Much of
what I say today you probably already
know. But that doesn’t prevent a
good discussion, so I hope you’ll bear
with me.
As I sat down to write my talk last
week, a friend emailed me a copy of a
manuscript illustration from the
thirteenth century. It’s a picture of
Mary punching the devil in the nose. She
doesn’t rebuke him. She doesn’t enter
into a dialogue with him. She punches
the devil in the nose. So I think that’s
the perfect place to start our
discussion. [
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When most Catholics think about Mary, we
have one of two images in our heads: the
virginal Jewish teen from Galilee who
says yes to God’s plan; or the mother of
Jesus, the woman of mercy and
tenderness, “our life, our sweetness and
our hope.” We can too easily forget that
Mary is also the woman clothed in the
sun who crushes the head of the serpent.
She embodies in her purity the greatness
of humanity fully alive in God. She’s
the mother who intercedes for us,
comforts us and teaches us—but who also
defends us.
And in doing that, she reminds us of the
great line from C.S. Lewis that
Christianity is a “fighting
religion”—not in the sense of hatred or
violence directed at other persons, but
rather in the spiritual struggle against
the evil in ourselves and in the world
around us, where our weapons are love,
justice, courage and self-giving.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem described our
spiritual struggle this way: “There is a
serpent [the devil] by the wayside
watching those who pass by: beware lest
he bite thee with unbelief. He sees so
many receiving salvation and is seeking
whom he may devour.” The great American
writer Flannery O’Connor added that
whatever form the serpent may take, “it
is of this mysterious passage past him,
or into his jaws, that stories of any
depth will always be concerned to tell,
and this being the case, it requires
considerable courage at any time, in any
country,” not to turn away from God’s
story or the storyteller.
If our theme as a meeting this week is
reclaiming the Church for the Catholic
imagination, we can’t overlook the fact
that the flesh and blood model for our
Church—Mary as mater et magistra—is
quite accomplished at punching the devil
in the nose. And as Mary’s adopted sons,
we need to be bishops who lead and teach
like the great Cyril of Jerusalem.
Having said all that, my thoughts today
come in three parts. I want to speak
first about the people we’ve become as
American Catholics. Then I’ll turn to
how and why we got where we are. Finally
I’ll suggest what we need to do about
it, not merely as individuals, but more
importantly as a Church. We need to
recover our identity as a believing
community. And I think a good way to
begin doing that is with the
“catechetical content” of our current
political moment.
My focus today isn’t politics. And I
won’t waste our time weighing one
presidential candidate against the
other. I’ve already said elsewhere that
each is a national embarrassment, though
for different reasons. But politics
involves the application of power, and
power always has a moral dimension. So
we can’t avoid dealing with this
election at least briefly. Here’s what I
find curious. Given Mr. Trump’s ugly
style and the hostility he sparks in the
media, Mrs. Clinton’s lead should be
even wider than it is. But it’s not. And
there’s a lesson in that. It’s this.
Even many people who despise what Mr.
Trump stands for seem to enjoy his gift
for twisting the knife in America’s
leadership elite and their spirit of
entitlement, embodied in the person of
Hillary Clinton.
Americans aren’t fools. They have a good
sense of smell when things aren’t right.
And one of the things wrong with our
country right now is the hollowing out
and retooling of all the key words in
our country’s public lexicon; words like
democracy, representative government,
freedom, justice, due process, religious
liberty and constitutional protections.
The language of our politics is the
same. The content of the words is
different. Voting still matters. Public
protest and letters to members of
Congress can still have an effect. But
more and more of our nation’s life is
governed by executive order, judicial
overreach and administrative agencies
with little accountability to Congress.
People feel angry because they feel
powerless. And they feel powerless
because in many ways they are. When
Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America,
he assumed that only two basic social
structures were possible in the modern
era, democracy and aristocracy. Because
of its mass appeal, democracy would be
the winner. Once we assume that power
flows from the people, the ordinary
citizen, not some self-styled nobility,
obviously has the right to rule.
Or at least that’s the theory. Reality
is more complex. Tocqueville noted that
even in America, both “aristocratic
[and] democratic passions are found at
the bottom of all parties.” These
passions might be hidden from view. But
they’re very much alive and well. It’s
worth noting that aristoi is just the
Greek word for “the best,” and in
practice, social elites come in all
shapes and sizes.
