not the impressed reporter nor anyone in reply, thought there was anything inappropriate about the politician’s exercise in Catholic criticism, and from a non -Catholic pulpit no less. It should have seemed too whimsical in a man who advocates the separation of Church and State and the inhibitions which he insists that separation imposes on his assertion of many religious convictions in the public forum. The generous front-page attention his remarks received is no indication of what kind of reception might be given in the unlikely event of a non-Catholic celebrity criticizing his denomination from a Catholic pulpit: and this only amplifies the voice of the historian who called anti-Catholicism the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.
Secondly, one has to be struck by this official’s own profession of theological influences on his executive policies. In fact he named one: Teilhard de Chardin. There was a ring here familiar to the announcement by President Carter that his social conscience had been largely influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr. It remains a tribute to Mr. Carter’s patience and acumen, for Niebuhr is not easy reading. Teilhard is even harder. But Niebuhr may present the humanitarian vision with a better prospect than does Teilhard. For while Teilhard’s cosmology is obscure, his sociology is not obscure enough; indeed, it is not easy to conceal, except possibly from those munificent and kind politicians who take only the best from their theologians, Teilhard’s benign regard for the early stages of the Fascist experience, his verbal assaults on the racial worth of the Chinese, and his campaign against black African membership in the fledgling United Nations.
Since the public official in question would most certainly not hold such views, he does complicate his politics with his theological allusions so that one is almost encouraged to agree that religion has no place in politics. But this usually means only that the practice of religion has no place, for the religious label is always given a welcome place when it is useful. A prominent party official recently proposed a congresswoman for an even higher public office saying: “She’s from New York, she’s Catholic, she’s been an effective member (of the House), and she’s very smart.” In the 1984 primary campaign, the three leading contenders were a man who advertised himself as the son of a preacher, a former Protestant divinity student, and an ordained Protestant clergyman whose speeches were nothing less than sermons. These are not out of place; they have a good and solid tradition behind them. But it is very much out of place to require of a Catholic candidate a mutability of doctrine and an infidelity to his or her obligatory commitments which would not be required of anyone else. Everyone should object to the Uncle Tom-ism by which Catholics running for office are expected to give a version of themselves which accords with the beliefs of the non-believer. It is quite worse when Catholic politicians agree to this at the expense of docility to higher authority. A Catholic politician who finds it inexpedient to oppose pro-abortion legislation publicly, must bear in mind the explicit counsel of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Declaration on Procured Abortion, November 18, 1974):
Human law can abstain from punishment, but it cannot declare to be right what would be opposed to the natural law, for this opposition suffices to give the assurance that the law is not a law at all. It must in any case be clearly understood that whatever may be laid down by civil law in this matter, man can never obey a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion. Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it. Moreover, he may not collaborate in its application.
Should this appear to promote “single-issue” voting, the Bishops of the New York State Catholic Conference explained in 1982 that “in the final analysis an overwhelming number of people vote for candidates because of ‘single issues,’ even such single issues as a candidate’s appearing to be a hawk or a dove. Yet voters who express grave concern that 4,000 unborn children are put to death through abortion every single day in the United States are apparently expected to remain silent in our ‘pluralistic culture’ …” Moreover, abortion is not so much a single issue as it is a total issue, a focus of the confrontation between secular materialism and supernatural humanism which is now having its effective test in the polling places of America.
A Catholic should not enter public life unless willing to look on such office the way any Catholic should look on any job, as a means of becoming a saint. Sanctification in daily life is an obligation and not an option. To avoid temptations to lukewarmness and mendacity along the way, every Catholic in the public eye should have a spiritual director who is sound enough to represent only what accords with Catholic truth, and who is detached enough not to be tailored in the livery of a courtier or flatterer but to speak when necessary Nathan did to David: “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12.71.
