Seems Like a Good Idea to Me

A reader writes:
A friend of mine lamented to me yesterday (in part):

There’s something unsettling about the fact that my belief in a relatively free economy more and more stems from a reaction against something bad, not an affirmation of a good. I have no doubt that somehow I am misguided, confused, and ill-informed. In other words, I admit that my own beliefs are flawed somehow.

Hey, you and me both, brother. I think we (and several million Americans) are sort of living laboratory demonstrations of Chesterton’s adage that, since the breakup of the Catholic worldview into the ever fragmenting world, first of Protestantism and now of sundry post-Protestant ideologies, fads, and tribalisms, each generation tends to react to previous generations in ways which make it quite clear that the revolutionary knows what he hates, but is much less clear on what he loves. We don’t know what we are trying to build and we don’t know where we’re going, but we are extremely clear we don’t want to be One of Those People.

However, one reader in my comboxes does have a rather interesting suggestion:

Instead of “tea parties” I wish truly orthodox Catholics would organize “Compendium of the Social Doctrine” and “Papal Encyclical” events where we could expose the limits of the current left/right ideological mainstream debates. There is no other Light through the perpetual fog of renewing the temporal order. If we dumb down the social doctrine to only abortion and gay marriage, we leave ourselves in a bind where we must say that other injustices large and small must wait- you must not care or do anything other than fight for these two issues. And when one questions the heart of the Republican mainstream who bark about being so pro-life, but when given the national stage claim that all they want is to declare abortion a state’s right type of issue- well you are obviously a liberal or a socialist to be so unimpressed. I personally don’t mind the harsh critique of the liberal take on abortion and the sexual revolution, I just don’t like to see self-proclaimed orthodox Catholics seeming to prostitute the Church’s social doctrine in service to petty pro-Republican political advantage.

Makes sense to me. We’ve got this big ol’ honking patrimony of Catholic social teaching from the sole institution in Western civilization that has ever actually saved Western civilization, so it seems worth a shot. However, I don’t think we are hurting anywhere near enough for ideas like “salvation” to seem like anything other than comic melodrama. We don’t really believe that we are teetering on the edge of an abyss, so we don’t *really* believe our civilization needs saving.

And, of course, it’s always worth noting that the *last* time the Church saved civilization, it was as a sort of gracious by-product, not as the main event. The Church is here to save human being, not civilizations. That she happened to do so was a sort of grace note tossed in by God as a kindness. There’s no guarantee he will do a repeat performance. For all we know, the whole history of the US could be preface to the Great Work God is about to do in China and Zaire. Certainly, the great Babylonian civilization must be disappointed to discover that it came and went and that all its fortunes mattered only insofar as they intertwined with a little kingdom the size of Maine way out on the Mediterranean coast: a bunch of loser whose Temple Nebuchadnezzar sacked and forgot about.

But still: God is rich and abounds in mercy, and whether our nation realizes it or not, it sure needs it–and the Church’s social teaching *is* the only sane blueprint for a way forward. I’d love to find some way to make it as accessible to the public as, say, the Theology of the Body is becoming due to the work of people like Christopher West.

But, of course, first that means I need to learn it, which is a hopscotch affair for me since I’ve gotta work.