Commonweal Writer Offers "Various and Strange Doctrines"
Browsing through the October 11 issue of Commonweal at the public library (I would never, of course, subscribe), I came across a column by John Garvey titled, "The Trouble With Religion." That trouble, as Garvey goes on to explain it, is that too many are too certain about it. "To be of Christ's mind," the writer assures us (being contradictorily certain) "means to empty ourself, to hold on to nothing." Liberalism such as Garvey's, touting as it does uncertainty, tried to introduce it everywhere so that the openness liberals espouse will never be shut, the mind never give the will anything to seize upon and value as a pearl of great price.
It has been now going on 28 years since I shared half a volume with Garvey in the Thomas More Press series, Catholic Perspectives. The subject was Abortion. He took the position that we should not want or seek a legal ban on abortion, because it wouldn't work — women would have abortions anyway, and making it illegal would simply increase resentment against those daring to attempt to deny them their desire: "A reasoned discussion of abortion will end where coercion begins. The sympathies of people will be turned toward those women who will be seen as oppressed by a bunch of celibate males."
Garvey also wrote: "Think too of the fact you can reasonably discuss alternatives to abortion with a woman who feels she has a choice. Threaten her with law, hang jail over her head, and you will not stand a chance of winning her sympathy."
I took the position in this in-print discussion that "abortion is devastatingly unnatural, and as such cannot be legalized, anymore than anarchy or the absence of government can be legalized. In fact, abortion is anarchy at the most sensitive and vital point of human society . . . Suicide for government is as immoral as for an individual. Failure to protect the unborn is a step toward that suicide, for it is a denial of a governmental responsibility."
It is clear that what Garvey considered "coercion" in the area of abortion he has carried over into his view concerning the human intellect and will and religion. Faith must not involve dogmatism: indeed, in Garvey's view it cannot. He puts it thus in his recent Commonweal column:
Holding on to nothing means refusing to hold on to the need for assurance, the need to be right. This isn't faith. Heb. 11:1 tells us that faith is 'the assurance of things hoped for.' This is not certainty as we ordinarily understand it. To hope for something is to await something, to care fervently that it comes to pass, and to know that in some corner of the heart we fear it may not.
Had Garvey quoted further the chapter of Hebrews he would have shown it to be full of certainties present in and by faith: That "he who comes to God must believe that God exists and is a reward to those who seek Him"; that by faith Noah saved himself and his household; that by faith Abraham had Isaac restored to him; that by faith Moses defied Pharaoh and parted the Red Sea; that kingdoms fell before the faith of the prophets; and finally that those of such faith would be perfected in that which Paul wrote was prepared for them. Thus in chapter 13 the author of Hebrews send this message: "Do not be led away by various and strange doctrines. For it is good to make steadfast the heart by grace" (emphasis mine). None of this epistle speaks of the kind of fear that Garvey finds cornered in the heart making us afraid "it" (meaning the promises we receive by faith?) may not come to pass. That is not "the steadfast heart" made so by grace that Paul wrote about, either in Hebrews or any epistle. It too closely resembles a doubting heart.
I would like to think Garvey has in mind humility, a virtue that unfortunately is not necessarily always present along with faith. It is true that pride is often a dedication too much to self, rather than to others, and a misevaluation of self beyond its value. But the recommendation of Garvey smacks more of annihilation of self, a disevaluation of self into worthlessness. That is more Buddhist than Christian.
Each person must be of worth, having been made by the Father and redeemed by His Son. If we hold on to nothing, as Garvey advises in unmistakable words, we thereby cannot hold on to those realities, or to the reality that we believe in Christ and His Church because we have received from Him the inestimable and undeserved gift of faith. Christ called it a pearl of great price — the Kingdom He has preached to us through His Church. And we dare not fail to hold on to that truth, or He who reveals it.
Further, Garvey invites us to a sort of religious utopianism, or perhaps more exactly a brand of Heraclitean faith, with belief always in constant flux. For Heraclitus, change is the essence of all reality. It is clear Garvey holds to the liberal concept of truth being more a "becoming" thing, so that we can never claim a grasp of it, or that what is called true now will not necessarily be so tomorrow. He writes in his article:
This sense of the unrealized is the heart of the Christian story. That is why Christian faith, seen properly, can never reconcile us to any particular politics, or way of life, or even morality as we conventionally understand it. We await our completion. We do not now, and never can, possess or control what we are finally meant to become.
