Denver Catholic

22 AUGUST 8-21, 2015 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives F rom this vale of tears, one can never be sure about the boundar- ies of acceptable behavior at the Throne of Grace. Is laughter at earthly foibles permitted? Encouraged? I like to think so. Which inclines me to believe that, this past June 3, Miss Mary Flannery O'Connor of Milled- geville, Georgia, was having herself a good cackle. That was the day the U.S. Postal Service released a Flannery O'Connor stamp – a grand idea, unhappily executed by doing a Vogue makeover on Miss O'Connor. The iconic peacock feathers are there, but that doesn't quite compensate for a portrait of the author that looks less like her than what someone fancied she ought to look like. And that, of course, would be another reason for Flannery O'Connor to laugh at her stamp. For if any modern American writer was better attuned to the foolishness of the modern cult of syn- thetic beauty, I don't know who he or she might be. In her fi ction, Flannery O'Connor was one of the supreme contemporary exponents of Catholic realism. Like the less-remembered Paul Horgan, she believed that story-telling ought to help modern men and women see "things as they are," cutting through the fog of a culture that tells us that everything can be just the way we'd like it to be. And here Miss O'Connor's fi ction was deeply infl uenced by her profound Catholic faith (another characteristic she shared with Horgan): she knew that an ice-your- own-cupcake world was a world that had forgotten its need for redemption, and an ice-your-own-cupcake religion was incapable of calling that kind of world to recognize the reality of sin and the need for conversion. Flannery O'Connor's novels and short stories are not everyone's literary cup of tea; I once received an impassioned e-mail from a Polish priest who had read "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" after learning about Miss O'Connor in the Polish edition of my Letters to a Young Catholic – and had found the story appalling. How could I promote such things? I tried to explain that Flannery O'Connor was very hard to translate. But the real problem, I suspect, was that my correspondent couldn't quite grasp how Miss O'Connor's genius lay in describing the work of grace (and the wickedness that grace seeks to repair) through what seems, at fi rst blush, repel- lant, even horrifying. Asked why there were so many grotesques in her fi ction, Flannery O'Connor, who could be tart, responded that, in the South, "we like to think we can still recognize them." Thus the south- ern sensibility she shared with writers like Walker Percy and Shelby Foote worked in tandem with her sacramental- ly-based Catholic realism: the South, the part of America that knew defeat and had in a certain cultural sense been formed by defeat, was instinctively realistic rather than pie-in-the-sky romantic. Mix the Catholic part of Flannery O'Connor with her Georgia roots and life, and the result was a high octane literary cocktail – too bracingly realistic for some tastes, but widely recognized by serious readers and critics as something unique and brilliant in American literature. It's not the Postal Service's job to honor great Catholic apologists, but that, too, was part of the Flannery O'Connor pack- age. Her apologetics, best displayed in her letters (gathered in The Habit of Being), are of more value now than ever, given the unrealities of 21st-century western culture. For the roots of those myriad unrealities (now made unambiguous and unmistakable by the transgender movement) can be found in what the late Father Ernest Fortin called "debo- nair nihilism:" a blithe disregard for the givenness of things, an insouciance that leads people to live solely by the pleasure principle because they imagine that noth- ing – the world, sex, relationships, beauty, history – is really of consequence. Flannery O'Connor saw this coming in the mid-1950s, writing to a friend, "If you live today, you breathe in nihilism... it's the gas you breathe." The way to push back, she understood, was through the Catholic Church. Why? Because the Church teaches us that everything is of consequence, for the Son of God became incarnate, suŒ ered, and died to redeem everything. I am sure by now that many of you have seen the appalling hidden-camera videos of two Planned Parenthood physicians bantering cheerfully with interlocutors posing as prospective buyers of the body parts of aborted infants. While they slurp wine in elegant restaurants, the good doctors—both women—blandly talk about what price they would expect for providing valuable inner organs, and how the skillful abor- tionists of Planned Parenthood know just how to murder babies so as not to damage the goods. One of the doctors specifi ed that the abortion providers employ "less crunchy" methods when they know that the organs of a baby are going to be harvested for sale. Mind you, the "crunch- iness" she's talking about is a reference to the skull-crushing and dismemberment by knife and suction typically employed in abortions. For me, the most bone-chilling moment was when one of the kindly phy- sicians, informed that the price she was asking was too low, leered and said, "Oh good, because I'd like a Lamborghini." Now it is easy enough to remark and lament the moral coarseness of these women, the particularly repulsive way that they combine violence and greed. But I would like to explore a deeper issue that these videos bring to light, namely, the forgetfulness of the dignity of the human being that is on ever clearer display in our Western culture. One has only to consider the over 58,000,000 abortions that have taken place, under full protection of the law, in our country since Roe v. Wade in 1973, or the ever more insis- tent push toward permitting euthanasia, even of chil- dren in some European countries, or the wanton killing going on nightly in the streets of our major cities. The fi gures in my home town of Chicago typically surpass those recorded in the battle grounds of the Middle East. What makes this sort of startling vio- lence against human beings possible, I would submit, is the attenuation of our sense of God's existence. In the classical Western perspective, the dignity of the human person is a consequence and function of his or her status as a creature of God. Precisely because the human being is made in the image and likeness of the Creator and destined, fi nally, for eternal life on high with God, he is a sub- ject of inalienable rights. I use JeŒ erson's language from the Declaration of Inde- pendence on purpose here, for the great founding father knew that the absolute nature of the rights he was describing follows from their derivation from God: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…" When God is removed from the picture, human rights rather rapidly evanesce, which can be seen with clarity in both ancient times and modern. For Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato, a cultural elite enjoyed rights, priv- ileges, and dignity, while the vast majority of people were legitimately relegated to inferior status, some even to the condi- tion of slavery. In the totalitarianisms of the last century—marked in every case by an aggressive dismissal of God—untold millions of human beings were treated as little more than vermin. I realize that many philosophers and social theorists have tried to ground a sense of human dignity in something other than God, but these attempts have all proven fruitless. For instance, if human worth is a function of a person's intelligence or creativity or imagination, or her capacity to enter into friendship, then why not say that this worth dis- appears the moment those powers are underdeveloped, weakened, or elimi- nated altogether? Or if respect for human dignity is related to the strength of one's feeling for another person, then who is to say that that dignity vanishes once one's sentiments change or dry up? My suspi- cion is that if we interrogated people on the street and asked them why human beings should be respected, some version of this argument from sentimentality would emerge. But again, the problem is that feelings are so ephemeral, shifting and changing like the wind. If you doubt me, read some of the accounts of the o£ - cers and soldiers in the Nazi death camps, who, after years of killing, lost all feeling for those they were murdering, seeing them as little more than rats or insects. For the past two hundred years, atheists have been loudly asserting that the dismissal of God will lead to human liberation. I would strenuously argue precisely the contrary. Once the human being is untethered from God, he becomes, in very short order, an object among objects, and hence susceptible to the grossest manipulation by the pow- erful and self-interested. In the measure that people still speak of the irreduc- ible dignity of the individual, they are, whether they know it or not, standing upon Biblical foundations. When those foundations are shaken—as they increas- ingly are today—a culture of death will follow just as surely as night follows day. If there is no God, then human beings are dispensable—so why not trade the organs of infants for a nice Lamborghini? Flannery O'Connor and Catholic realism The Death of God and the Loss of Human Dignity Bishop-elect Robert Barron of Los Angeles is founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and rector of Mundelein Seminary in Illinois. He is the creator of the award winning documentary series "Catholicism." Guest Column BISHOP- ELECT ROBERT BARRON George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The Catholic Di› erence GEORGE WEIGEL

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