November 2014 - Page 2 of 2

In the aftermath of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, friends often send me “whatcha think?” links about the direction Pope Francis is likely to take in the coming year. It’s a hard situation, because a lot of what is out there is negative about the Holy Father: “He botched the Synod,” “He is out to get conservative Catholics,” “He has a radical agenda of reform,” and so on. As a Catholic one wonders how to navigate the conversation.

Based on recent exchanges, I have worked up a few rules of thumb for myself that others may find helpful as well. When I consider how I should react to the situation Pope Francis faces, there are three things to consider: (1) the situation, (2) Pope Francis, and (3) me.

Rule of Thumb #1: Focus on the situation

This is conflict resolution 101, really. It is rarely helpful to talk about motives or speculate about events unfolding far away, but it is always helpful to talk about the reality right around you. And the reality around us is that people are confused, despite any pretense to the contrary. So while I will not say, “Pope Francis intends to do this” or “Pope Francis is to blame for that,” I will say, loud and clear, that people are confused and agitated after the Synod.

During the Synod there was a wash of helpful and unhelpful commentary online. Unhelpful commentary dwelt with anguish on the bold and impious motives of this or that key figure in the drama, while helpful pieces gave factual information about the unfolding events and offered a frank assessment of the resulting situation in the world. It was not angry or bitter to say that people were afraid of a harmful relaxation in the Church’s practice; it was not harsh or hurtful to say that many Catholics took scandal at the appearance of political maneuvering. It was just stating the experience of Catholics as a reality. So long as the focus stayed on the situation and off the dramatis personae, it was a true exercise of the prophetic charism every Catholic possesses in virtue of Baptism.

Focusing on the situation not only keeps us from saying potentially unjust things about Pope Francis but also keeps us focused on what the Holy Spirit is asking us to do. We know that the Holy Spirit guides the Church and will ultimately preserve her from ruin, but this principle tempts us to look far away at things outside of our responsibility and trust the Holy Spirit wa-a-a-ay over there. “Gee, it looks like the Pope is doing X or Y, but I know the Holy Spirit is taking care of things. Wow, it looks like the bishops are saying A or B, but I know the Holy Spirit is taking care of things.” As long as we focus on the Pope, we forget that the Holy Spirit is also working through us, right here. Focusing on the situation at hand reminds us that we need to stop wringing our hands about what happens in Rome and start looking for what the Holy Spirit wants to do right under our noses.

Rule of Thumb #2: Balance realism and reverence

Of course, we can’t just avoid all conversations about the Pope. People will ask us what we think, and anyway we should pay enough attention to form specific prayer intentions for him. So what do we say if asked point-blank about the Pope’s intentions or culpability or whatever?

First, we have to be realistic. There have been truly rotten popes in the past, and there may be truly rotten popes in the future. The Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Church does not give her immunity from all bad leadership. We need to get familiar with some Church history so we can offer people this context, because if people are not realistic then they will be lazy in prayer and more easily scandalized if things do turn bad.

Second, we have to be reverent. The fact that the Pope is a public figure does not make him fair game for any unfeeling remark; on the contrary, his office demands respect. When we see certain facts reported in the News or the blogosphere, inevitably the facts will admit of a range of interpretations from best to worst, any one of which a reasonable person could hold. To my mind, realism means admitting that this is in fact the range of reasonable interpretations while reverence means that we choose to believe one of the better interpretations until coerced by contrary evidence.

The very nature of the current crisis calls for reverence in speaking about the Pope. What one side wants and the other side fears is calling into question the Church’s teaching authority, saying that her doctrine is always revisable no matter what a pope or a Church Council may have said. Even if the man who happens to be pope were himself contributing to an erosion of the world’s opinion about his authority, we the faithful need to make sure that reverence for the office doesn’t go out with respect for the man. Trash talking the Pope because we thought he was undermining the Church’s teaching would be a classic case of sawing off the branch we sat on.

We might take inspiration from David’s dealings with King Saul. Saul was in fact a bad man, and David had been chosen by God to replace him, and yet out of reverence for the king’s office David would not take up arms against his enemy: “The LORD forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the LORD’s anointed, to put forth my hand against him, seeing he is the LORD’s anointed.” (1Sam 24:6) Given that the Pope is a good man, and I have certainly not been chosen by God to replace him, how could I take up the slings and arrows of outrageous rhetoric against the vicar of Christ?

Rule of Thumb #3: Fix the problem at home first

There are some people whose jobs put them close to the Pope, and those people have a moral obligation to speak to him and warn him if he goes off the rails. I could be wrong, but I don’t think any of those people are reading my blog, so I’m going to assume that you all are like me, far from the Pope and without any real ability to influence a Synod. So what do we do, right here where we are?

