TO PROPOSE THE TRUTH
THE CATHOLIC MOMENT REQUIRES FIVE TRANSFORMATIONS
Richard John Neuhaus
SEVEN YEARS AGO in <The Catholic Moment>, I contended that the premier
responsibility for the Christian mission rests with the Catholic
Church-the premier opportunity, and therefore responsibility, for
evangelization and cultural transformation in America and the world. I am
regularly asked whether The Catholic Moment has been missed or is now
past. The answer is emphatically No. In part because, if the Catholic
Church is what she claims to be, every moment, from Pentecost until Our
Lord returns in glory, is The Catholic Moment. In part because my "reading
of the signs of the times" suggests that the world is newly open to, newly
hungry for, a sure word of truth and hope, a word that is most certainly
possessed and most convincingly presented by the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church offers the word of truth and hope also for the family.
<Familiaris consortio>, the 1981 apostolic exhortation on the family
declares that "humanity's passage to the future is through the family." In
this year's World Day of Peace Message, the Holy Father's argument is that
to care about the human project is to care about the family. And the
Church cares-lovingly, intensively, passionately-about the human project,
and so about the family, which today is challenged on many fronts. Indeed
it may seem that the family is overwhelmed by challenges. Distinguished
experts often address economics, work, gender roles, law, education,
popular culture, and how each of these poses a challenge to the family.
But such work all begins with, and ever comes back to, <faith> and the
family.
The Church has a doctrine of the faith, a truth divinely inspired and
humanly informed, regarding marriage and the family. With this truth she
challenges the Catholic faithful and the world. Families that meet the
challenge of faith are equipped to meet the many other challenges that
will surely come their way. With faith, everything is possible; without
it, all foundations rest upon shifting sand. In reflecting on family life,
we are haunted by the question of Our Lord, "When the son of man returns,
will he find faith on earth?" (Luke I8:8). It is no secret that the
Church's teaching on sexuality, marriage, and family is ignored by many
Catholics and is derided by the world. This is not to say that the
teaching is rejected, for to be rejected it must be understood, and to be
understood it must be taught. All too frequently the Church's truth about
marriage and the family is not taught-not confidently, not persistently,
not winsomely, not with conviction.
IT IS NOT TAUGHT, in part, because in our culture it is frequently derided
and distorted. The Archbishop of Baltimore has recently addressed with
refreshing candor the ways in which the communications media are captive
to a twisted version of "the Catholic story." A central component of that
story is the claim that most Catholics dissent from the Church's teaching
on sexuality and family life. But of course that claim is false. In order
to dissent one must know what one is dissenting from. Yet that claim of
the media, repeated often enough, has an intimidating and inhibiting
effect upon the Catholic people, upon catechists, upon priests, and, dare
I say, even upon some bishops. Repeated often enough-and it is repeated
incessantly-it insinuates the suspicion that, in this vital area of human
life, the effective teaching of Catholic doctrine is a losing cause,
perhaps already a lost cause.
Our situation is best described not in terms of dissent but of widespread
ignorance and confusion. Admittedly, the problem is compounded by the fact
that there are some who do dissent-theologians and others who are not
above employing ignorance and confusion to advance their own views. One
speaks of this with sorrow and hesitation, and yet speak of it we must. It
is not a matter of making allegations, for those responsible could hardly
be more public in identifying their views and declaring their purposes.
Theirs is not the quiet and conscientious dissent of scholarly service to
the Church; rather, it is all too often a dissent of bitter opposition and
angry alienation. It is a dissent that confuses opinion research with the
<sensus fidelium> and attributes magisterial authority to "the spirit of
the times" as authoritatively expressed by academic guilds and the most
prestigious media.
This is the phenomenon addressed, no doubt with a heavy heart, by the Holy
Father in his recent encyclical, <Veritatis splendor>. "Dissent, in the
form of carefully orchestrated protests and polemics carried on in the
media, is opposed to ecclesial communion and to a correct understanding of
the hierarchical constitution of the people of God." As this Pope has
affirmed again and again, revealed moral doctrine is truly doctrine of the
faith. What is at stake is infinitely more than intramural squabbles
between liberals and conservatives, progressives and traditionalists. What
is at stake is whether people understand that they are invited to the high
moral drama of Christian discipleship, of living in the truth. Souls are
at stake. And if we do not believe that souls are at stake, we must
seriously ask ourselves what business we think we are in.
