The Church and the Citizen
It goes with broad-mindedness these days to express a high respect for religion — in its place. And what is its place? In church, of course. Man has, rightly or wrongly, certain aspirations toward Higher Powers, outside this universe. It is the business, the only business, of a Church, to help him express these aspirations. In other words, it may conduct public worship. Anything beyond that is trespassing. No one will complain of the Church while it helps people to pray; no one will complain much, while it talks to people about God; but it must not tell people how they are to act: that is interference. Interference with whom? With the individual, when it is a question of private morality. With the State, when it is a question of public morality.
Before looking more closely at this theory, we may make three remarks about it.
First: The broad-minded man must not think it is his own invention. Every tyrant there has ever been has made it the first plank in his platform — every tyrant from the pagan Emperors who first massacred Christians to the late Hitler and the living Stalin. The tyrant never feels secure until he has bolted the Church into the sanctuary.
Second: Only a man very ignorant of history would make such a suggestion calmly. Had the Church stayed in church, the world would have stayed in the mire. Even the high paganism ruling when the Church was born would be a thing intolerable to men brought up in the civilization that the Church remade: the very notion of equality was unknown in a civilization where women and children were as such a lower order of humans, and slaves were not really human at all. The Church uttered her great dogmas and her great commandments in the face of the world, and women and children came to new reverence, and slavery could not live where her voice reached. Even that paganism, I say, at its highest, needed to be remade by the Church: in its collapse before the seeping-in of the barbarous, only the Church preserved what could be preserved and slowly rebuilt a world order. It would have been the grimmest sort of irony to tell the Benedictines to get back into church at a moment when all Europe's hopes of material and intellectual reconstruction, of learning and letters, and music and painting and building, were concentrated in them: an irony even grimmer to order the Church back into church at a moment when Vikings from the North, Saracens from Africa, and Magyars from the East nearly destroyed Europe totally — and the Church converted the Vikings, civilized them, taught them the Christian laws, made them into the saviors of Christendom.
One imagines that, reminded of this and a hundred other things of the same sort, our critic would hasten to admit that the Church has rendered great service in the past: he might even, under pressure, admit that it would have been disastrous if she had done then what he is so anxious that she should do now: but he would add that times have changed — men no longer need this sort of service from the Church — they can handle their own affairs quite satisfactorily without her.
So men can handle their own affairs quite satisfactorily, can they? You would hardly think so, to look at them.
Third: In fact, no one really suggests that either our Church or any other should confine itself so rigidly to worship as to have no teaching on morals at all, so that it would admit the swindler, the sadist, the mass-murderer, without so much as a "Tut-tut" to hint its disapproval. Our critic not only does not object to the Church's condemning conduct that he condemns himself, he is actually indignant if she does not. If at one moment he is asking why the Church doesn't stick to religion, at another he is asking Why doesn't the Pope say thus and thus and thus. The man who demands that the Church stay in church is not saying what he means. No one ever criticizes the Church for teaching on moral, social, or political questions, but only for differing from him about them.
2.
The Church does indeed teach on morals: like her Founder. Christ gave a great mass of moral teachings, confirming what Moses had given, or supplementing it, or carrying it forward to a new level. Note that what was given was not advice but commands, and men's whole relation with Him depended on observing them: "If ye love me, keep my commandments"; "He that has my commands and loves them, he it is that loves me." And His instructions to His Church cover this: "Going, teach all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you."
Christ's commands (given by Himself or by His Church) affect human activities: but not all human activities. His concern is with the moral rightness or wrongness of the things men do, nothing else. Whether a given line of conduct is wise or unwise, practical or impractical, likely or unlikely to achieve the purpose intended — that is for men to decide for themselves: Christ does not intervene. Whether it is moral or immoral, upon that He speaks.
What is the test? Action is immoral which perverts man fundamentally — that is, action which swings a man away from his true nature as man and from his true goal as man. Man is by nature a creature of God and made to God's image; a union of soul and body with the body subordinate to the soul but necessary all the same to the fullness of man's nature; and his destiny is to come to God in a most marvellous union with Him. All men are all this and as such all men are equal. Any action that denies man's subordination to God, or the body's subordination to the soul, or the equality of all men in God's sight, any action that sets man's will towards self and away from God or creates a situation in which men are hindered from union with God now or hereafter — is morally wrong. God's commands upon these matters are absolute.
