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[Woodstock Report, March 1994, no. 37, pp. 3-10]
Copyright © 1994 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
To inaugurate the celebration of the Woodstock Theological Center's 20th year as a theological reflection center, a February 17, 1994, forum addressed the proper role of the Church in helping to restore religious and moral values in our increasingly secular society. Presenter for the discussion was Avery Dulles, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley professor of religion and society at Fordham University and an internationally known author and lecturer. Respondents were Monika K. Hellwig, professor of theology at Georgetown University, and E.J. Dionne, of the editorial staff of The Washington Post. Michael J. Lacey, director of the division of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., was the panel moderator. The views expressed at a Woodstock forum do not necessarily represent the views of the Woodstock Theological Center.
Avery Dulles, S.J., is a professor at Fordham University and an associate fellow of the Woodstock Center. He is the author of 17 books on theology; his latest, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith, will be published by Oxford University Press this spring.
Although the United States is still a relatively religious nation in which Christianity continues to be dominant, there has been a widening gap between the gospel and contemporary culture. Religion continues to be widely esteemed, but such esteem does not necessarily mean a high degree of faith or commitment to the Church. Religiosity is compatible with religious individualism, with enthusiasm for New Age phenomena, or with a preference for non-Christian religions such as Buddhism, Islam, or Native American religion.
A vague adherence to Christianity can also be combined with a culture that is hedonist, consumerist, and competitive to the point of violence. Many believing Christians find their faith called into question or undermined by a social atmosphere that endorses values quite opposed to those of Christ and the gospel. The inherent logic of contemporary western culture, in many of its post-modern features, threatens both to enfeeble the churches and to erode the religious heritage of the nation. These developments are a present danger both to the vigor of Christian faith and to civic virtue as we have known it.
In contemporary American Catholicism, and in many other forms of Christianity, we may observe three characteristic responses to the current situation. The first is to reject the prevalent culture and try to cling to the culture of medieval Europe, as it comes down to us through its baroque and romantic reincarnations. While this first response is appealing to many older Catholics of my generation, those who have had a strong confessional upbringing, it is not a realistic possibility for most young Americans, for whom pre-Vatican II Catholicism is not a living memory. The ideal of a close-knit community of faith sustained by a Latin liturgy, with a strong clerical caste in charge, is not attainable for the American Catholic Church as a whole, but only for certain relatively small groups within it.
The second possible reaction is to embrace indiscriminate pluralism on the theory that all cultures are equally good and that Christian faith can coexist with any of them. This attitude has a certain plausibility because Christian faith is not definitely rooted or wedded to any one culture, but it fails to recognize that every culture carries with it a built-in set of values and behavioral patterns that may be more or less compatible with, or supportive of, Christian faith. Catholicism itself, in its historical expressions, has many of the characteristics of a culture; it necessarily exists in tension with cultures that are purely secular or cultures linked with other religious traditions.
The third attitude, the only one I regard as adequate, is for the Church to enter into critical dialogue with contemporary cultures, accepting what is sound, opposing what is faulty, and attempting to supply what is lacking in them. Vatican II clearly endorsed such a dialogue. The recent popes speak of an "evangelization" of culture. Taking Christian revelation or the gospel as a norm, the Church may attempt through dialogue to shape a culture that is more favorable to Christian faith and practice.
Historically, every great Christian culture has been achieved through interaction of this kind. In the first millennium of Christian history the Church took over the healthy elements in the cultures of Greece, Rome, and the Germanic and Slavic peoples, and gave these elements a new Christian stamp.
The Catholic Church in the United States, although it numbers approximately one-quarter of the population, is not by itself in a position to make a major impact on the prevailing culture. It is too divided within itself and too estranged from the American heritage as it comes down to us from the Pilgrim fathers and the Revolution. Within the American Catholic soul there seems to be a split in faith and culture. For this reason we do not, as yet, have any flourishing Catholic art, music, or literature in this country. How then can we hope to make a Catholic contribution to American culture?