The Church has not the time, the world has not the time, countless men and
women eager to live the adventure to holiness have not the time for
interminable intramural disputes that obscure the splendor of Christian
truth about marriage and the family. It is time to move on.
THE SPRINGTIME OF PROPHETIC HUMANISM
If we have the will and the wit for it, if we have the faith for it, a
world that has lost its way is waiting to receive the gift of the Church,
which is the good news of the One who is the Way. A world that has come to
doubt the very existence of truth waits to hear from the One who is the
Truth. A world falling headlong into the culture of death looks with
desperate hope to the One who said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the
life" (John 14:6). If we have the will and the wit for it, if we have the
faith for it, this is our moment in The Catholic Moment which is every
moment in time, and is most certainly this moment in time.
At the edge of the Third Millennium we stand amidst the rubble of the
collapsed delusions of a modernity that sought freedom and life by
liberating itself from the author and end of life. Many of the best and
the brightest announced the death of God; what appeared, is the death of
man. It is for man-for the <humanum>, for men and women in their personal
dignity and vocation to community-that the Church contends. The Holy
Father has tirelessly reiterated that the revelation of God in Christ is
both the revelation of God to man and the revelation of man to himself.
Father Avery Dulles has aptly said that the teaching of John Paul II
should be described as "prophetic humanism." This is the prophetic
humanism that the Church proposes to a world that is wearied and wasted by
false humanism that deny both man's nature and his transcendent glory. The
Church neither can nor wants to impose this authentic humanism on the
contemporary world. In the words of the encyclical <Redemptoris missio>,
"The Church imposes nothing, she only proposes." But, if we understand the
crisis and opportunity of our historical moment, we <will> propose the
truth-urgently, winsomely, persuasively, persistently, "in season and out
of season" (II Timothy 4:2).
There is reason to hope that, after the long winter of its jaded
discontent, the modern world may be entering a season of greater
receptivity to the truth that the Church has to offer. The great British
novelist Anthony Burgess sometimes described himself as an apostate
Catholic. Shortly before he died, he wrote, "My apostasy had never been
perfect. I am still capable of moaning and breast-beating at my defection
from, as I recognize it, the only system that makes spiritual and
intellectual sense." Like the apostasy of Mr. Burgess, the apostasy of our
world from Christian truth is by no means perfect. The Holy Father speaks
frequently of the Third Millennium as a springtime "-a springtime of
evangelization, a springtime of ecumenism, a springtime of faith. He
cannot know and we cannot know what is in store for us, but we can be
prepared. We can be prepared to be surprised by a time in which thoughtful
men and women will give a new hearing to the only truth that "makes
spiritual and intellectual sense."
With respect to the family or anything else, one runs a risk by suggesting
that the world needs to hear, whether it knows it or not, the truth that
the Church has to offer. One runs the risk of, among other things, being
accused of triumphalism. If the alternative to triumphalism is defeatism,
we should not fear to be known as triumphalists. But the only triumph that
we seek is the triumph already secured by the One who came "not to be
served but to serve" (Matthew 20:28). Springtime may not produce immediate
results, indeed the result may seem like failure. But we know that "unless
a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if
it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24). And there were seeds sown long
ago in cultures once called Christian, seeds that may again be breaking
through the earth that has for so long been hard frozen under the ice of
indifference and unbelief. I take it that this is what the Holy Father
means when he so earnestly calls us to the tasks of "re-evangelization."
To re-evangelize-to sow anew, and to nurture to new life what is already
there but has for so long been stifled and stunted by neglect and
faithless distraction.
THE FIVE TRANSFORMATIONS
If, in anticipating the springtime of the Third Millennium, we are to sow
more confidently and effectively, if our sowing is to transform the world
(and we are called to nothing less than that!), we ourselves must be
transformed. Permit me to suggest five transformations of pressing
urgency. First, we need to cultivate the courage to be counter-cultural.
Second, we need to appropriate more fully the gift of Peter among us, a
gift luminously exemplified by this pontificate. Third, we need to
recognize that the Church's teaching about sexuality, marriage, and family
has a coherent structure and is all of a piece. Fourth, we need more fully
to honor marriage as a Christian vocation. Fifth, we need an intensified
commitment to what <Familiaris consortio> calls the "politics of the
family."