Fortitude may be the virtue rarest among public figures. Intelligence and zeal are no substitutes for it. It is a supernatural virtue, related to magnanimity, patience, munificence and constancy, without which public ad-ministration is a threat to the common good. Saint Thomas Aquinas analyzes fortitude, in language not irrelevant to politics, as he describes its double object: one is the repression of that fear which compromises an individual who desires to do good but who knows the possible negative consequences; the other consists in control of that bravado which, if unchecked, easily lapses into temerity when tested by competition (Summa theologiae IIa IIae, q. 123, a. 3). Fortitude then requires a capacity for suffering, not in the lesser sense of compassion which is known by the intelligentsia as “sensitivity,” but in the mystagogic sense of that word as Christ displayed it: “suffering with.” Pilate’s irresponsibility lay in his contempt for his constituents, a disdain which accorded them the choice to inflict suffering on themselves. So long as the crowd was willing to say, “Let this crime be on us and on our children,” he was willing to be pro-choice. Reluctant from the cynical perspective of the Latin imperium to muddle his civil religion with any profounder ontology, he washed his hands; but in such circumstances pale hands are a whitened euphemism for conscience.
Christian history bulges with examples of Catholic leaders who flouted Catholic teaching before cheering crowds, but the modern situation is unique in its cases of individuals who parade devout obedience to a Catholicism of their own definition. And then, for instance, when the Holy See refuses to approve inaccurate representations of Catholic teaching, removing the Imprimatur from unsuitable catechetical books, some Catholics themselves look upon it as an attack on the constitutional principle of press freedom instead of recognizing in it a resolution of Catholic identity. When an archbishop challenges a municipal executive order which condones disordered sexual activity, some of his own flock act embarrassed at finding themselves members of an institution which contradicts the City Council.
While some notorious tyrannies claimed nominal Catholic identity, they were aberrations of the Catholic social economy. That is why bad Catholics were usually condemned not for their Catholicity but for their hypocrisy. But with the fragmentation of the Catholic world view, there came onto the scene something more menacing than those quixotic and eccentric despotisms, and that was the modern invention called totalitarianism. Now totalitarianism is what we have when a social order based on natural law is rejected, not as a concession to pride, but as a matter of pride elevated to a high principle. It is a new product of the umbrous mental occlusion introduced by that rationalism which thought it was a form of enlightenment, but which can be traced over a tortuous path, as we allowed earlier, to the first formulations of individualism in the Reformation.
With this awareness, and using language which runs against the fashion of the moment and which may have to be whispered in classrooms, G.K. Chesterton in his life of Aquinas, called Martin Luther the “elemental barbarian.”
At a time when we are occupied with George Orwell’s appropriation of the year 1984, it is well to recall that the more courageous humanism of Chesterton also had its play in 1984, although no one seems to have remarked the coincidence, for that was also the date of his Napoleon of Notting Hill, exalting the perdurability of the good. But Chesterton’s confidence also knew the darkness of human rebellion against the Authority which wills the human good. He traced the development this way: in Luther the force of a single personality, or what a public figure today might call “charisma,” first claimed a worth equal to, and indeed superior to, the systematic logic of natural law and the life of the virtues.
As that distortion of personality has increased, the worthy democratic dictum “every man a king,” has been vulgarized into the modern conceit which insists “every man a kingdom.” ‘Louis XIV said, with perfect justice when you realize he was Louis XIV, “Je suis l’etat.” The energetic barbarian, envisioned by J.S. Mill, like the elemental barbarian remembered by Chesterton, says with no warrant, “Je suis mon etat.” And, according to the life of the virtues, that bravado soon succumbs to a spirit of temerity the moment reality intrudes far enough to show that egoism is still not the conscience of the universe. Here is rooted that twentieth- century plague called Alienation which has ruined more people than the Black Death of a dimmer age.
The conscience of the public Catholic once again needs to embrace the Catholic conception of morality not as extrinsically imposed but as intrinsic to the human condition. The covenant between God and the Hebrew tribes was no contract accepting certain arbitrary rules; it was an agreement to obey that which can only be disobeyed at the price of self-destruction. Sin is dehumanizing while virtue secures the human integrity. But neither is the moral standard separable from God.
The Catholic politician speaks from a tradition which transfigures civilization by the light of culture. It is a light which is ordained by the divine will to give light to the whole house. The light shines on the just and on the unjust alike, and justice is the acceptance of the fact. The practice of justice, then, is the institutionalization of reality. In the framework of this institution, no one has the right to impose one’s sense of human integrity on anyone else, but every just man according to justice has the solemn duty to impose it on himself. And when it is also God’s sense of morality, he has a vocation to promote it by just law on the whole social order. Then the real world, which by all accounts includes the New York Times, will understand that no one is a victim of innocence. The innocent are victims of that disordered mentality which will not vindicate innocence.