Fortunately, Catholics are not alone in their concern for the preservation of the Christian or Judeo-Christian tenor of our national religious heritage. For several centuries our national ethos has been dominated by a kind of civil religion that is not specific to any one denomination or even specifically Christian, but is a kind of natural religion expressed in a biblical rhetoric. Enshrined, for example, in our founding documents and in many presidential proclamations, this civil religion has provided a framework within which a variety of biblically inspired faiths, without sacrifice of their separate identities, can coexist in relative harmony.
Although the American civil religion is encountering serious challenges, there still exist many vigorous groups, mostly Christian and Jewish, who are concerned with the revitalization of the religious heritage that has been at the roots of our national self-consciousness. The Catholic Church, while seeking to develop its own internal life, in the light of its full tradition, can make a contribution to the national culture by selective cooperation with other Christian and biblically oriented movements. I advisedly say "selective" cooperation because churches should be wary of entering into potentially compromising alliances that are dominated by other religious groups, such as the "Moral Majority" of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the "Christian Coalition" of Pat Robertson. Although the Catholic Church will not want to buy into the full political agenda of these other groups, limited cooperation on selective issues, such as pro-life programs and family values, may be desirable.
Important though social and political action unquestionably is, this is not the Church's proper sphere of competence. It performs its greatest service to secular society not in the sphere of direct social and political action but in that of religious and moral formation. Before all else, the Church should strive to give its own members a sense of their communal identity as members of the Body of Christ and a realization of their personal accountability before God, in whose presence each of our lives is played out. By its teaching the Church can in some degree influence public opinion so that citizens will tend to bring social institutions and practices into closer harmony with the moral and religious principles of professed Christians.
Civilized society is not so much a matter of laws and police power as of common purpose and trust, in which the members of the society can depend upon one another to be honest and respectful. In the long run this requires a socially accepted code of morality that is backed up by religion, a point repeatedly affirmed by our national leaders, beginning with George Washington's farewell address. The current opinion that religion is a purely private matter, and that the state has no interest in promoting religion, stands in blatant contradiction to the evidence.
When I speak of the interest of the state in supporting religion, I am not speaking of every movement that arrogates to itself the title of religion. I have in mind religion that raises the mind and heart to the one true God, and moves people to guide their lives by the divine law. The true God is the one who stands revealed in the Bible, but who is knowable, to some degree, by the right exercise of human reason. Authentic religion sustains civic virtue, including the responsible exercise of freedom and respect for the human dignity of others, including the poorest and weakest members of society. Pseudo-religions that endorse racism, sexual license, or the drug culture do not have the same beneficial effects. The state must, of course, allow freedom for various religious groups to teach their own doctrines, provided that these doctrines do not lead to criminal conduct, but it should not give positive support to religious groups that undermine rather than sustain the common good.
A major resource for the Church is its educational system. Through its many schools, colleges, and universities the Catholic Church is well positioned to make a certain cultural impact. These institutions are privileged channels for the transmission and dissemination of the literary, artistic, and philosophic heritage of Catholic Christianity and for fostering creative developments in these fields.
One particular area in which Catholics can easily enter into dialogue with the dominant culture is that of social teaching. The large body of social doctrine developed under the aegis of the papacy since Leo XIII contains ideas that could be extremely useful for the renewal of American society today. I have in mind principles such as the inalienable dignity of every human person, religious freedom, the primacy of the common good, participatory democracy, solidarity, and subsidiarity. If these principles are kept alive, intelligently appropriated, and convincingly proclaimed with clear applicability to the American scene, the Church can help greatly to bridge the gap between the gospel and contemporary culture.
Monika K. Hellwig is a professor in the Theology Department at Georgetown University. She is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a member of the editorial board for Theological Studies. An author of many books on theology, she received her doctorate at Catholic University.
I agree with Father Dulles that values and virtues compatible with the gospel in this country are not simply absent but are disappearing or eroding progressively. One can quickly list some examples: children settling petty quarrels by shooting one another on our streets in this city; increasing numbers of homeless persons across the country; growing numbers of drivers who will not move out of the way of an ambulance or slow down for handicapped pedestrians; a rapid increase in cheating in colleges, universities, military academies, and technical schools; the steady increase in illegitimacy and venereal disease.