First, then, whether "in season or out of season," those who propose
Christian truth must always cultivate the courage to be counter-cultural.
Until Our Lord returns in glory, we will be wrestling with what it means
to be in the world but not of the world. The truth that the Church
proposes is for the world, but the Church will inevitably appear to be
against the world when the world resists the truth about itself. The
necessary posture of prophetic humanism, therefore, is one of being
against the world for the world. Moreover, cultural resistance to the
truth has more formidable sources. With Saint Paul, we never forget that
"We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this
present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the
heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12).
Especially in North America, some fear that the call to counter-cultural
courage is an invitation to return to the "ghetto Catholicism" of an
earlier era, but that is not the case. Sociologically speaking, immigrant
Catholicism was not so much counter-cultural as subcultural. The true
progression is from subcultural striving to cultural success to
counter-cultural challenge and transformation. The remarkable cultural
success of American Catholics in the last half century is a tragic failure
if it means that now Catholics are just like everybody else. Real success
is marked by the confidence and courage to challenge the culture of which
we are securely part. Or we might put it this way: there is a crucial
difference between being American Catholics and being Catholic Americans.
We are constantly told that there is a distinctively American way of being
Catholic. The course of counter-cultural courage is to demonstrate that
there is a distinctively Catholic way of being American. The Catholic
Moment happens when American Catholics dare to be Catholic Americans.
An earlier generation prided itself on being accepted by American culture,
and we should honor what was honorable in that achievement. But surely our
task if to prepare a generation that will dare to transform American
culture. Catholicism is no longer a suppliant, standing hat in hand before
our cultural betters. We are full participants who unhesitatingly accept
our responsibility to remedy a culture that is descending into decadence
and disarray. The remedy begins with each person who hears and responds to
the radical call to holiness in accord with moral truth. This is the
message of <Familiaris consortio>: "In a particular way the Church
addresses the young, who are beginning their journey towards marriage and
family life, for the purpose of presenting them with new horizons, helping
them to discover the beauty and grandeur of the vocation to love and the
service of life."
This is the message of <Veritatis splendor>, that we are called to nothing
less than moral greatness-"to be perfect as your Father is perfect." This
is the drama, this is the adventure, this is the audacious hope of
Christian discipleship. We must settle for nothing less, and persuade the
Catholic people to settle for nothing less. We are told that young people
today, immersed as they are in hedonistic self- gratification and
consumerism, are deaf to the call to moral greatness. Tell that to the
hundreds of thousands of young people who gathered in Denver last August.
Tell that to millions of television viewers who witnessed in Denver a
spiritual explosion in response to the culture-transforming call to live
in the splendor of truth.
The second needed transformation is for Catholics in America to more fully
appropriate the gift of Peter among us as exemplified by this pontificate.
For more than fifteen years now, we have been graced with one of the most
determined and vigorous teaching pontificates in the two-thousand-year
history of the Church. We have witnessed before our eyes the vibrant,
Spirit-guided development of doctrine that John Henry Cardinal Newman
celebrated as a unique strength of the Catholic Church. And yet we must
confess that this gift has not been truly received among us. The teaching
of this pontificate has hardly begun to penetrate the institutions and
practices of American Catholicism. In large sectors of the theological,
administrative, educational, and catechetical establishments, this
pontificate is viewed not as a gift but as an aberration-as a temporary
interruption of the "progressive" march of intellectual and moral
accommodation to the spirit of the times.
BUT THIS, too, may be changing. A younger generation is little interested
in the tired ecclesiastical politics of the last quarter century, the
endless wrangling of conservative versus liberal, progressive versus
traditionalist, liberationist versus magisterial. They want to get on with
the bracing adventure of being authentically and distinctively Catholic.
We are told that seminarians today are timorous, dull, and conformist; and
no doubt there are some who fit that description. There is reason to hope,
however, that there are many more who are eager to be enlisted in a great
cause, to serve the greatest of causes-the salvation of souls, the daring
of discipleship, the anticipation of the coming of the Kingdom of God.
Pray that we will be worthy of a new generation of priests who will settle
for nothing less.
Moreover, we will soon have, at long last, the <Catechism of the Catholic
Church>. While it is addressed specifically to bishops, I hope that every
bishop will make this a motto of his ministry: A copy of the Catholic
Catechism in every Catholic home. Catholic families cannot be faithful to
the teaching of the Church if they do not know the teaching of the Church.