But within this framework of divine law men are free to live their own lives as individuals or as a society, arriving at such arrangements of human affairs upon earth as seem to promise happiness or prosperity. God leaves men free to experiment, to succeed and fail, to learn from their failures, to grow to maturity as they could not grow if God arranged every detail of their lives for them. God, so to speak, lays down certain principles, and these are absolutes. But subject to these, men, as individuals or social groups, may set their own goals and the techniques by which they hope to attain them. Sociology, politics, like private life, are the proper field for these purposes and techniques: upon them God gives no command. Neither does His Church. Upon the material effectiveness of the means and techniques by which man handles his earthly affairs, the Church has received no revelation, is not infallible, does not claim to impose her opinion upon her members (though even upon these matters she has acquired through the ages a fund of wisdom which men would be wise to draw upon). She is here to utter the law of God, and provided that is not contravened, she will not interfere. Sometimes she knows the law of God by His direct utterance: He has commanded or forbidden. Where situations arise on which God has not thus clearly spoken, He guides her in the application of the same principles; what denies the nature of man or hinders man from attaining the goal of man is wrong, and she so declares it. She insists upon the just wage, for instance, because to deny it is to deny man's right to life; she condemns contraception because it is a direct willed contradiction of the purpose for which God gave men sexual powers; she condemns racism because it denies the fundamental natural equality of all men.
Where the Church is most hotly accused of interference by one sort of critic is in her teaching on the sanctity of life (as against euthanasia, for example) and the sanctity of sex (as against contraception, for example). But God is the Lord and Giver of Life: and in the natural order no two things could be more fundamental than sex which initiates life and death which is its earthly ending. It was not the Church that dragged sex and death into the moral sphere. God Himself includes them among the primary moral questions: all systems of morality have seen them so.
The Church, then, gives moral teaching to her own members. And she demands that they recognize her moral teaching as infallible. When Christ told her to teach men to observe all things whatsoever He had commanded, He promised to be with her all days till the world should end: His command to her to teach men was a command to men to be taught by her: His promise to be with her in her teaching (like the earlier instruction "He that hears you, hears me") was a guarantee to men that they could accept her commands as God's will for them. If one is a Catholic, one believes this, accepts the Church's moral teaching, tries to obey it, and if one disobeys it, knows that one is in sin — sin against God.
For the Catholic, then, no problem is raised by the Church's commands save the problem of obeying them when inclination runs counter. If, as the critic wishes, the Church stayed in church, she would be disobedient to Christ and have no further hold upon her members.
For the non-Catholic also there should be no problem. He does not accept the Church's position as the mouthpiece of Christ our Lord, is not bound by her teachings, can go his own happy way ignoring them. Why then does he worry? He can hardly deny our right to believe that the Church is uttering God's will to us. We don't require him to believe it. Why can't he just let us go our way while he goes his?
There are two reasons why he should be interested in our relation to our Church, one of which concerns us more, one of which concerns him more. The one that especially concerns us is that his dislike of the Church's "interference" in our private lives is helping to keep him out of the Church. The one that especially concerns him is that the Church gives teachings on public morality as well as private, so that our obedience to the Church's teaching affects us as citizens in various ways and, as he feels, makes problems for him. Let us look at these two reasons in turn.
3.
The Church, says our critic, gives her members moral teachings, claims to be infallible, and so insists on their acceptance. This is totalitarianism and as such repellent to the modern conscience. But the Church is not totalitarian at all. Consider these three facts:
- The essence of the totalitarian state is that it claims total control — there is no field of thought or action in which it is not entitled to control its members. The Church teaches as we have just seen that while there is a sphere in which she has authority, there is another sphere in which she has no standing at all.
- The Church claims infallible authority over all those who accept her as instituted by God: those who have not the Faith are under no compulsion to obey her. No totalitarian state ever leaves it open to its citizens to reject or accept its authority at their choice.
