I'm Getting Good...

I wrote a response to a blog article on the Washington Post's online religion page. A lot of the blogs' responses are controlled by the blog owners, a reasonable measure to prevent spammer nastiness that nearly destroyed the blogs. For one reason or another, depending on the blog owner, I am sure, most of my responses never go through. Hmmm... But I am getting better. Rather than go apoplectic at my time wasted, or just sigh in resignation, I have saved my piece and am reproducing it below. (I know, heaven forbid I just do something useful!)

First, a click here to read the reasonably well considered, original post by Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J. to which I respond:

(my response follows)

I am intrigued by this thoughtful article, Fr. Reese. At first you lean into a mistake, labeling the Holy Father "left of most Americans including President Obama." This mistake is huge. The Holy Father himself, while addressing the U.N. in New York, asked them to move beyond worn-out categories of left and right. But then, as the article progresses, you indicate an awareness that the Pontiff isn't so easy to pin down.

Trammatic does a good job of summarizing how this indeciperability plays out in American politics:

"I am a practicing Catholic and find no comfort in either political party. I have either respect for life on the right or the preferential option for the poor on the left, but no place with both. On some issues I'm more conservative than most; on others more liberal. This is evident in near-down-the-middle split of the Catholic voting block."

It is because Christ was neither a liberal nor a conservative, but God. Trammatic is on to something in saying that the encyclical will be worthless here in America. That's because even most 'religious' Christians put politics before Christ, and then try to fit him into one party or the other. The only way to make Jesus Christ, the Infinite Alpha and Omega, the Great I-Am, fit into one political party or another is a grizzly process of amputation: not of his heart or mind or ideas or actions, but of ours.

That's why Americans don't, fundamentally, "get" the Church. Whatever she does, people think she is pandering for the opposite political party. She is at once a leftist for caring about migrant workers and a right-wing nut for caring about unborn children and the aged.

In reality, the Holy Father is not going to call for the world to move 'leftward' politically or economically, any more than any other pontiff has. He is going to ask the world to move inwardly, to examine its conscience, and change its way of thinking and living. He is going to call us to something entirely different than swinging back and forth on some right-left pendulum. He is going to call us to Christ.

Piety, rightly understood, is the key to understanding why the Church's "rightist" and "leftist" concerns aren't actually contradictory. Piety is the virtue and gift by which one recognizes God's fatherhood over oneself and over others as well. Consequently, we recognize our fraternity under that same Father, and His loving will that we love each other. This in turn leads to pity (in the best sense of the world), in which we show tender mercy to those who have fallen beneath us in some way, beneath our true dignity as human beings. Piety, then, inspires not only reverence toward God, but love of neighbor. Conversion, the deepening of our relationship to God as His children, will consequently and necessarily change our attitude toward each other. This does not mean socialism - a political centralization of decisions regarding economic matters - but social conscience. We become aware that our actions - whether choices in the businesses we patronize or candidates for whom we vote - affect other people who are as beloved to our Father as are we. In gratitude for His love, we share it.

Personal conversion is not on the opposite end of some tension or spectrum from social action. Quite to the contrary. In fact, any personal conversion that does not change how we regard and behave toward others is a sham. And any social action uninformed by a deep interior reflection, self-evaluation, and conversion toward God's loving will, is bound to be hollow and domineering.

This stuff isn't difficult. It will be interesting to see whether American Catholics get it, though, and whether we are able to share it effectively with our neighbors.

Ryan Haber
Kensington, Maryland