Great Responsibility

The American founders were very serious men. Their astonishing accomplishment was due more to a seriousness of purpose, combined with rigor and candor, rather than a unique collection of genius. They were the very embodiment of my oft-repeated dictum that truth will stand the test of examination. There was no shallow bumpersticker sloganeering in the debates on the Constitution.

Less serious delegates could have wailed, “The people deserve to decide all things,” in defending pure democracy without grappling with the reality that, historically, almost all pure democracies dissolve into chaos and violence well within 20 years. But they dealt honestly with both the real-world advantages and disadvantages of their proposals.

Through that rigorous assessment, they built a blended system that would gain us the advantages of liberty, order, and fundamental rights while obviating the disadvantages of the systems involved…IF we faithfully followed that system. Most of our dysfunction now has to do with how we have allowed sloganeering to replace serious, rigorous thought. Complaints about the system the founders designed are like complaints against a paint-by-number set that the user just smeared random crayons over. The fault, as Shakespeare said, is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Would that the hierarchy in the Church would re-adopt the American founders’ method in approaching serious and complex issues!

There are plenty of examples in Church history on how to do this. Start with the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. Long ago, I thought Aquinas must be over-rated, because almost every self-proclaimed “Thomist” I encountered was pedantic, obsessed by process, used impenetrably dense language to obscure their inability to get to the heart of a problem, and considered it great sport to set up straw men to knock down rather than deal with actual objections to their positions.

Then I started reading Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. The language was similar, but in his case it was to make fine distinctions in deeply substantive discussions rather than to obscure the lack of substance in his arguments. He adopted no straw men whatsoever. In fact, for every proposition he raised, he took great pains to find the very best counter-arguments he could – and systematically demolished them on their own terms before even bothering to criticize them on his terms. He did not avoid the heart of the problem; that is where he started. I realized that mediocrities flattered themselves that their self-absorbed intellectual inanities were “Thomist” because they used a similar literary style to St. Thomas’ genuinely scholastic method. In St. Thomas’ case, it was a fine instrument used to illuminate impenetrably difficult issues. In the mediocrities case, it was the “beard” they use to hide the reality that they are incapable of dealing soberly and in depth with difficult issues.

For a long time, I did not seriously examine the Catholic Church as a potential faith home because of the general inanity of formal pronouncements of bishops and Bishops’ Conferences. During the last couple of decades of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union, Bishops’ Conferences in both the U.S. and Europe overwhelmingly came down on the side of unilateral disarmament by the U.S. – ignoring the aggressor while making strident demands of the aggrieved (much like our current Pope does in his approach to Israel). When some American bishops took to declaring their dioceses “nuclear-free zones” I nearly quit listening altogether. Fat lot of good their pompous pronouncements would do when a nuclear-tipped Soviet missile burst over their diocese.

Fortunately, a few years after St. John Paul became Pope I hedged my bets. He was at least one serious, responsible thinker in the Catholic Church. Thank God for St. Augustine, whose Confessions led me to seriously examine the doctrinal and philosophical basis of the Church, rather than judge it by the serial inanities of its reigning Bishops Conferences.

The feckless inanity continues in the hierarchy of the Church I love. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is overwhelmingly in favor of open borders / free immigration. How do they deal with the inevitable vast increase in human trafficking that always results from standardless open borders? How about the effect on employment for the citizens nations are primarily responsible for? How about how it affects cultural continuity? How about the effect on crime when you indiscriminately allow all comers to come without standards? You wouldn’t know because, when the conference deals with these types of questions at all, it is to sniffily dismiss them. The bishops’ general attitude about human rights is to leave the actual transgressors alone while insisting that the US has a moral obligation to absorb all the problems of the world.

What about gun control? The bishops are almost unanimously in favor of it. What about all the times guns are used in self-defense? What are the actual real-world results of jurisdictions that have tight controls on guns and those that don’t? How to explain the order of magnitude greater violent crime in jurisdictions that hold very restrictive rather than permissive gun laws? The bishops don’t even try to grapple with this. Their position is little more than the childish sloganeering that, “all persons deserve not to be shot.” Unfortunately, the bishops’ approach to almost all genuine issues of social justice are this asinine.

Of course, the bishops do not have any more authority over these issues than the average laymen. At times throughout history, bishops have thought they could enhance their authority and prestige by weighing in on things they had no formal authority over. At times, they have – but only when they address complicated matters with deep and honest candor – and don’t neglect their actual responsibility to speak on faith and morals in fidelity to Christ and the Magisterium.

When they engage in bumper-sticker sloganeering, written in the Scholastic style, they diminish the actual authority they do have. A seven-year-old girl puts on her Mommy’s high heels and smears on her make-up, thinking it makes her look like a sophisticated princess. A lot of modern bishops (and particularly their conferences) dress up their inane absurdities in the scholastic style thinking it makes them profound. The former comes off comical, the latter pathetic.

I pray that, in this New Year, Bishops throughout the world will candidly address their growing irrelevance in moral debates by working to become serious people. I once read a Catholic evangelist write that, “if a bishop does not have to speak on a matter, he should NOT speak on it.” While there is some merit to that position, I would not go nearly that far. I do pray, though, that in this New Year, if a bishop is not willing to delve into all the complexity of a serious issue and only has a bumper-sticker inanity to offer, he will keep it to himself and go about the business of running his diocese.

If all the bishops would make that their New Year’s resolution and keep to it, they would end 2025 with a lot more moral authority than they began it with.