- The totalitarian state permits no disobedience to its commands: the offender is hunted down, prosecuted, punished. Whereas if a Catholic has disobeyed one, or many, of the Church's commands, nothing happens at all unless he approaches the Church to confess his sins: in other words, he is his own prosecutor: until he acts, there is no prosecution: the penalties are mercifully light — such things as extra prayers; and the Church does not follow him up to see that he carries them out.
What all this means is that if we are bound, we tie the bonds upon ourselves and can untie them at will. But are the Church's laws tying us? They are the very reverse. Every single moral law the Church gives us is a new liberation. Let us make two things clear to the unbeliever: 1) that we accept the Church's moral laws because they are God's; 2) that God's laws are not there to fence us in but to liberate us. No one, buying a Ford car, complains that Ford says he must do thus and thus and thus: on the contrary, he is very glad that Ford has told him how best to handle the car. No one complains that Ford's instructions limit his own freedom to run the car as he pleases, for Ford is the maker of the car and unless we run it as he pleases we cannot run it as we please: in fact we cannot run it at all. As with Ford and the car, so with God and ourselves: Ford is the car's maker and gives instructions for its running; God is our Maker and gives instructions for our running. The moral law taught by the Church is the complete set of maker's instructions for the running of men. We, who have them, are the freest of men.
Just as the Church is entitled to declare the law of God in private matters, she is entitled to declare it in the social-political field, too. The Maker's instructions are as necessary in the one field as the other.
Upon political structure as such the Church utters no sound. A society may be governed as a democracy or an aristocracy or a monarchy or a dictatorship. No one of these necessarily contradicts the nature of man as a whole or any element in it, diminishes man as man, interferes with his right relation with God upon earth, or makes it more difficult for him to get to heaven. Therefore, groups of men may be organized in any of these ways and the Church, minding her own business, makes no comment.
Nor ordinarily will the Church intervene in the matter of which men are to govern. America, for instance, has elected its Congress and President for a hundred and sixty years without any whisper of a preference, much less a directive to the Catholic voter, from Rome; England has had a Parliament longer than that, with the same lack of ecclesiastical intervention in her elections. The Church has at times intervened in one country or another, but the intervention has always been for exceptional reasons (as in forbidding Catholics to take part in the Italian election following the seizure of the Papal states), and the occasional interventions of this sort serve only to point up their rarity.
When the Church does, as the critic puts it, interfere in politics, it is always in defense of the religious or moral order. Never for political reasons. Pope Pius XI, for instance, wrote an encyclical against the Soviet rulers of Russia, but it was for their atheism that he attacked them. He wrote many encyclicals that must have infuriated the Nazi rulers of Germany, but he was not aiming at National Socialism as a structure of government: that not being the Pope's business. His Encyclical on racism cut at the heresy contained in their master-race nonsense; Mit Brennender Sorge assailed their interference with freedom of worship; the Christmas Allocution of 1937 cried out against their profanation of the souls of children. Similarly, the Pope has never assailed the British or American political systems; but in Quadragesimo Anno and the encyclicals that followed it, he attacked those evils in finance capitalism which degrade man as man and make it more difficult for men to attain their natural fulfillment in this life or their eternal destiny in the next. Once again, the Pope was minding his own, immeasurably important, business.
For the Catholic, all this is clear. The Pope must utter the law of God, and for us there is nothing but gain in his doing so. But is the non-Catholic entitled to resent it? He is not so entitled, for a reason seen lying right on the surface; and also for another reason that is profounder and might easily be missed.
The obvious reason is merely a statement of something we have already noted. There can be no law in a democracy forbidding the citizen to get enlightenment from any source that seems to him adequate. The Catholic citizen is entitled to get his from the Church; one could hardly say that any man is entitled to believe that the Church utters the will of God, but is not entitled to be guided by her utterances in forming his own views. Thus he comes to see that contraception, say, or euthanasia, is not merely sinful but bad for man and dangerous to society. He cannot force his view on his non-Catholic fellow Christians. But since it is his view, he is duty-bound to urge it on them, give the reasons for it, do his utmost to get them to see it, as a citizen use all lawful means to see that the State does not actively support the thing he sees as bad for the health of society. The non-Catholic retains his own freedom of judgment: he is not harmed by hearing a view — a highly expert view, coming from the most experienced teacher in the world — which otherwise might not have occurred to him. Even if he rejects it and sticks to his own original opinion, he will understand his own opinion all the better for having had to defend it against the Church's. The Catholic has no less right to fight for the prohibition of euthanasia than the Methodists and others had in 1918 to fight for the prohibition of alcohol.
