Hecker Lecture 2010: E.J. Dionne, Jr.
The following text contains excerpts from the 2010 Hecker Lecture on Catholicism and politics given by columnist and author E.J. Dionne Jr. Jan. 22, 2010 at St. Paul’s College in Washington, D.C.
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Religion always has been and always will be an important part of American public life. The separation of church and state has never meant that Americans would not be informed by, inspired by or moved by their religious convictions. Faith and reason should be allies, not enemies. Religious Americans have an obligation to acknowledge that ours is a pluralistic society and that the arguments they offer during political campaigns and in the midst of public debates and struggles must be accessible to those who do not share their faith or their religious principles. But non-religious Americans need to acknowledge in turn that their religious brothers and sisters cannot help but have their political convictions informed by their faith traditions.
Religion in the public square can unite us or divine us. It can lead us to searching self-criticism or pompous self-satisfaction. There have been moments in our history when it has inspired us to courage and commitment, and other moments when it has been used as a tool of prejudice and exclusion.
For all of our difficulties as a nation, however, I believe that just as the arc of history bends toward justice, so has the engagement of faith in our public life been primarily a force calling us to higher standards, to greater justice and to a commitment to community and to fellowship.
We are moving, I think into a reengagement with faith’s prophetic role, into a time when believers and unbelievers come together, as they did in the civil rights years, on behalf of great projects of civic renewal and reform.
In the long run, faith should unite us, not divide us. It should lead us not to complacency but to action, not to arrogance bit to an acceptance of our responsibilities , not to a certainty that God is on our side, but to a humble quest to act in a godly way in an imperfect world whose betterment requires to act in hope.
Faith and hope should promote in us a glorious dissatisfaction with the world as it is so that we can envision the world as it might be. Self-satisfaction is not the calling of faith. Martin Luther King drew upon the prophet Amos in the speech offering his own dream: “We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” That is the standard of faith. That is the obligation of those who declare their allegiance to a just and loving God. …
On so many issues in American politics, being a Catholic liberal or a Catholic conservative inevitably meant having a bad conscience about some issue – often many. All this makes Catholic political and electoral behavior confounding.
Consider categorizing two prominent Catholics – the late Robert Casey (or, for that matter, his son, who carries on his name and advances his worldview as a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania) and Bill Bennett, the prominent Republican author and talk show host. As governor of Pennsylvania from 1987-95, Casey was as liberal as any Democrat on social welfare and union issues. But he was seen by many as “conservative” solely because of his staunch opposition to abortion. Bennett, a solid conservative, has nonetheless said that “unbridled capitalism is a problem … for the whole dimension of things we call the realm of values and human relationships.”
Bennett was getting at something a senior White House adviser during the Clinton Administration, Sidney Blumenthal, noticed in 1997: why had so many Democrats who had been more or less in favor of free trade in the past declined to give the president “fast track” authority to negotiate new trade agreements? They were insisting that the agreements include social and labor protections, and that the government do more to assist those who lost jobs or income because of free trade. Blumenthal stared at the list of House members who had turned against the president’s position and suddenly noticed that most of the defectors were Catholic.
“This was simple protectionism,” Blumenthal says. “It involved a deeply rooted tradition of Catholic social reform and solidarity.” Even after a long period of upward mobility, the tradition of John Ryan and the 1919 bishops’ program never fully left the Catholic soul. …
The relation shop between the moral and the economic crises in our society can be seen most powerfully in families where the need to earn enough income forces both parents to spend increasing amounts of time outside the home. One of the great achievements of the last century was the “family wage,” which allowed the vast majority of workers to provide their families with both a decent living and the parental time to give their children a decent upbringing.
The family wage was not simply a product of the marketplace. It was secured through a combination of economic growth, social legislation, agitation and unionization. If the marketplace becomes not simply the main arbiter of income, as it will inevitably be, but the only factor determining living standards, then all social factors, including the need t strengthen families and improve the care of children, become entirely irrelevant in the world of work.
The moral crisis so many conservatives talk about thus grows not primarily from the “countercultural” or “permissive” ides that developed in the 1960s. Its roots lie deeper, in a society that threatens to allow market values to crowd out all other values. The result is a steady erosion of the bonds of solidarity, morality and trust. This affects the values put forward by the popular culture, the organization of family life and the aspirations of the next generation – all questions of vital concern to religious conservatives.
My friend the late Father Philip Murnion regularly offered his friends in the Catholic social justice community a powerful insight from the time he spent as a child on welfare after his father died. In his day, Murnion said, poor children could count on three basic forms of support: some money from the government; love and nurturing within the family; and moral guidance form churches and neighbors who lived in relatively safe and orderly communities.
In recent years, he argued, poor children have come under threat in all three spheres: government help is in danger; many of the poorest children live in difficult (and at times dangerous) family situations; and the moral order and physical safety of many neighborhoods has collapsed.
Social justice requires economic support from government, a concern for family life and serious efforts to strengthen community institutions and to protect public order. Religious progressives may find their vocation in insisting that our society needs to grapple with each of these issues. At the heart of their arguments should be two principles: compassion is good, but justice is better; and while government certainly cannot solve all problems, what government does – and fails to do – matters enormously. …
John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus has to rank as one of the most successful papal documents in history. The highest compliment to the pope’s 1991 social encyclical lay not in the fact that so many were eager to say they agreed with the pope, but that partisans of so many different viewpoints in the church insisted that he agreed with them.
Such consensus is often reached with fuzzy language, artful compromises and a high level of generality. But that was not true with Centesimus Annus. The pope was highly specific about the principles Catholics should embrace in judging economic systems. He was also clear in stating where various systems – socialist, capitalist, welfare state liberal – failed to live up to Christian criteria.
But John Paul wisely chose not to build a political and economic system form top to bottom and declare his creation the one and only Catholic or Christian way. The pope’s principles rule out certain approaches (including dictatorships, highly-centralized command economies and capitalism without social safety nets and safeguards) while leaving open a broad area for debate and experimentation. The pope’s approach was principled but not ideological; broadly egalitarian without being a demand for absolute equality; open to the advantages of markets and the positive uses of government. …
The basic orientation of the American bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter on the economy was reformist, quite in line with John Paul’s overall economic view. Consider this rather balanced view of the American economy:
“The U.S. value system emphasizes economic freedom. It also recognizes that the market is limited by fundamental human rights. Some things are never to be bought or sold. This conviction has prompted positive steps to modify the operation of the market when it harms vulnerable members of society. Labor unions help workers resist exploitation. Through the government the people of the United States have provided support for education, access to food, unemployment compensation, security in old age and protection of the environment. The market system contributes to the success of the U.S. economy, but so do many efforts to forge economic institutions and public policies that enable all to share in the riches of the nation. The country’s economy has been built though a creative struggle: entrepreneurs, business people, workers, unions, consumers and government have all played essential roles.”
