Civic Responsibility for a New Millennium
A year from now, citizens of the United States will elect a president,
the House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate, as
we do every four years. The primary campaigns in the political
parties have been in the news for many months. Last September,
the administrative board of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference approved
a statement on the political issues before the electorate considered
in the light of the Catholic faith. Every four years, early enough
to avoid being caught in campaign rhetoric and yet close enough
to be part of the conversation around the upcoming elections,
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops administrative board
issues a statement similar to the one now released with the title,
“Faithful Citizenship: Civic Responsibility for a New Millennium”.
The mention of the millennium in the document’s title should bring
to mind our efforts here to become, with the help of God’s grace,
a sharing Church, a community of evangelizers and stewards, as
we celebrate the Great Jubilee. What better way to thank God again
for the gifts we have received in Christ than by sharing them
more widely? In becoming an evangelizing people, however, there
is that necessary move from personal conversion to transforming
our society. The social teaching of the Church is a constitutive
part of the Gospel, and this latest statement is a useful tool
for reflecting on the impact our faith is to have on our economic
and political decisions as a body politic. It helps us see how
our present social, political and economic life, with its many
strengths and weaknesses, its mixture of sound basics and sinful
structures, is not the Kingdom of God.
Almost every time such a statement comes out, however, the cry
goes up that the bishops are not respecting the “separation” between
Church and State. Who sends it up depends very much on whose ox
is being gored on any particular issue. The New York Times, for
example, wrote a beautiful editorial some years ago when the bishops’
pastoral on war and peace was being written, defending the bishops’
statement on national nuclear policy and, even more important,
defending the bishops’ right, as citizens, to voice their concerns
and express their judgments. Coincidentally, the bishops’ judgment
happened to agree with the editorial position of the Times. The
same newspaper, however, has editorially threatened that the Church
risks losing her property tax exemption if the bishops keep interfering
vocally with the “constitutionally protected” right to an abortion.
Coincidentally, the Times disagrees with the bishops (and the
Catholic faith) on this issue.
Almost automatically, a statement which combines respect for human
persons in both their sexual and family life and also in their
political and economic life will be a source of puzzlement for
those who cannot see the connection between these dimensions of
human life. If only the Church would give up opposition to abortion
and artificial contraception, we hear, her message about changing
the economic rules of the game in favor of the poor would be more
“credible”. The Church should stay out of bedrooms. If only, on
the other hand, the Church insisted on personal sexual morality
more frequently, the social and political orders would take care
of themselves. The Church should stay out of boardrooms. But the
social teaching is of whole cloth, because all of it is rooted
in the understanding of what it means to be human in the light
of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
The pastoral wisdom of issuing such statements at all is sometimes
disputed as well. They seem to have little effect on voting patterns.
Reading them makes it clear that the basic insights and values
of the Catholic faith do not govern this country and the bishops
have little political clout. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to avoid
the national and international agenda and stay “clearly” within
the household of the faith? What is prudent pastorally is a tricky
question. The current controversy swirling around the actions
of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War furnishes a case
in point. Those who defend Pius XII rely on the testimony of the
many quiet efforts he encouraged and performed himself, opening
up even his bedroom at Castelgondalfo as a maternity ward for
Jewish mothers. Those who say he was, at best, a moral coward
insist that he should have explicitly condemned the Nazi regime’s
plans to exterminate the Jewish people when he became aware of
them, whether it would have made a difference or not in a dictatorial
regime and in a world unwilling to be distracted from winning
a war. The final judgment on his actions and speeches will have
to be made in a context including the re-examination of the strategies
and speeches of Roosevelt and Churchill and other political leaders
who interpreted the war as a moral crusade, of Protestant religious
leaders in Germany and elsewhere and even of the American Jewish
leadership’s strategy during the war.
Prudence works to put together moral principles and practical
actions in particular contexts. How do you exercise it pastorally
when moral prohibitions seem ineffective? Last week, the pastors
of Vicariate I told me about the problems they face when asking
themselves how they can guide people who have simply dismissed
much of the Gospel and the Church’s teaching in their daily lives
and seem unconcerned about doing so. On the larger scene, who
speaks for the Church in the practicalities of the economic and
political spheres, and who says what is moral and what merely
political in the narrow sense? In the recent massacres in East
Timor, the bishops, especially Bishop Carlos Belo of Dili, have
continued to bring international attention to the plight of their
people and have been justly applauded for doing so. What would
happen if the U.S. bishops brought to the United Nations the plight
of the poor in our country? In the United States, Catholics now
have another statement from the NCCB administrative board which
reminds us again that “...every candidate, policy and political
platform should be measured by how they touch the human person;
whether they enhance or diminish human life, dignity and human
rights; and how they advance the common good.” It applies these
principles to protecting human life and promoting family life,
to education and social communication and health care, to foreign
policy and affordable housing, and applies them well. The statement
will be available in all our parishes for everyone’s consideration.
I hope it influences our judgments and conversation in this coming
year.
Perhaps most importantly in the long run, the statement says that
a “new kind of politics” is needed for a new millennium. At almost
the same time the U.S. bishops were releasing their statement
on civic responsibility, Pope John Paul II received three young
people, representing the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and the
three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
The Holy Father encouraged them to be peacemakers at the beginning
of the new millennium, to construct a new society, to build a
new civilization based on mutual respect. He said, “None of us
is alone in this world; each of us is a vital piece of the great
mosaic of humanity as a whole.” Were that attitude established
among both young and old, a new politics would be prudentially
possible.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
