Denver Catholic

22 JUNE 23-JULY 13, 2018 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives Homelands and social doctrines Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind: A refl ection on the Irish referendum W ith hundreds of bishops coming to the Vatican in October 2001 for a synod, I decided to spend that month in Rome conducting interviews for what would eventually become the sequel to Witness to Hope and the second volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning. During my conver- sations, I found a striking similarity among bishops from Latin America, each of whom I asked to name the greatest challenge his local Church faced in implementing Catholic social doctrine in the 21st century. With- out exception as to country , and no matter where the bishop in question fell on the spectrum of Catholic opin- ion, each of them gave the same, one- word answer: "Corruption." That got my attention, because fostering cultures of honesty and trust would seem to be right in the Catholic Church's wheelhouse, and the Church had been present in Latin America for some 500 years at that point. Yet one by one, the bishops told me that per- sonal corruption, leading to systemic and culturally reinforced economic and political corruption, was the great- est challenge they faced in the new century. It was an answer that helped explain some otherwise puzzling phe- nomena: like Argentina's collapse from being one of the world's 10 wealthiest countries in 1900 to being a perennial political and economic basket case; like Brazil's inability to realize its potential as a great economic power. There was serious Catholic failure here, and the bishops with whom I spoke were honest enough to admit it. I remembered those conversations when reading a recent essay in America magazine by San Diego's Bishop Robert McElroy, "Pope Francis brings a new lens to poverty, peace, and the planet." In that essay, the bishop had this to say about comparative pontifi cates: "This new lens refl ects in a fun- damental way the experience of the Church in Latin America. Critics of Pope Francis point to this as a limitation, a bias that prevents the pope from seeing the central issues of economic justice, war and peace, and the environment in the context of the universal Church. But St. John Paul II certainly enriched key aspects of Catholic social teaching from a perspective profoundly rooted in the experience of the Eastern European Church under communism. Contem- porary critics of Pope Francis voiced no objections to that regional and his- torical perspective." I've no idea who these "critics" are, but perhaps a few refreshers on John Paul II's social doctrine would help further the discussion. First, Karol Wojtyla was steeped in the classic social doctrine tradition of Leo XIII and Pius XI, which he taught at the Silesian seminary in Cracow in the 1950s and which provided the intel- lectual sca olding for his own social magisterium when he became pope. Second, it's true that John Paul II's most important contribution to the 21st -century discussion of the free and virtuous society — his insistence on a vibrant public moral culture as the key to living freedom nobly and well, in both political and economic life — refl ected the experience of a Poland that remained alive through its culture when its independent state- hood was eliminated between 1795 and 1918. But it's also true that this "culture-fi rst" theme was thoroughly baked into the classic social doctrine, beginning with Leo XIII. Third, John Paul II's recognition of the dynamics of post-Cold War econ- omies was not drawn from his Polish experience — the man never had a checkbook and lived largely "outside" the economy — but from intense con- versations with western scholars who knew how post-industrial economies work (and don't), and from whom he was both smart enough and humble enough to learn. And fi nally, John Paul II's social doctrine took failure seriously and tried to learn from it: specifi cally, the failure of the Weimar Republic in interwar Germany, where an ably-de- signed political and economic system eventually produced a totalitarian regime, because its moral and cultural foundations were too shaky to support the institutions of freedom when the crunch of the Great Depression came. So it seems to me that, with John Paul II, a distinctive personal experi- ence refi ned and extended the classic social doctrine tradition. John Paul was not imposing an idiosyncratic view on the world Church — which is, in fact, something no pope should do, because the Bishop of Rome is the custodian of a universal tradition, not an intellectual free agent. I will confess that as a person of Irish heritage on both sides of my family, I found the events in Ireland May 27 particularly dispirit- ing. Not only did the nation vote, by a two-to-one margin, for the legal prerogative to kill their children in the womb, but they also welcomed and cele- brated the vote with a frankly sickening note of gleeful tri- umph. Will I ever forget the unnerv- ing looks and sounds of the frenzied crowd gathered to cheer their victory in the courtyard of Dublin Castle? As the right to abortion now sweeps thoroughly across the Western world, I am put in mind of Gloria Steinem's mocking remark from many years ago to the e ect that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sac- rament. I say this because abortion has indeed become a sacrament for radical feminism, the one, absolutely sacred, non-negotiable value for so-called progressive women.´ One of the features of the lead-up to the vote — and this has become absolutely commonplace — was the almost total lack of moral argument on the part of the advocates of abor- tion. There was a lot of political talk about "rights," though the rights of the unborn were never mentioned; and there were appeals to "health care," though the lethal threat to the health of the child in the womb was a non-issue. There was, above all, an attempt to manipulate people's feel- ings by bringing up rare and extreme cases. But what one hardly ever heard was a real engagement of the moral argument that a direct attack on a human life is intrinsically evil and, as such, can never be permitted or legally sanctioned.´ Accompanying the entire process, of course, was the subtext of the Cath- olic Church's cultural impotence, even irrelevance. Every single story that I read in advance of the vote and subsequent to it mentioned the fact that overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland had shaken o the baleful infl uence of the Church and had moved, fi nally, into the modern world. How sad, of course, that being up-to-date is apparently a function of our capacity to murder the innocent. But at the same time I must admit — and I say it to my shame as a Catholic bishop — that, at least to a degree, I under- stand this reaction. The sexual abuse of children on the part of some Irish priests and brothers, not to mention the physical and psychological abuse of young people perpetrated by some Irish nuns, as well as the pathetic handling of the situation by far too many Irish bishops and provincials, produced a tsunami of su ering and deep injustice.´ And we must remember a principle enunciated by my colleague, Father Stephen Grunow — namely, that the abuse of children in any society, but especially in one as insular and tight- knit as Irish society, has a tremen- dously powerful ripple e ect. When a young person is sexually abused, particularly by a fi gure as trusted as a priest, that child is massively and permanently hurt; but once the abuse becomes known, so are his siblings, The Catholic Di¢ erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL BISHOP ROBERT BARRON Guest Column Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series "Catholicism."

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