The Catholic New World: Church needs to ‘recover its moral voice’

The Catholic Church has maintained a remarkably consistent moral voice to the modern world, Cardinal George said Jan. 25, despite evidence that the world isn’t doing a lot of listening.

The problem is that while the message remains the same, the moral voice has lost its force, perhaps becoming more of a whisper than the shout it once was, the cardinal said.

He was responding to a presentation by Father Louis Cameli, director of ongoing spiritual formation for priests, about “How the Church Can Recover Its Moral Voice.”

“The moral force of the church’s voice is quite weakened now,” the cardinal said to a small audience of about 30 people, about half of whom were priests. “If the voice is fairly consistent, it is the witness on the part of the members of the church that is lost.”

For that, Cardinal George said, the church can look to a culture that has been moving for centuries to the position that any objective moral authority flies in the face of human personal freedom, the ultimate value in Western enlightenment society.

That position has become popular, he said, and gained more adherents after Sept. 11, an attack perpetrated by terrorists who said they were acting in the name of God. That raised the idea that any faith that claimed moral authority was vulnerable to become fanaticism.

The sexual abuse scandal exploded into that milieu, the cardinal said, allowing disbelievers to question the church’s right to claim any moral authority.

“Our own sexual abuse scandal comes at the worst possible moment,” he said. “Maybe the advantage is that we have to face it now, because it’s there and our people have to face it all the time.”

What issues in today’s culture is the church’s moral voice addressing? There are many, from acknowledging the recent anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision allowing abortion and the U.S. decision to wage pre-emptive war on Iraq against the wishes of the Vatican and most of the world community.

Cameli said the question he posed—how the church could recover its moral voice—assumes that something has been lost, and that loss can be in understood in ways from believing that the church has lost its basic moral compass to believing that the church has lost its credibility because of the scandal.

That’s the interpretation he sees most, Cameli said.

“There’s an inconsistency between the message and the messenger,” he said. “We say one thing, but we behave another way. … Moral voice means not just proposing a particular position, but also a shared invitation to a way of life.”

That only works if the invitation comes from someone who appears to be following that way of life, Cameli said.

But the question also assumes that something can be done to bring the moral voice back, Cameli said.

His first suggestion was to look to the way the church teaches on moral issues.

“Our teaching seems to be primarily—often exclusively—by conclusion,” he said, explaining that it doesn’t work to start the conversation by telling people what they should do.

“You have to bring people along to get them to that point,” he said, pointing examples of how everyone from Old Testament prophets to Jesus and his apostles taught. “If you look at St. Paul, who had some hard things to say to the local churches, he always started with the fact, what the truth the was, and followed it with the imperative: ‘If this is the fact, then this is what you must do.’ The truth is there, the demands of the truth are there, but it’s in a larger context.”

Priests and other teachers also must take a more pastoral approach to moral instruction, Cameli said, offering people the support they need to make moral choices stick.

“It’s not enough to give people the knowledge that leads them to the conclusion,” he said. “You need to give them the support to live out what they are called to live out.”

In his response, Cardinal George suggested that for the church’s moral voice to be heard, the church must listen to those in the culture that oppose it.

“Who is the enemy of the church’s moral teaching?” he said. “Listen carefully to the opponents. Why are they saying what they’re saying? Where is the future—of the church as a teaching institution and of the context in which the church teaches?”

The church, the cardinal said, may outlast a culture that says people should be able to do anything they want, provided they don’t hurt anybody.

“If we are all one body, then somebody else is hurt if we make a mistake, and in our culture, a lot of people are hurt,” the cardinal said. “So there’s a fault line, and that means it’s unstable. … The church may become a part, if she’s still around, of picking up the pieces when something falls apart that nobody expects to fall apart.

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