Shortly before his death in 1963 Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical with a novel distribution.
Originally, encyclicals were circular letters sent to all
bishops. In modern times the addressees came to
include priests and “all the faithful.” But John sent
Pacem in Terris much further. He proclaimed peace
on earth as far as the angels had sung their carol: “to
all people of good will.”
Paul VI continued this heading on his own great
encyclicals, hoping that the cogency of the faith
could speak to non-Catholics and non-Christians.
And those letters did begin to gain more attention
from that broader, ecumenical, and secular audience.
The American bishops did likewise, and with this
larger audience in mind they began to address more
“public policy” issues. As they did, their mode of
approach naturally adapted itself to their more
diverse audience: no longer the American Catholics,
but the American people . . . and the United States
government. More came of this than was intended.
For a public that now shared few of their convictions,
the bishops were constrained to argue from a thinner
philosophical and political gospel. Some thought
they were more competent and more responsible to
expound the gospel.
Last September the American bishops issued a
document that returns to the pastoral tradition of
expounding the faith to those who should be able to
make sense of it. Faithful for Life: A Moral Reflection
is addressed to the Catholic flock to whom the bishops are primarily responsible. It is their most cogent
pro-life statement thus far. It is believer-friendly, yet it
stings. The reason it may gain a wider hearing is that
the bishops bottom their argument, not on civic or
sociopolitical grounds, but on trademark Catholic
beliefs.
The leading issue is fidelity. Abortion and euthanasia are two instances of ultimate infidelity, whereby
the most helpless members of families become disposable at will if they are felt to be too burdensome. Abortion and euthanasia, the bishops observe, are
both secondary infections of the same infidelity
whereby spouses so commonly walk away from one
another that the American public can hardly even
imagine what it might mean to bind oneself to another, for better or for worse, until death. It is as impossible a notion today as it was when Jesus first said and showed it. The bishops are pleading that by God’s
grace we can”we must”live lives that are obligated
by other persons and their needs. They say we can
manage to do what Jesus did: be faithful to others
whether or not they are faithful to us.
Faithful for Life begins with the story of the Good
Samaritan, an unwelcome foreigner traveling at his
own risk in Judea, who was the only journeyman
ready to rescue a mugging victim from the ditch.
Two locals, bound not to “stand by idly when your
neighbor’s life is at stake” (Leviticus 19:16), had
looked and hurried the other way. Jesus’ praise for
this alien, the bishops note, is not for doing a favor,
because for him it was a duty too: “The victim didn’t
need to be kin or countryman of someone to whom
the rescuer had made a commitment. Anyone lying
helpless in that ditch was neighbor.” “We are all journeying down the road from
Jerusalem to Jericho,” the bishops say, and this parable haunts us because it scorns the dogma of our day:
“that our loyalties and our obligations are owed only
to those of our choice. On the contrary, we owe fidelity to those we choose and, beyond them, to others we
do not choose. It is we who have been chosen to go
out of our way for them.”
So the bishops come out as “anti-choice.” If fidelity
is to be Christian it is owed not only to those to whom
we pledge it but to those whose needs place an equal
claim upon our consciences. The pursuit of one’s
own “interests,” satisfaction, freedom, and preferences”all summed up in “choice””is the watchword
of our culture, and the bishops are explaining how
our culture can become deadly.
American society upholds the doctrine that human
beings find their ultimate sense and fulfillment
in individual freedom. To survive other people’s
competing endeavors”so this belief runs”we must
assert our own solitary “best interests.” Spouses must
enjoy uninhibited freedom, but respect it in their
partners (who are, however, revocable at will). Children (also revocable at will) must be the creatures of
explicit parental choice, and once accepted they must
be helped quickly into the full possession of their
own right to choose (and to fend) for themselves.
Grandparents (revocable also) must retain their vigor
and their distance so as to enjoy their freedom to
choose (but not to impinge too heavily on their children’s choices), up to the timely end of their lives.
Any decline from autonomy to dependence is felt as
an indignity. The desirable outcome of family life,
according to this belief, is a pack of freewheeling
individualists who enjoy unimpeded liberty to do
what they choose, limited minimally by their agreement not to impede one another’s liberty. This exaltation of individual free choice has, naturally, put
fidelity owed to others into full eclipse.