Furthermore, there is the ominous trend in the courts and elsewhere to modify the principle of separation of church and state: what was intended to guarantee freedom for a variety of religious traditions is becoming a matter of outright hostility to any religious presence in public places, especially in public schools. The vast majority of American children passes through the public school system, where most young people are learning more about science, computers, and mathematics than their parents know. Why shouldn't these children also be gaining a better grasp of values and priorities?
I also agree with Father Dulles that neither withdrawal into a separatist social circle nor merger with the larger society's values is the answer: patterns of critical dialogue about society's values and expectations must be found. Moreover, I agree that we need not invent new values and expectations; through the centuries the Church has been in a critical dialogue with the societies in which Christian communities have lived. It is clear that the larger cultures have been modified by this engagement. What has happened in the past can happen again.
A third area of agreement is the crucial importance of Catholic schools as the principal resource of the Catholic community in its contribution to a broad ecumenical effort. However, what is to be done in and with the schools is no longer blueprinted in the way it was before the Second Vatican Council. Before then we were in a more or less straightforward, counter-cultural stance which rejected much of the philosophy, scientific perspective, political and economic assumptions, literature and art, and much else that prevailed in the wider society.
In the Second Vatican Council we acknowledged and began to address the 400 year agenda of largely undifferentiated rejection of what was seen as modern. We have not had time to deal with all the issues in three decades but several generations have reached adulthood during this time, a period of bewilderment and confusion for their teachers and their parents. Teachers in the Catholic schools themselves were not always able to judge what was significant development and what was just loud noise at the lunatic fringe. It has not been easy to distinguish what belongs to a permanent core of Christian faith, life, and worship and what stems from changing circumstances. Hence, the task before the schools is a challenge of terrifying proportions.
My disagreements with Father Dulles are fewer. I find myself less optimistic than he is about the uses and impact of the "civil religion." During those years of my adult life in which I have lived in the United States, I have not seen the civil religion as a kind of natural religion in which various religious traditions can meet and cooperate. I have seen it rather as a neutral tool which can become very dangerous in the hands of those in power. It is my sense that the civil religion is one of the aspects of this society which most needs to be scrutinized in the light of the gospel.
A second area of disagreement is really a matter of emphasis. Rather than implementing gospel values primarily for the formation of individuals, I favor a stronger focus on the formation of communities that share and model those values and offer strong mutual support. There is, of course, no such formation of community that bypasses the individual, but the practical emphasis is important. We see parents in our society struggling with an increasing sense of isolation to counter anti-evangelical values that are heavily reinforced by social structures, media, peer groups, and models in public life.
The all-encompassing issue in narrowing the gap between gospel and culture is the need for general public and private acknowledgment of ultimate responsibility to the transcendent God, transcending civil obedience, peer group approval, practical sanction, enforceable rules, and effective supervision. We are experiencing an increase in cheating in schools and examinations of all kinds, large scale tax evasion by people in responsible positions, a thriving business in child pornography and extensive patronage of child prostitution in the Third World, and widespread investment in drug traffic. These behaviors acknowledge no ultimate law of right and wrong, but daily destroy human lives and dignity and relationships and subtly create the sense that this state of affairs is inevitable.
The second issue which to me seems crucial in narrowing the gap is the awareness that personal fulfillment and happiness are to be found in positive reciprocal relationships, and not in conquest, acquisition, and one-upmanship. This involves the tremendous task of unmasking business promotional and advertising principles which create artificial needs and promote addictive behavior.
A third issue is the understanding that the common good is our common global concern. There is no room in today's world for a society which does not consider the impact of its actions on other countries or populations or on the world ecology. As we know more we lose our relative innocence about the far-flung consequences of our actions. But even as this happens, there is a contrary move towards less concern with the common good at any level. People are feeling more helpless, more isolated, less supported, more fragile, and more immediately at risk.
A fourth and pressing issue is one deeply rooted in the gospel, namely that the common good is served only when the least favored are truly included. This is an issue that has been raised repeatedly in the modern social encyclicals, in the documents of Vatican II, and in the statements of both the U.S. and Latin American bishops' conferences. Yet it is an issue which has not had the wholehearted support of the Catholic laity in these countries. It has been vigorously resisted not only in the society at large but within the churches.
