Pushing and Shoving the Pope

I’ve said it many times, but I think this point needs re-stating now that the pope is in the United States: it is both meaningless and counterproductive to use the (flawed) American political divisions in the Catholic context. But we see this all the time, especially through the media, but also among Catholics. Just look at the bevy of papal stories over the past few days. The pope is too conservative. But, no, conservatives have been disappointed by the pope. The pope used to be conservative, but is becoming liberal on the job. Most of the pope’s positions are liberal. The pope is pulling in two opposite directions, liberal and conservative, confounding his critics.

Of course, there is no such duality in the thought of Pope Benedict. He is preaching the message of Christ, a message that is universal and consistent. It has nothing to do with American politics and the phony culture war. If we cannot liberate ourselves from this way of thinking, then there is a great tendency to try to pull the pope in one’s own ideological direction while perhaps secretly wishing that he did not devote quite so much attention to the stuff your opponent likes. Honestly, do you think the pope thinks in these terms? 

Instead of pushing and shoving the pope in the direction we would like, we need to widen our perspective. We need to reconnect the whole. Instead of pulling the pope toward “our” position, we should ourselves move toward the pope’s position, by letting go of the secular ideological and cultural baggage that continues to weigh us down.

While extremely pronounced in the US (with a long-standing fondness for viewing things through a dualistic lens and demonizing one’s opponents), these divisions are by no means unique to it. And Pope Benedict himself has reflected on this issue– the address to the Swiss bishops in 2006 contains a particularly lucid insight. The problem, as he sees it:

“I have pondered on this – I have been pondering on it for a long time – and I see ever more clearly that in our age morality is, as it were, split in two.

Modern society not merely lacks morals but has “discovered” and demands another dimension of morality, which in the Church’s proclamation in recent decades and even earlier perhaps has not been sufficiently presented. This dimension includes the great topics of peace, non-violence, justice for all, concern for the poor and respect for creation. They have become an ethical whole which, precisely as a political force, has great power and for many constitutes the substitution or succession of religion…

This is one aspect: this morality exists and it also fascinates young people, who work for peace, for non-violence, for justice, for the poor, for creation. And there are truly great moral themes that also belong, moreover, to the tradition of the Church…

The other part of morality, often received controversially by politics, concerns life. One aspect of it is the commitment to life from conception to death, that is, its defence against abortion, against euthanasia, against the manipulation and man’s self-authorization in order to dispose of life…

The morality of marriage and the family also fit into this context…Marriage is becoming, so to speak, ever more marginalized… The awareness that sexuality, eros and marriage as a union between a man and a woman go together – “and they become one flesh” (Gn 2: 24) – this knowledge is growing weaker and weaker; every type of bond seems entirely normal – they represent a sort of overall morality of non-discrimination and a form of freedom due to man…”

And the solution:

“[w]e must commit ourselves to reconnecting these two parts of morality and to making it clear that they must be inseparably united. Only if human life from conception until death is respected is the ethic of peace possible and credible; only then may non-violence be expressed in every direction, only then can we truly accept creation and only then can we achieve true justice.”

In other words, there is such a thing as a consistent ethic of life, based on the human dignity that is essential to Christianity. Too often in the United States, there is a tendency to make excuses for whatever aspect of one’s chosen ideology flies in the face of Church teaching. Abortion becomes a choice. War becomes a prudential judgment. No, we need to show some consistency, and that is the first step in persuading people that our beliefs have some merit. As long as pro-lifers support war, torture, the death penalty, and economic policies based on individual self-interest, then the “pro-choice” set will dismiss them as hypocrites (with some justification). And as long as fighters for peace and social justice insist on twisting individual rights to support killing the unborn and treating marriage as a vessel for mere selfish satisfaction, then they will never convince their opponents that their quest is in earnest.

It is incumbent on Catholics to cross this divide, instead of justifying it. As Pope Benedict recently put it, we must have an “anthropology that recognizes the human being as a subject of rights prior to all institutions, with a value that must be respected by everyone.” With this as a springboard, we are bound to challenge both sides of the secular divide. But are we living up to the challenge, or are we still trying to pull the pope in our own direction? And where do we start? Well, a good first step in this direction would be to stop using meaingless terms like “liberal” and “conservative” in the Catholic context.