Predictably, a “plague effect” has been visited on
children by their parents’ failures to form or maintain commitments to each other. Studies indicate
that the children of severed partnerships are in a
great many ways at a disadvantage by comparison
with those whose parents remain together. They are
more impoverished and more likely to subside into
welfare, to perform poorly in their studies and to
drop out of school, to become involved in Juvenile
crime and its legal penalties, to require treatment for
physical illnesses and emotional disturbances, and to
be at risk for sexual abuse. Even more dismaying,
perhaps, are indications that this pathology intensifies as it is passed on. These same children are also
more likely to drift into adolescent sex, pregnancy,
and cohabitation, and thereby the increased likelihood that their own marriages will disintegrate.
The increasing acceptance of disposable relationships and the exaltation of divorce are but single
episodes in a long subversion of fidelity that has
changed the nature of the familial undertaking at its
root. It is not happenstance that the country which
offers the least legal protection in the developed
world for the unborn is the same country that offers
the least legal protection for the victims of divorce.
Abortion and euthanasia, the bishops argue, bring
home to us in a newly violent way how drastic is our
disbelief in fidelity. For it has become obvious to any
Catholic willing to see it that what was once constituted as a commitment has shriveled to a wish. “The
home becomes the place where, when you knock,
they no longer have to let you in.”
The Catholic Church has historically argued that
free and deliberate choice is indeed an essential element in any Christian marital bond. But there is a
companion teaching. We can and do incur other
bonds without choosing them, as when we are begotten by parents and when we are gifted with children.
“We are bound to our children, not because we chose
them, but because we were given them: simply
because they are our children, our very near neighbors.”
Even the marital bond transcends choice, for one
has committed oneself not only to the spouse one
married, but to that spouse with all of his or her
eventual developments of character and circumstance. We cannot discharge ourselves of our spouses
or our kinfolk or our neighbors in their authentic
needs without damaging our own capacity to love.
And once we have accepted this fidelity as an inmost
need in our lives, who knows in advance how many
times we will have to turn aside from our journeys
along that road from Jerusalem to Jericho?
It is clear that the bishops are expressing an unusually sharp critique of the national culture. It is a
prophetic moment for them.
“Abortion, and now euthanasia, have become
socially accepted acts because many have been persuaded that people unfairly lose their freedom when
others make claims on them that pose burdens and
obligations. In the course of a very few years many
people have come to think of an unplanned baby as
an unwanted baby, and of an undesired baby as an
undesirable one. The prescribed social remedy has
been to put an end to the baby’s life before fie or she
can make a claim on ),ours.” Such violations of
human life and human dignity are now “expounded
upon in classrooms, prescribed by physicians, condoned by public figures, protected by courts, subsidized by legislatures, and even advertised in the Yellow Pages. How has it come to pass that the
elimination of one’s child or one’s parent, acts of desperation wrought in every age, are now described as
sensible and even attractive alternatives?”
Infidelity, once naturalized, easily resorts to violence. Witness the, homicides committed by parents
upon their children, children upon their parents,
spouses upon one another. In this environment the bishops will not gain an
easy hearing for their message that life is a mixture of
both choice and acceptance. This nation’s adults are
hardly capable of convincing their children that life’s
moral imperatives are not a la carte.
The bishops do not mention evils more monstrous
than abortion and euthanasia, nor do they claim that
these two are so pernicious that they must preempt
all other moral concerns: genocide, enslavement,
environmental devastation, or nuclear destruction.
What the bishops do say is that abortion and euthanasia are dreadful outbreaks of the infidelity that darkens our earth with both furtive and flaunted violence.
Our nation has a persistent way of not wanting to
peer honestly into that darkness. Consider how prone
we are to evade social remedies that carry a personal
cost. We are a people scourged with drug seduction
and addiction; so we have locked away more of our
population than any people in the world. Our all affluence has afflicted our country with overweight; so we
look for the perfect crash diet, patch, or pill. AIDS
sweeps the land like Bubonic Plague, and we want
only a pharmaceutical to cure it. Prisons, diets, and
drugs are not wrong, but they only trick the edge of
these persistent problems.