If the problem is that people are misguided and confused, then the solution is to fill the atmosphere with good guidance and clear teaching. Practically, that means that we each need to be well-informed and vocal, and in that order. How we are vocal depends on our situation: I don’t see lots of people, but I write; one of my friends doesn’t write much, but he spends all his days in conversation with important Catholics. The key is to look for your opening and take it.

But how we are well-informed is the same for all of us. Even if you think of yourself as pretty much conversant with the Church’s teachings on marriage and family, take the current situation as an occasion to re-read some old things and to take on some new things. As Cardinal Burke suggests, we should all study the Catechism as a starting point. You could follow the footnotes from there, but if you’re looking for a short and informative read, take up John Paul II’s Letter to Families next, and after that Pius XI’s Casti Connubii. I would be happy to suggest a reading plan, but you get the idea.

Here is the key: seize your chance to be vocal, you need to tell people that they should read up on marriage and family. And to tell them they should read up, you need to convince them by example, by talking about what you read just recently. It doesn’t matter how much you have read, so long as every time you talk to someone you can say that you read something helpful just the other day….

[Last summer I was asked by my diocesan bishop to prepare a short reflection on the dignity of the human person within the context of the Diocese of Wyoming. Given that today is election day, it seems appropriate to share what I wrote for him.]

The Dignity of the Human Person

Our Contemporary Situation

As Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae says, our times are characterized by an increasing emphasis on the dignity of the individual human person: “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom, not driven by coercion but motivated by a sense of duty.” (DH 1) This is a positive fruit of the Enlightenment era, which perceived the use of reason as requiring a greater stress on the individual.

Formed in the last stages of the settlement of America, Wyoming and the American west especially value freedom and individuality. The rugged frontier attracted self-reliant, pioneer personalities, and the isolated conditions re-enforced and rewarded independence and responsibility. Consequently the culture of the frontier, which persists to this day, further emphasized the individualism of the modern era. The “cowboy ethic” stresses the virtues of responsibility, persistence, temperance, and everything else requisite for true independence.

While the positive side of the modern and western situation is evident, the individualism of the modern era can easily veer into autonomy, to the detriment of human dignity. As Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes points out:

Modern atheism often takes on a systematic expression which, in addition to other causes, stretches the desires for human independence to such a point that it poses difficulties against any kind of dependence on God. Those who profess atheism of this sort maintain that it gives man freedom to be an end unto himself, the sole artisan and creator of his own history. They claim that this freedom cannot be reconciled with the affirmation of a Lord Who is author and purpose of all things, or at least that this freedom makes such an affirmation altogether superfluous. (GS 20)

The consequence of this explicit or implicit atheism is a lack of grounding for morality and a loosening of the bonds between persons. The same modern era which has brought worker’s rights, increased societal roles for women, and an end to slavery has also given us abortion and the Gulag. Absolute individualism leads, by a surprising logic, to the devaluation of the individual and its dissolution into a collective. The same western culture which led to a famously early recognition of women’s rights can produce an indifference to religion and morality, as though ethics and ultimate questions are purely private affairs left to the individual’s whim. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church expresses the balance required:

The human individual may never be thought of only as an absolute individual being built up by himself and on himself, as if his characteristic traits depended on no one else but himself. Nor can the person be thought of as a mere cell of an organism that is inclined at most to grant it recognition in its functional role within the overall system. (CSDC 125)

Human Dignity in the Catholic Tradition

However, this balance is not achieved by looking to individualism on the one hand and collectivism on the other and then charting a course in between them. As so often happens in the moral life, the mean is found only by finding a new beginning point, a new trailhead. Secular attempts to find the basis of human dignity easily swerve toward one extreme or another because the basis of human dignity is not secular. The Catholic tradition grounds the dignity of the human person in two mysteries: creation and redemption.

Creation and the Dignity of the Person

Man the Image of God

The mystery of man’s creation is unfolded above all in the first chapters of Genesis, where man and woman are created in God’s image and likeness on the sixth day in Genesis 1. In this text which portrays God as the wise architect who exercises dominion over all creation through his word, man is established as a steward of the earth who exercises dominion in wisdom and rationality after the pattern of God his maker. Psalm 8 meditates with wonder on man’s authority over the world:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established; ⁴what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? ⁵Yet you have made him little less than God, and you crown him with glory and honor. ⁶You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you hast put all things under his feet, ⁷all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, ⁸the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. ⁹O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

It is on the one hand a wonderful dominion man exercises, and yet on the other hand it is given to him by one whose dominion is unimaginably greater and it leads man’s thoughts back to his God. Man is a vice-regent, a steward, a representative of God on earth, and this fact balances tremendous dignity with a decisive limit on man’s claims.