The 2016 election is one of those rare
moments when the repellent nature of
both presidential candidates allows the
rest of us to see our nation’s pastoral
terrain as it really is. And the view is
unpleasant. America’s cultural and
political elites talk a lot about
equality, opportunity and justice. But
they behave like a privileged class with
an authority based on their connections
and skills. And supported by sympathetic
media, they’re remaking the country into
something very different from anything
most of us remember or the Founders
imagined.
The WikiLeaks email release last week
from the Clinton entourage says a lot
about how the merit-class elite views
orthodox Christians. It’s not friendly.
But what does any of this have to do
with our theme? Actually quite a lot.
G.K. Chesterton once quipped that
America is a nation that thinks it’s a
Church. And he was right. In fact, he
was more accurate than he could have
guessed. Catholics came to this country
to build a new life. They did
exceptionally well here. They’ve done so
well that by now many of us Catholics
are largely assimilated to, and digested
by, a culture that bleaches out strong
religious convictions in the name of
liberal tolerance and dulls our longings
for the supernatural with a river of
practical atheism in the form of
consumer goods.
To put it another way, quite a few of us
American Catholics have worked our way
into a leadership class that the rest of
the country both envies and resents. And
the price of our entry has been the
transfer of our real loyalties and
convictions from the old Church of our
baptism to the new “Church” of our
ambitions and appetites. People like
Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Kennedy, Joe Biden
and Tim Kaine are not anomalies. They’re
part of a very large crowd that cuts
across all professions and both major
political parties.
During his years as bishop of Rome,
Benedict XVI had the talent of being
very frank about naming sin and calling
people back to fidelity. Yet at the same
time he modeled that fidelity with a
kind of personal warmth that revealed
its beauty and disarmed the people who
heard him. He spoke several times about
the “silent apostasy” of so many
Catholic laypeople today and even many
priests; and his words have stayed with
me over the years because he said them
in a spirit of compassion and love, not
rebuke.
Apostasy is an interesting word. It
comes from the Greek verb apostanai—which
means to revolt or desert; literally “to
stand away from.” For Benedict,
laypeople and priests don’t need to
publicly renounce their baptism to be
apostates. They simply need to be silent
when their Catholic faith demands that
they speak out; to be cowards when Jesus
asks them to have courage; to “stand
away” from the truth when they need to
work for it and fight for it.
It’s a word to keep in mind in examining
our own hearts and hearts of our people.
And while we do that, we might reflect
on what assimilating has actually gained
for us when Vice President Biden
conducts a gay marriage, and Senator
Kaine lectures us all on how the Church
needs to change and what kind of new
creature she needs to become.
So how did we get to this moment, and
when did the process begin?
I suppose 1960 is a good place to date
the start of our current troubles.
That’s when candidate John Kennedy
promised Houston Baptist ministers
that—if elected—he’d keep his Catholic
faith separate from his presidential
leadership. Or we could use 1984 as a
start date. That’s when Mario Cuomo gave
his widely praised but finally
incoherent defense of Kennedy’s approach
to public life—the “I’m personally
opposed to evils like abortion, but”
tactic—in a speech here at Notre Dame.
Or we could use 1962 as another
reasonable start date. That’s when
President Kennedy told a group of policy
advisers that “The fact of the matter is
that most of the problems, or at least
many of them that we now face, are
technical problems … administrative
problems. They are very sophisticated
judgments which do not lend themselves
to the great sort of ‘passionate
movements’ which have stirred this
country so often in the past. Now they
deal with questions which are beyond the
comprehension of most men.”
That last Kennedy line—describing our
problems as “beyond the comprehension of
most men”—sums up the spirit of today’s
leadership classes. Briefly put, their
message is this: “Smart people should
run things, and most people aren’t smart
enough to qualify. But the country
shouldn’t worry as long as the really
smart people like us—in other words, the
technologically and managerially
gifted—stay in charge. So don’t rock the
boat with a lot of useless noise from
the deplorables.”
In effect, technology and its comforts
are now our substitute horizon for the
supernatural. Technology gets results.
Prayer, not so much—or at least not so
immediately and obviously. So our
imaginations gradually bend toward the
horizontal, and away from the vertical.
Religion can still have value in this
new dispensation by helping credulous
people do socially useful things. But
religion isn’t “real” in the same way
that science and technology are real.
And if, as John Kennedy said, our main
social problems today are practical and
technical, then talking about heaven and
hell starts to sound a lot like
irrelevant voodoo. The Church of our
baptism is salvific. The Church where
many Americans really worship, the
Church we call our popular culture, is
therapeutic.