A fifth and pervasive matter is that we are spending much of our lives in an unreality created by all manner of "spin doctors" serving all manner of self-interested groups and purposes. Young people growing up in today's world are quick to learn spin techniques because they are surrounded by them. The denial syndrome of the drug or alcohol addict is only a more patent example of unwillingness to acknowledge and deal with the arduous, difficult, or embarrassing.
Closely connected with my point about truthfulness is the unpopular topic of chastity and fidelity. What is much obscured in our culture is that chastity is never purely private, but rather a necessary support to the whole fabric of community relations and to the kind of trust that is foundational to civilization. Yet the way human sexuality is portrayed in TV programs playing non-stop in family living rooms, kitchens, and children's rooms across the land is a recipe for disaster. Fidelity in sexual and other matters is simply not contemplated as happening in the contemporary world with any regularity among normal people. There are indications that we are becoming a society where unprecedented numbers of people have had the experience of being used and thrown away, an experience that does not ordinarily make them generous and responsible.
What, then, can be proposed as action to narrow the gap? It is quite clear that there are no magic answers, but that there are answers. We need to build community structures, both denominational and ecumenical, to support religious values. Such community structures can no longer be taken for granted. They are not simply passed on from the past because too much has changed. We need to build for our own times and situations. Nowhere is this more evident than in Catholic schools at all levels; we have much thinking and discerning to do. The patterns of the past are inadequate and those for the present and the future are still to be devised. We need prayer and evaluation and prudent examination.
On another front we need to devise strategies to link the churches in public policies and to introduce discussion of moral issues into public life. We need to infuse all the ordinary and continuing issues, decisions, and activities of public life with moral and spiritual values. Not least in that imperative is the promotion of an explicit debate on the limits of permissiveness. This debate is bound to be conflictual, unpopular, and exhausting, but we stand at the last five minutes of the eleventh hour in which to do something about the values in our culture that are being offered to our children.
E. J. Dionne is an editorial writer for The Washington Post and has a weekly column. He has a doctorate in sociology from Oxford University and has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of Why Americans Hate Politics.
The questions that Father Dulles has addressed are among the most vexing questions facing Catholics, especially American Catholics who have been reared with a profound respect for the need to preserve the independence of the religious sphere from the state. American Catholics, as a religious minority, are necessarily more sensitive to the need to protect religious dissenters from impositions by majorities than Catholics in other countries.
Just as the Church has profited from its engagement with the cultures of Greece and Rome and the Germanic and Slavic peoples, so also has it profited from its engagement with the republican and democratic traditions of the United States. The Church has engaged in a fruitful dialogue with the liberal tradition, thanks in no small part to the role played by people like Father Dulles and John Courtney Murray. But that doesn't lessen our own responsibility to enter, as Father Dulles says, into critical dialogue with contemporary culture, "accepting what is sound, opposing what is faulty and attempting to supply what is lacking."
What faults in our society do we have a particular responsibility to oppose and what might we as Catholic Christians supply that is lacking? And how can we still be mindful of the Christian's obligation to humility and to genuine regard for the dignity of others? How can we be in Pope John Paul's lovely phrase, "signs of contradiction," without being nastily contrary?
Catholic social thought is unusually well placed to overcome what has become a fruitless debate in our country between contemporary liberals and contemporary conservatives. That debate has really revolved around what sins should matter most to us as a society. Liberals have tended to emphasize one set of sins: materialism, prejudice, racism, sexism, a lack of individual and social generosity. Conservatives have tended to emphasize a different set of sins: personal irresponsibility, hedonism, a lack of regard for the importance of family life and the responsibilities of parenthood. We are entering one of the most exciting periods of social policy thinking because we're in the process of ending this fruitless debate. It is impossible to divorce a concern about social justice from an awareness of how the acts of individuals contribute to creating a more or less just society.
This emphasis on the indivisibility of individual responsibility and the common good has been one of the central characteristics of Catholic social thought for the last century. The well-being of families, for example, turns out to have a powerful impact on the possibilities of giving the next generation of children a fair chance in life. With liberals, the Church has long asserted that family stability can be encouraged through social generosity, including government programs and trade unionism and an insistence that rewards for work be adequate to the support of families.