Man Created for God

But the account of man’s rationality in Genesis is not complete without the seventh day, which is the goal toward which the whole week of creation leads. This climactic Sabbath day expresses in a narrative way the fact that the human person exists for the sake of a relationship with God. Although every other living creature is subjected to man’s needs, man himself is ordained to divine worship.

The fact that man is subjected to God alone and not to any other creature leads to a fundamental principle: “In no case . . . is the human person to be manipulated for ends that are foreign to his own development.” (CSDC 133) That is to say, the human person can never be treated as a mere means, because that would subordinate the person to a mere creature. But the same fact, that man is subjected to God, means that the human person is not an end in itself in such a radical way as to exclude a common goal for the whole human race. All human beings have a single good, a single goal, in God. This makes it possible for persons to form community, and in fact for the whole human race to form a unity. As Gaudium et Spes expresses it, “God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood. For having been created in the image of God, Who ‘from one man has created the whole human race and made them live all over the face of the earth’ (Acts 17:26), all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself.” (GS 24)

Man the Image of the Trinity

But there is a further aspect of creation only hinted at in Genesis, namely that to be made in the image of God is to be made in the image of the holy Trinity and so to be called to share its life. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, although truly distinct as persons, live one single interior life which is nonetheless a life of relationship to one another. God, who is reason itself, lives in relation; God, who has every power and goodness, proceeds from another. When the light of this mystery is brought to bear on mankind, it reveals that the person is by the very fact of its rationality called to live in communion with others. As Gaudium et Spes says:

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, “that all may be one. . . as we are one” (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. (GS 24)

No greater dignity could be conceived than to share in the interior life and unity of the divine communion, and yet this same dignity excludes a proud individualism that would claim absolute autonomy. As good as it is to live according to one’s own reason, the Father himself by his very thought lives in communion; as good as it may appear to be self-reliant, the eternal Word, the Son, receives everything from his Father; as necessary as it may be to leave others to their lifestyles and opinions, the Holy Spirit proceeds not as tolerance but as Love. St. John Paul II captures the point:

God created man in His own image and likeness: calling him to existence through love, He called him at the same time for love. God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. (FC 11)

Redemption

The Catholic tradition bases the dignity of the human person not only on its creation by God but also on its re-creation in Christ. The gospel message speaks of a dignity surpassing all that could have been expected, because God became man and died for us. As Gaudium et Spes observes, “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” (GS 22)

The mere fact that God took on human nature immediately gave every human being an unsurpassable dignity. Every mother is ennobled by the fact that God has a mother; every baby is a marvel because God has been a baby. In the second chapter of On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius compares the Incarnation to “when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all.”

But the entire New Testament dwells on the even more amazing fact that the God-man gave himself up to death for all. St. Peter exhorts Christians to recognize their own dignity, saying, “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” (1Pet 1:19) St. Paul asks, with wonder, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for all, will he not give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:32) God himself has suffered death for each human person we meet: Christ warns us that at the last day he will say, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” (Matt 25:41)

All of this can be said even of those who have not recognized the gift given them in Christ. Of those who acknowledge Christ and receive his Spirit, St. Paul teaches that they become “children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ….” (Rom 8:17) The tradition of the fathers and doctors sums this up by saying that the Son of God became man that we might become gods. (See the citations in CCC 460)

This dazzling emphasis on the dignity of each person still does not lead to an absolute individualism, but rather to a unity in Christ. The dignity given to the human person by the fact of the Incarnation and saving death of Christ gathers all humanity around a common point of reference, establishing Christ in fact as a second Adam and natural monarch of the human race. Saving faith and the reception of the Spirit makes us adopted sons of God precisely by making us members of Christ, uniting us into one mystical body.

Some Concluding Practical Notes

It seems good to point out briefly how what has been said above relates to marriage and family, one of the great “personal dignity” debates of our time, even though marriage and family are not the primary focus of this essay. A few bullet points should suffice:

If the dignity of the person is not understood, then one cannot understand how children can be the primary end of marriage. The goal or end has to be the best thing; so much in marriage is beautiful and good that only something as exalted as the human person itself could be better.
Marriage is the first communion of persons and it founds the first society, the family. The radical individualism of our times which undermines the dignity of the human person also attacks marriage and family directly.
The dignity of the human person as grounded in Christ’s redemptive death connects directly to St. Paul’s teaching that marriage is an icon of Christ and the Church.
The dignity of the human person as grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity connects directly to St. John Paul II’s teaching about family as communion—the quotation from him above was taken from his apostolic exhortation on the family.

Abbreviations:

CCC = Catechism of the Catholic Church

CSDC = Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church

DH = Dignitatis Humanae

GS = Gaudium et Spes

FC = Familiaris Consortio

Month: November 2014

After the Synod: What’s a Catholic to say?

The Dignity of the Human Person