From their pastoral ministry the bishops know
story upon story of valiant people coping with family
responsibility in the face of frustration. Yet what has
become the “American Way” of family life invites us
into shortcuts and sidesteps that can deprive us of the
close community we all truly seek. A young couple
by cohabiting make marital fracture and eventual
divorce more predictable. Our society and often our
Church look the other way, put them through a marriage preparation routine, celebrate their wedding,
and “hope for the best.”
Some parents who work full-time do so not from
family need but to avoid tedious days with children. They buy dawn-to-dark day care for their parenting,
delivered pizza for their meals, and television for
their amusement”where children are presented
with a hundred thousand sexual situations and two
hundred thousand acts of violence before coming of
age. Schoolwork slides down the national learning
curve, as teachers plead for more parental collaboration, and parents put hope in a cram course for the
college entrance exams. The grandparents retire and
move toward the sunniest retirement community,
where no children are allowed. The teenagers start
binge drinking and the neighborhood parents take
their turns leaving town for a weekend so that the
children can all drink indoors, regularly and “safely.”
The kids are having sex too, and school clinics and
condoms are going to make it “safe,” though not safe.
They don’t use the condoms, the girls get pregnant,
and a “safe” abortion is offered as the remedy for that,
though for nothing else. The parents eventually get
more time together but find they don’t like one another much any more, so they go for counseling; and at
the third session the therapist proposes divorce as the
obvious remedy. The grandfather dies, and when the
grandmother declines into depression she is put in a
nursing home with other depressed and abandoned
people. One of the divorcees drifts into a later-in-life
cohabitation, with the assurance of a compassionate
annulment to make it right.
The bishops’ response is radical. “To live in fidelity we have to rearrange our lives, yield control, and
forfeit some choices. To evade the full burden of
putting ourselves at the disposal of those to whom we
belong, to allot them only the slack in our own agendas and not what they require, is to practice desertion
by other means.” A life without loving fidelity is
eventually lethal. From beginning to end, Faithful for Life makes
points intelligible only to those who understand
the gospel. The victim of unfaithful violence who
suffers the most is not the one killed, but the one who
kills. When Jesus says that anyone who lives by the
sword will die by the sword, he is warning his disciples that the handle can be more deadly than the
blade. The reason we need to protect our helpless
neighbor is that the neighbor is “the Lord, who
comes in the guise of a stranger. At such times he
comes as if his very life depends on our welcome; but
it is our lives, not his, that most depend upon it.”
It is a tough message. That is because the gospel is
tough. But the bishops are not just harsh. At the end
of their pastoral reflection they turn to another story
from Scripture: the narrative of Cain and Abel with
its lesson that violations of fidelity have a perversity
and a severity all their own. The Lord told Cain:
“Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the
ground.” Early Christian writers took that as their
cue to list the sins that “call to heaven for vengeance”:
killing a kinsman, exploiting foreigners, mistreating orphans and widows, and cheating workers of their
wages. “What gave each of these sins voice before
God was not only the exploitation of the vulnerable
by the powerful, but the misuse of the helpless by
those who should have been their protectors.” But
then the bishops go on to show how far forward the
gospel has carried the Covenant. “Crimes that cry to
heaven for vengeance” read differently when the
Father in that heaven is a wrathless one whose only
“vengeance” is to love and not to hate, to transform
but not to punish”a Father who retaliates by drawing the heart of the sinner all the more relentlessly to
become faithful. That, of course, goes well beyond
what any civil society might understand.
Yet this pastoral meditation, by drawing the
gospel beyond what the Constitution could yield,
may yet win for the bishops a breakthrough of understanding from both Catholics and other Americans.
To be heard peaceably, the bishops will require people of good will. But their prophetic reflection may
elicit enough good will to be heard.
The peace they are writing about surpasseth
understanding, but beguileth it as well.
Ishmael Law writes on issues of moral theology, especially those dealing with the fostering of life.