The profounder reason is worth a very close consideration. The Church that is uttering its view is not just any outsider: it is she who presided over the birth and nourished the growth of Western Civilization. The principles by which she is criticizing elements in the life of this or that nation are the principles by which all our civilization came to life. She is testing everything by a test that no one else even dreams of applying, and it happens to be the only adequate test there is. All human societies are made of men; the Church alone keeps steadily in mind the question: What, then, is a man? The Church alone tests every development of modern life by the question: Is this suitable to the nature of man? Will it diminish man as man or develop man as man? Will it help man to reach his goal or hinder him?
Do not think of this as a secondary question, only important to the philosopher or theologian. In the long run every society will treat men according to what it thinks man is. If it thinks of man as an animal, it will treat men as animals. We have already, in our own generation, for the first time seen the lethal chamber extended from the killing of animals to the killing of men, the killing of men by the hundred thousand. One view of man, taught by the Church, on which our civilization was based, is that every man is a union of body and spirit, made in God's image, with an eternal destiny, for whom Christ died. This is the only view of man which makes man an object of reverence: and the Church is the only institution that steadily applies it, and judges everything by it. This is, indeed, the only view of man which gives man any rights at all. If man is not this, what is he? An animal? And what rights have animals? A collection of electrons and protons. But what rights can a chemical formula have? It is sometimes said that in a wholly Catholic society, the Church would deny a man's right, not, of course, to hold contrary religious views, but to teach them to others. There is ground for discussion here, but note this: the most that her critics claim is that the Church would refuse one or two such "rights"; but, in their view of man, he has no rights at all: he merely gets what society decides is good for him.
This is the enormous service the Church renders to all nations, even unbelieving nations. Of what earthly use would a Church be that was always on the band wagon, always soothingly telling the majority that it was right, her utterances merely carbon copies of what everybody was saying? The majority, even in a democracy, will judge by passion, or whim, or prejudice, at the best by immediate considerations — an immediate problem to be solved, an immediate goal to be attained. It has all to gain by listening to the voice of one who judges by totally different standards, permanent standards, the undying nature of man and God's will for him.
This last point is indeed the essential. Society will never be healthy unless rulers and ruled both recognize a law higher than man's law. Power tends to spread. The ruler tends to take more and more: the ruled are too vague about their own rights. Only if the law of God is known for what it is, will the ruler have a reason to stop and the ruled a principle on which to make a stand. Throughout the ages it has been the Church's function, and only hers, to remind rulers of God's law. That was an epoch in the long story of mankind when St. Ambrose stood in the doorway of the Cathedral at Milan and barred entrance to the Emperor Theodosius till he should have done penance for a massacre he had ordered at Thessalonika. And the Emperor accepted the command of a subject whom he could in an instant have destroyed, and did eight months of penance. The example is still needed. Democracies are as capable of sinful action or tyrannical action as dictators. Masses of men can be selfish, even hideously selfish: the law of the pack can mean a ghastly sacrifice of the weaker individuals, those who are not useful to society.
The extension of power over the individual so that ultimately he is dehumanized, deprived of all personal initiative and personality, is in some ways easier in a democracy, since the individual has a feeling that the majority ought not to be resisted and that, in subservience to the will of the majority, there is no enslavement. The sore-pressed individual has no hope, save in a law higher than man's law, the law of God. This is not a moment to shut out the one voice that most powerfully utters it.
* In certain cases, where a Catholic's teaching or action is a serious danger to the souls of his fellows, the Church excommunicates him, refuses to admit him to the sacraments.
© Order of Preachers, Province of St. Joseph
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