Now at last, after a long season of uncertainty, the Catholic people will
have in hand a reliable, lucid, and persuasive guide for living the life
to which, at their best, they intuitively aspire.
CATHOLIC TEACHING ON SEX
To cultivate the courage to be counter-cultural, and to appropriate the
gift of this pontificate, a third transformation is needed: To recognize
that the Church's teaching on sexuality, marriage, and family is all of a
piece. Here it is necessary to speak of <Humanae vitae> Much of the
theological energy of a generation has been dissipated in rancorous
dispute over that encyclical. Surely it is past time to move on. That
every conjugal act should be open to the gift of new life is the
consistent and emphatic teaching of at least five pontificates. Surely it
is past time to acknowledge-early, unambiguously, and yes, gratefully-that
this is an essential part of the truth proposed by the Catholic Church. It
is of a piece with all that the Church teaches about the human person in
marriage and family life. That teaching is, if I may borrow a phrase, a
seamless garment. A few academics may continue to fret about what is
"infallible" and "irreformable," but the Catholic people cannot live well
the lives to which they are called if they live with a sense of
uncertainty, contingency, and conditionality about the moral truth that
claims their allegiance.
Maybe people are led to think, the Church will change its position on this
or that or the other thing. The "maybes" of conditionality produce
conditional Catholics, and conditional Catholics are deprived of the joy
of unqualified discipleship. We are not dealing here with inconvenient
rules of the Church that can be changed at will. Again <Familiaris
consortio>: "The Church is in no way the author or the arbiter of this
norm. In obedience to the truth which is Christ, whose image is reflected
in the nature and dignity of the human person, the Church interprets the
moral norm and proposes it to all people of good will, without concealing
its demands of radicality and perfection." The teaching of <Humanae
vitae>, especially as it is illuminated by the more comprehensive argument
of <Veritatis splendor>, displays an ensemble of mutually dependent
insights that constitute the structure of faith regarding sexuality,
marriage, and the family.
Of course there are pastoral problems, very difficult problems, in
connection with this truth. The Church is infinitely patient and
understanding toward those who struggle with the demands of the truth; but
the Church's love is never the love that deceives by disguising the truth.
The readiness to forgive is ever greater than the capacity to sin; and no
one has fallen away who, having fallen, seeks the grace to rise and walk
again. The People of God look more often like a bedraggled band of
stumblers than a spit-and-polish company on parade, but the way of
discipleship is no less splendid for that. It is the splendor of truth
that calls us, and truth will not let us go.
Here, too, the teaching of the recent encyclical applies: "Commandments
must not be understood as a minimum limit not to be gone beyond, but
rather as a path involving a moral and spiritual journey toward
perfection, at the heart of which is love." It is pitifully inadequate
simply to teach that artificial contraception is wrong. In the Church's
teaching, every "no" is premised upon a prior and greater "yes." All too
often that "yes" has not been heard, and it has not been heard because it
has not been taught. The Church's teaching is to be presented not as a
prohibition but as an invitation, an invitation to what Saint Paul
proposed as the "more excellent way" (I Corinthians 12:31)-the way of
love. Only in the light of that more excellent way does the prohibition
make sense. Only those who know what they are called to be can understand
the commandments about what they are to do, and not to do.
THE VOCATION TO HOLINESS
The way of love is openness to the other, and openness to life. It is the
uncompromised gift of the self to the other and, ultimately, to God.
Against a widespread dualism that views the body as instrumental to the
self, the way of love knows that the body is integral to the self. Against
a sexuality in which women become objects for the satisfaction of desire,
the way of love joins two persons in mutual respect and mutual duty, in
which sacred bond respect turns to reverence and duty to delight. Against
a culture in which sex is trivialized and degraded, the way of love
invites eros to participate in nothing less than the drama of salvation.
There are many, also in the Church, who dismiss this way of love as an
impossible ideal. Married couples beyond numbering who live this way of
love tell us otherwise. They testify that it is ideal and it is possible.
We need more effectively to enlist their testimony in advancing the
authentic sexual revolution, which is the liberation of sexuality from
bondage to fear of life and bondage to the self. This, too, may be part of
the springtime that we are called to anticipate: that a world exhausted
and disillusioned by the frenzied demands of disordered desire may be
ready, even eager, to hear the truth about love. But ready or not, it is
the truth that we are commissioned to propose.