Let me put our situation this way. The
two unavoidable facts of life are
mortality and inequality. We’re going to
die. And—here I’m committing a primal
American heresy—we’re not created
“equal” in the secular meaning of that
word. We’re obviously not equal in
dozens of ways: health, intellect,
athletic ability, opportunity,
education, income, social status,
economic resources, wisdom, social
skills, character, holiness, beauty or
anything else. And we never will be.
Wise social policy can ease our material
inequalities and improve the lives of
the poor. But as Tocqueville warned, the
more we try to enforce a radical,
unnatural, egalitarian equality, the
more “totalitarian” democracy becomes.
For all its talk of diversity, democracy
is finally monist. It begins by
protecting the autonomy of the
individual but can easily end by
eliminating competing centers of
authority and absorbing civil society
into the state. Even the family, seen
through secular democratic eyes, can be
cast as inefficient, parochial and a
potential greenhouse of social problems.
Parental authority can become suspect
because it escapes the scrutiny and
guidance of the state. And the state can
easily present itself as better able to
educate the young because of its
superior resources and broader grasp of
the needs of society.
Clearly our civil liberties and our
equality before the law are hugely
important premises for a decent society.
They’re vital principles for our common
public life. But they’re also purely
human constructs, and in a sense,
fictions.
What Christians mean by “freedom” and
“equality” is very different from the
secular content of those words. For the
believer, freedom is more than a menu of
choices or the absence of oppression.
Christian freedom is the liberty, the
knowledge and the character to do what’s
morally right. And the Christian meaning
of “equality” is much more robust than
the moral equivalent of a math equation.
It involves the kind of love a mother
feels for each of her children, which
really isn’t equality at all. A good
mother loves her children infinitely and
uniquely—not “equally,” because that
would be impossible. Rather, she loves
them profoundly in the sense that all of
her children are flesh of her flesh, and
have a permanent, unlimited claim on her
heart.
So it is with our Catholic understanding
of God. Every human life, no matter how
seemingly worthless, has infinite
dignity in his eyes. Every human life is
loved without limits by the God who made
us. Our weaknesses are not signs of
unworthiness or failure. They’re
invitations to depend on each other and
become more than ourselves by giving
away our strengths in the service of
others, and receiving their support in
return. This is the truth in the old
legend about heaven and hell. Both have
exactly the same tables. Both have
exactly the same rich foods. But the
spoons in both places are much too long.
In hell people starve because they try
to feed themselves. In heaven they
thrive because they feed each other.
For all of its greatness, democratic
culture proceeds from the idea that
we’re born as autonomous, self-creating
individuals who need to be protected
from, and made equal with, each other.
It’s simply not true. And it leads to
the peculiar progressive impulse to
master and realign reality to conform to
human desire, whereas the Christian
masters and realigns his desires to
conform to and improve reality.
I want to turn now in my last few
minutes to what we need to do.
Talks like mine today are always a mixed
experience. In describing a hard time,
the words can easily sound dark and
distressing. That’s not my intention at
all. Optimism and pessimism are twin
forms of self-deception. We need instead
to be a people of hope, which means we
don’t have the luxury of whining.
There’s too much beauty in people and in
the world to let ourselves become
bitter. And by reminding us of that in
The Joy of the Gospel, his first
apostolic exhortation, Pope Francis
gives us a great gift. One of his
strongest qualities—and I saw this at
the World Meeting of Families in
Philadelphia—is his power to inspire
confidence and joy in people while
speaking candidly about the problems we
face in a suffering world.
Serenity of heart comes from consciously
trying to live on a daily basis the
things we claim to believe. Acting on
our faith increases our faith. And it
serves as a magnet for other people. To
reclaim the Church for the Catholic
imagination, we should start by renewing
in our people a sense that eternity is
real, that together we have a mission
the world depends on, and that our lives
have consequences that transcend time.
Francis radiated all these things during
his time in Philadelphia.
If men and women are really made for
heroism and glory, made to stand in the
presence of the living God, they can
never be satisfied with bourgeois,
mediocre, feel-good religion. They’ll
never be fed by ugly worship and shallow
moralizing. But that’s what we too often
give them. And the reason we do it is
because too many of us have welcomed the
good news of Vatican II without carving
its demand for conversion onto the stone
of our hearts. In opening ourselves to
the world, we’ve forgotten our parts in
the larger drama of our lives—salvation
history, which always, in some way,
involves walking past St. Cyril’s
serpent.