But with conservatives, the Church has insisted that the behavior of individuals and especially of parents is decisive in shaping the just society. It should not have taken us so long to recognize the costs of family breakdown, which include the rising violence in the poorest neighborhoods in our cities, where children may hear the sound of gunfire before they hear a lullaby. I think it's no accident that one of the first people in American public life to make the link between social justice and the need to strengthen the family, Senator Moynihan, was greatly influenced by Catholic social thought. President Clinton himself reflects what he learned in Catholic grade school and at Georgetown University. And although Professor Hellwig says that talking about the limits of permissiveness is unpopular, I believe that it's becoming much more popular because we confront the costs of permissiveness every day.
Another crucial question raised by Father Dulles concerns what the Church might provide that is lacking in our society. I think that the answer lies not only in the practical good that the Church does, but in the realm of political and social philosophy. If there has been a fruitless debate between liberalism and conservatism in America, there has also been a flawed confrontation between individualism and collectivism in the rest of the world. Since the rise of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, the alternatives facing wealthy and Third World countries alike were both too starkly drawn and too little concerned with what might be called the realities on the ground. Communism itself proved to be a flawed idea, and capitalism, as one Italian communist once told me, cannot be discussed without adjectives. A democratic capitalism is different from capitalism under a dictatorship, welfare state capitalism is different from capitalism without safety nets.
With the fall of communism, the capitalist-socialist debate has ended and the utility of markets has been widely recognized by almost everyone. There is, nonetheless, an intelligent uneasiness on the part of most people, conservatives included, with the sort of society that is created out of pure individualism. Such worries animate the new communitarian movement, which accepts the traditional liberal emphasis on rights but also seeks to remind us of the responsibilities individuals have toward their communities.
There is also a growing awareness that values and social bonds cannot be created either by the state or by the market. They grow from a third sector which is neither a creature of the state nor a creation of the market. That sector is often referred to as civil society, and the Church has been arguing for its importance since the Industrial Revolution. The peaceful revolts against Communism in Eastern Europe and especially in Poland were fueled in great part by the Church's practical achievements in nurturing this third sector and its philosophical commitment to the idea that civil society needs protection. Protecting civil society against both the state and the market is one of the central tasks of a free society. And it is a task that the Catholic Church and religious institutions in general are uniquely well-placed to take on.
I would like to underscore Father Dulles' point that the primary contribution of the Church to society "is not in the sphere of direct social and political action, but in that of religious and moral formation." One of the most vexing problems confronting the Church is the tendency of its various factions to see themselves as political parties and parties that pretend to infallibility. There is a very troubling tendency on both the left and the right in the Church to engage in a kind of running excommunication in which each side sees its opponents as representing a kind of anti-Christ. Some on the Catholic right see liberal and left-wing Catholics as distorting the Church's deposit of faith and trying to remake Catholicism into something like utilitarianism. Others on the Catholic left see conservative Catholics as heartless apologists of the ruling class, unwilling to understand the radicalism of the Christian message. Carried out in the right way this debate might be fruitful, but the factions usually end up imitating some of the worst aspects of contemporary political parties.
Peggy Steinfels, the editor of Commonweal, points out that too often the goal of these debates is to place the imprimatur of the Church on a particular political agenda whose terms are set by the ongoing political debate and not by some set of values outside of it. It is more appropriate to see Catholicism and Christianity as laying out guidelines for political thought and action, and not as embodying some sort of program.
I see these guidelines as primarily negative in character, because it is much easier to be clear on what a Christian should not do in the political and social realm than it is to elaborate a full program that can speak for all Christians. First, Christians ought never to support dictatorships whose actions demonstrate a contempt for the dignity of each person and, second, Christians ought never be apologists for social systems that demonstrate indifference to the plight of the poor, the outcast, and the helpless. One could multiply these examples, but there is enormous room for debate and disagreement within such a framework. Debate should be welcome, because if the last 2,000 years have taught us anything, it is that people who call themselves Christian have not come up with the last word on creating a just society.