The fourth transformation: We need more convincingly to honor marriage and
family as Christian vocation. In popular teaching and piety, we have yet
to overcome the false pitting of celibacy against marriage. We speak of
"vocations" to the priestly and religious life in a way that can obscure
the truth that every Christian has a radical vocation to holiness. In
agreement with a venerable tradition, we may want to say that celibacy is
a "superior" calling, but we must never do so in a way that suggests that
married Christians have settled for the second best. For all Christians,
the greatest vocation is the vocation that is truly theirs. I expect that
this truth would be more convincingly communicated were the Church to
raise to the honor of the altar more Christians who exemplified
outstanding holiness in their vocation as mothers, fathers, husbands, and
wives. The Catholic Church has a gift for eliciting and celebrating the
extraordinary in the ordinary. With respect to marriage and the family, we
might do that more effectively if we had more married saints, formally
acknowledged as such.
For compelling reasons-reasons freshly articulated in this
pontificate-celibacy will, I believe, continue to be the norm for priests
of the Latin Rite. A renewed accent on marriage as a vocation to holiness
is not in tension with the vocation to priestly celibacy. On the contrary,
as every Catholic is challenged to discern the radical call to live in the
splendor of truth, I believe that we will experience a great increase both
in vocations to the priesthood and in families that will settle for
nothing less than the adventure that Saint Paul describes as "being
changed into his likeness from glory to glory" (II Corinthians 3: 18 ).
Fifth and finally, we need a renewed commitment to what <Familiaris
consortio> calls "the politics of the family." Years before "pro-family
policy" became a popular phrase in our political culture, the Holy Father
pleaded with Catholics to become "protagonists" in "family politics." He
directed our attention to the Church's "Charter of Family Rights," and
urged upon us the rich doctrine of "subsidiarity" which underscores the
importance of mediating structures in society and, above all, the
irreplaceable role of the family. No state, no party, no academic
institution, no other community of faith has proposed such a comprehensive
and compelling vision of the family in the modern world. The Church's
teaching is a bold proposal for family justice that can inform public
thought and action-on everything from welfare policy and employment
practices to the right of parents to choose the education they want for
their children. School choice is not a matter of preference but a matter
of justice. For the poor among us, increasingly it is a matter of
survival.
Family rights presuppose the most primordial of rights, the right to life.
To strike at the transmission of life is to strike at the heart of the
family. Here, however inadequately, the Catholic Church already has had a
transformative influence on American culture. Although today, thank God,
we have many allies, especially among Evangelical Protestants, for a long
time Catholics stood almost alone in the witness for life. Without the
Catholic Church there would be no pro-life movement. The proponents of
abortion, euthanasia, population control, and genetic engineering are
correct in viewing the Catholic Church as the chief obstacle to their
ambitions. We earnestly pray that one day they may be persuaded to be our
friends, but until then we wear their enmity as a badge of honor.
We will not rest, nor will we give others rest, until every unborn child
is a child protected in law and welcomed in life. We do not deceive
ourselves about the encircling gloom of the culture of death. Perhaps the
darkness will grow still deeper, but we will not despair. We have not the
right to despair, and, finally, we have not the reason to despair. For we
know that the light of life shines in the darkness "and the darkness has
not overcome it" (John 1:5). The darkness shall never overcome it. Never.
Never.
And now I have gone on too long. "Humanity's passage to the future is
through the family." The prophetic humanism of this Pope and this Church
proposes to the Catholic people and to the world how that future can be
lived with moral dignity and grandeur. We do not know how this proposal
will be received, but we will persist in proposing it "in season and out
of season." At the edge of the Third Millennium maybe the springtime is at
hand; maybe the long dark winter has just begun. We do not know. We do not
need to know. God knows.
We do know this: Now is the time of our testing. And it is the time of our
splendor in contending for the splendor of the truth. If we have the will
and the wit for it. If we have the faith for it.
------------------
Richard John Neuhaus is president of the Institute on Religion and Family
Life and editor-in-chief of <First Things.> This essay is adapted from his
keynote address to the Pope John Center Workshop for Bishops, given in
Dallas on January 31, 1994. Taken from the April 1994 issue of <Crisis>.
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