In Philadelphia I’m struck by how many
women I now see on the street wearing
the hijab or even the burqa. Some of my
friends are annoyed by that kind of “in
your face” Islam. But I understand it.
The hijab and the burqa say two
important things in a morally confused
culture: “I’m not sexually available;”
and “I belong to a community different
and separate from you and your
obsessions.”
I have a long list of concerns with the
content of Islam. But I admire the
integrity of those Muslim women. And we
need to help Catholics recover their own
sense of distinction from the
surrounding secular meltdown. The Church
and American democracy are very
different kinds of societies with very
different structures and goals. They can
never be fully integrated without
eviscerating the Christian faith. An
appropriate “separateness” for Catholics
is already there in the New Testament.
We’ve too often ignored it because
Western civilization has such deep
Christian roots. But we need to reclaim
it, starting now.
Catholics today—and I’m one of them—feel
a lot of unease about declining numbers
and sacramental statistics. Obviously we
need to do everything we can to bring
tepid Catholics back to active life in
the Church. But we should never be
afraid of a smaller, lighter Church if
her members are also more faithful, more
zealous, more missionary and more
committed to holiness. Making sure that
happens is the job of those of us who
are bishops.
Losing people who are members of the
Church in name only is an imaginary
loss. It may in fact be more honest for
those who leave and healthier for those
who stay. We should be focused on
commitment, not numbers or institutional
throw-weight. We have nothing to be
afraid of as long as we act with faith
and courage.
We need to speak plainly and honestly.
Modern bureaucratic life, even in the
Church, is the enemy of candor and
truth. We live in an age that thrives on
the subversion of language. And here’s
one example. “Accompaniment,” when Pope
Francis uses the word, is a great and
obvious good. Francis rightly teaches us
the need to meet people where they are,
to walk with them patiently, and to
befriend them on the road of life. But
the same word is widely misused by
others. Where the road of life leads
does make a difference—especially if it
involves accompanying someone over a
cliff.
Here’s another example: A theologian in
my own diocese recently listed
“inclusivity” as one of the core
messages of Vatican II. Yet to my
knowledge, that word “inclusivity”
didn’t exist in the 1960s and appears
nowhere in the council documents.
If by “inclusive” we mean patiently and
sensitively inviting all people to a
relationship with Jesus Christ, then
yes, we do very much need to be
inclusive. But if “inclusive” means
including people who do not believe what
the Catholic faith teaches and will not
reform their lives according to what the
Church holds to be true, then inclusion
is a form of lying. And it’s not just
lying but an act of betrayal and
violence against the rights of those who
do believe and do seek to live according
to God’s Word. Inclusion requires
conversion and a change of life; or at
least the sincere desire to change.
Saying this isn’t a form of legalism or
a lack of charity. It’s simple honesty.
And there can be no real charity without
honesty. We need to be very careful not
to hypnotize ourselves with our words
and dreams. The “new evangelization” is
fundamentally not so different from the
“old evangelization.” It begins with
personal witness and action, and with
sincere friendships among committed
Catholics—not with bureaucratic programs
or elegant sounding plans. These latter
things can be important. But they’re
never the heart of the matter.
When I was ordained a bishop, a wise old
friend told me that every bishop must be
part radical and part museum curator—a
radical in preaching and living the
Gospel, but a protector of the Christian
memory, faith, heritage and story that
weave us into one believing people over
the centuries.
I try to remember that every day.
Americans have never liked history. The
reason is simple. The past comes with
obligations on the present, and the most
cherished illusion of American life is
that we can remake ourselves at will.
But we Christians are different. We’re
first and foremost a communion of
persons on mission through time—and our
meaning as individuals comes from the
part we play in that larger communion
and story.
If we want to reclaim who we are as a
Church, if we want to renew the Catholic
imagination, we need to begin, in
ourselves and in our local parishes, by
unplugging our hearts from the
assumptions of a culture that still
seems familiar but is no longer really
“ours.” It’s a moment for courage and
candor, but it’s hardly the first moment
of its kind.
This is why Mary—the young Jewish
virgin, the loving mother, and the woman
who punches the devil in the nose—was,
is, and always will be the great
defender of the Church. And so we can
say with confidence: Holy Mary, mother
of God, pray for us. And St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, patron of bishops, be our
model and brother in our service to
Mary’s son, Jesus Christ.
So be it: Amen.
