Denver Catholic

26 JANUARY 26-FEBRUARY 8, 2019 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives Squandering moral capital We need Catholic schools now more than ever T he morality of tyrannicide is not much discussed in today's kinder, gentler Catholic Church. Yet that diµ cult subject once engaged some of Catholicism's fi nest minds, including Thomas Aqui- nas and Francisco Suárez, and it was pas- sionately debated during the Second World War by German oµ cers — many of them devout Christians — who were pondering the assassi- nation of Adolf Hitler. (Their e© orts were known and tacitly approved by Pius XII, but that's another story.) What about today? Were I back in the classroom, I'd ask my students to construct a morally defensible argument for killing a tyrant. If the student followed Aquinas's reason- ing, the case for tyrannicide would involve a leader who was doing grave evil, who could not be removed from power except by being killed, and whose assassination would not make matters worse. Were those conditions met, Aquinas argued in his Commen- tary on Peter Lombard, a citizen might even be "praised and rewarded" for being the "one who liberates his country by killing a tyrant." With the 30th anniversary of the Revolution of 1989 coming this fall, we'll all be reminded that there are alternatives to killing tyrants or surrendering to evil: Awakened consciences can discover nonviolent tools of resistance to tyranny, tools preferable to assassination. And con- sciences are awakened when men and women hear a summons to moral her- oism — to living in the truth, which is the greatest of liberators. That is why the current stance of the Holy See toward Latin American tyrannies is so disconcerting. For rather than calling the people of hard-pressed countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to e© ective, nonviolent resistance against tyrants on the model of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, the Vatican is constantly bleating about "dialogue" with mur- derous thugs who've demonstrated for decades that they're only inter- ested in maintaining their power, masking their gross personal ambi- tion and greed with a fog cloud of gib- berish about "the revolution." Now, however, 20 former Latin American heads of state and govern- ment have said, politely but fi rmly, that enough is enough. In a Jan. 6 letter to their fellow-Latin American, Pope Francis, the signatories, includ- ing Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, acknowledged the "good faith" and "pastoral spirit" of Francis's Christmas blessing Urbi et Orbi [to the city and the world]. But they also reminded the pope that Venezuelans "are victims of oppres- sion by a militarized narco-dicta- torship which has no qualms about systematically violating the rights to life, liberty, and personal integrity," a corrupt regime that has also "sub- jected [Venezuelans] to widespread famine and lack of medicine." As for Nicaragua, President Arias and his colleagues noted that the Ortega regime has recently killed 300 Nica- raguans and wounded 2,500 others in a "wave of repression" against nonvi- olent protesters. In these contexts, the former leaders concluded, the papal "call for harmony....can be understood by the victimized nations [as an instruction] that they should come to agreement with their victimizers." Which is why the majority in Nicaragua and Vene- zuela received the pope's Christmas message "in a very negative way." In 2013, the Church's moral infl u- ence in world a© airs was at its modern apogee. John Paul II was widely recognized as a pivotal fi gure in the nonviolent collapse of European com- munism and a signifi cant player in the democratization of Latin America and East Asia. Drawing on John Paul's social doctrine and his own penetrat- ing insights into political modernity, Benedict XVI had made powerful statements about the moral founda- tions of the 21st-century free society in lectures at the Collège des Bernar- dins in Paris, London's Westminster Hall, and the Bundestag in Berlin. What has the world seen since then? It has seen a papal initiative in Syria that, however well-intended, pro- vided cover for the Obama adminis- tration to back o© its "red line" about Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons against his own people. It has seen a Vatican that refuses to use the words "invasion," "war," and "occupation" to describe Vladimir Putin's Anschluss in Crimea and his war in eastern Ukraine, which has killed more than 10,000 and displaced more than a million Ukrainians, many of them Ukrainian Greek Catholics. It has seen a Vatican deal with China that is widely regarded as a kow-tow to ruthless, aggressive authoritarians. Where is the moral challenge to tyranny? Where is the summons to heroic resistance? Great moral capital is being squandered, in a world that desperately needs a moral compass. O ur ancestors, Catholic immi- grants to the United States, built up the largest private school system in the world. They made an enor- mous sacri- fi ce, scrap- ing pennies together for the for- mation of their chil- dren. Why were they so committed to giving their kids a Catholic educa- tion? They understood that education provides the foundation for how to live — how to think, what to value, and how to contribute to the world. Catholic schools were formed to give children a complete formation, setting them up for both success and their eternal happiness. Nonetheless, since the 1960s, Catholic educa- tion has been in decline and now an overwhelming majority of Catholic children are formed primarily by the public schools. If public schools educate the bulk of Catholic children, then the state of the public education bears directly on the future of the Church in the United States. Authors Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan make a poignant and pressing case against public education in Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull You Child from Public School Before It's Too Late (Regnery Gateway, 2018). Here are their reasons for why public education has become untenable: 1) Public schools are now committed to spreading gender ideology, despite the fi ndings of science; 2) Meant to form citizens, they have eroded patri- otism and indoctrinated socialism; 3) The absence of engagement with religion combined with scientism have led to practical atheism and rel- ativism; 4) School systems have been eroding parental rights and margin- alizing parents' role in their child's education; 5) The steady decline in academic achievement has been fur- thered by Common Core. The authors state the urgency of their case: "The risk of harm to a child's moral and human formation in the public schools today is serious and nearly certain. Few children are intellectually adept enough to detect the illusion being passed o© as truth or wise enough to avoid the moral pitfalls that accompany an immersion in 'sexual health' or gender ideology" (148). The reality of this claim is hitting home in Colorado right now as the State House considers HB 19 1032, a bill which doubles down on existing standards covering human sexuality for public schools. Its pro- posed language states: "Comprehensive human sexuality The Catholic Diš erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL The Catholic Reader R. Jared Staudt, PhD, is a husband and father of six, the director of formation for the Archdiocese of Denver, a Benedictine oblate, prolifi c writer, and insatiable reader. DR. R. JARED STAUDT

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