The fact that Christians have legitimate political disagreements suggests that the Church's mission cannot be primarily political and the Church, therefore, ought to be wary of having its agenda set by this world. In an essay he wrote 20 years ago, "Unmasking Secret Infidelities," Father Dulles argued that the popular notion that the Church ought to respond to the questions put to it by the world is profoundly misleading. He went on to say that Jesus refused to answer many of the questions addressed to him, especially those prompted by curiosity, hypocrisy, or vain desire for self-justification. Instead, Jesus put questions to his questioners. And Father Dulles concluded, the Church likewise must question the world's questions and in this way challenge the values and priorities on which those questions are based.
Questioning the world's questions strikes me as exactly the right definition of the Christian's task in the world. It is not an easy task, it is often confusing, but worthy tasks are often difficult and confusing. I offer a view complementary to Father Dulles' own, from the political philosopher, Glenn Tinder. Tinder has suggested that the Christian's role is to help build what he called the "attentive society," which he defined as a society in which people listen seriously to those with whom they fundamentally disagree. An attentive society, Tinder wrote, would not be dominated by doctrinaire secularism, but neither would it be officially or coercively religious. Such a society, he went on, would provide room for strong convictions, but its defining characteristic would be a widespread willingness to give and receive assistance on the road to truth. Such a place, he said, is the proper historical setting for freedom. Tinder, like Father Dulles, sets a high standard, but what other standards would we choose to live by, and what other standards can we count on to preserve and protect freedom?
Michael J. Lacey, moderator: Part of the difficulty in thinking seriously about critical engagement with the broader culture is related to the internal disarray and animosity that exists within American Catholicism along political lines. It is certainly questionable whether the processes of moral formation that Father Dulles talks about are possible under conditions of distrust and suspicion, even within the Church. How do you feel about the prospects for peacemaking within the Church itself? And what might be done practically to encourage serious dialogue about the issues dividing the liberals and the feminists and the conservatives and the traditionalists and so on?
Father Dulles: That is a very serious problem. It has been one for the last 20 years, really almost since Vatican II, which was the occasion for tremendous polarization within the Church in many countries, not simply in the United States. I really don't think this response is a permanent thing, especially here. We've become accustomed, in our political processes and elsewhere, to living with one another and to some kind of civil discussion, and the absence of this in the Church in the past few years is really the exception rather than the normal situation.
Catholics must realize that if we spend our time acrimoniously accusing and spreading distrust of other Catholics we are really destroying the influence of the Church itself. I think people are getting tired of those bitter discussions and I may be too optimistic about this but I think there is a tendency to get back to a healthy center and to have some degree of tolerance for people with different ideas or emphases than one's own.
Dr. Hellwig: I must confess I am not as pessimistic about this as your question implies. I have a sense that we are perhaps having an adolescent fling. Before Vatican II, there was relatively little freedom to express differences. Since the lid came off, we are having our little fling with some perhaps very unwise and extreme assertions of positions. I'm quite at peace with the idea that we'll settle down. Even in the most acrimonious debates, many participants really do listen to one another. That gives me great hope that we're going to manage.
Dr. Dionne: In the United States what's striking is how the divisions, especially political divisions, do not match denominational lines. In fact, what you have are scrambled denominations where liberal Catholics, liberal Episcopalians, liberal Methodists, liberal Jews and, in many cases, secular liberals are closer to each other. Conservative Catholics, conservative evangelicals, and a variety of other kinds of conservatives are closer to each other. The debate is not really a debate within any one institution.
In the case of the Catholic Church, the Church itself has been cut up into the same parts as the rest of society. To some degree that's good. But I'm afraid it also suggests that, in Father Dulles' terms, the world is setting the agenda for the Church and not the other way around. Secondly, I agree with both Father Dulles and Professor Hellwig that some of these divisions are lessening and that there is a greater sense of dialogue, partly because people are tired of shouting and partly because people may have actually learned things from each other over the last 25 years.
However, I think there remain some very deep differences within the Church on some very practical issues, such as the ordination of women or the ordination of married men. I don't see those issues going away. I think those issues become focal points for a lot of other differences that people may not want to talk about so directly. I agree that there was a quality of adolescent rebellion in what we've gone through, but divisions remain.