Here Garvey brushes some things aside that are necessary for just what is called for by our Catholic faith — a living of it here and now, at this moment, making it a way of life, and "reconciled" to the absolutely necessary morality of obedience to God's will as He has made known to us by Christ and in the Church He founded.
The Commonweal columnist here uses a faulty tactic of argumentation, mixing concepts of different sort, slighting principles of Catholic morality just as he did in the Abortion book.
There he brushed aside the principle of double effect in order to validate the "seamless garment" thesis that tries to condemn warfare and capital punishment as if they were identical with abortion — all intentional killing of the innocent. But of the three only abortion is forbidden as by its very definition an act of murderous homicide.
His failure at making distinction between realities leads to muddy waters even about this. He calls the double-effect principle that allows removal of a diseased womb even though containing unborn life casuistic questioning whether it ever was a "good" (meaning, I take it, a valid) principle. It is obvious he do so out of a distaste for use of the principle to justify unintended deaths that result in war or other acts of self-defense. He uses the following to scoff at its "dishonorable" use, as for example in application to unintended deaths "especially during wartime":
[One cynical student] who had to endure a moral theology class in which bombing of orphanages was defended but contraception was forbidden said, 'When they defend something, it's "double effect." When they condemn something, it's "the end never justifies the means",' I think he has a point.
The fact he ignores in this argument is that any principle can be misapplied to masquerade an evil intention. But doing that doesn't overthrow the principle. I never knew any American in my own wartime experience who would deliberately bomb an orphanage intending to kill its innocent young residents. Every induced abortion is, however, the intentional equivalent of doing so though the purpose is usually destruction of the haven of only one child. It's that difference of intentions that makes abortion always morally evil — as deplorable as all death in war may be.
Because the beautiful blossom of human salvation does not completely unfold until the human soul enjoys the beatific vision of God in His own Kingdom does not mean, as Garvey says, that our faith can never "reconcile" us to a particular way of life or even morality. We have the clear and certain Revelation from Christ Himself that a life lived in love of God and neighbor will certainly bring us to that Kingdom. Further, Christ was warned that deeds done contrary to that love will deny us such an outcome. We should never be "reconciled," it is true, to an understanding we have already succeeded in such living as well and as completely as possible. That would be smug presumption, usually the result of pride. It is the opposite of sanctity, and if we grow complacent because of it we are in mortal supernatural peril. But equally dangerous is to doubt religious reality.
In fact, the "way is certain," whereas Garvey seems to suggest it is not. So, too, are religious truths marking that way, including the need to cling to that truth even in the vocation of politics. No one of the simplest intellect, the smallest amount of comprehension, can misunderstand these things except in ignoring Christ's declaration, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." This can and must be taken as an absolute, for Christ spoke of it as such. It leaves no room for a future finding of some other way and truth, or living of some different life. Religion that embraces this completely cannot be taken as an evolving, uncompleted, changing thing. Our entry into it is subject to time; the reality is not.
Further, the Church is identified by our faith with that Way, Truth, Life. Christ promised the Church His abiding Presence. The martyrs, therefore, refused to worship in any other way than what was given to that Church by its Divine Founder. That was one reality they knew could not be given up without giving up their own souls. It is difficult to reconcile Garvey's insistence that if we wish to "be of Christ's mind" we must hold on to nothing with the martyrdom that the Church accepts as a certain proof of sainthood. Christ Himself held on to the truth about Himself and about His heavenly Father, and died for such "blasphemy."
The modernist frame of mind is insidiously tempting, for it tries to submit to time every reality, even those of religious faith and known by divine Revelation. That is undoubtedly why St. Pius X called modernism the synthesis of all heresies. Heresy is the replacement of revealed divine reality with humanly preferred temporal truth. Orthodoxy is objective, subject in our understanding to development, but complete and unchanging in its substance and definition.
We dare not redefine truth to be something other than it is. Either the substance of the Catholic religion is true and necessary for salvation or it is not. Either the Catholic Church was founded by Christ or it was not. If it was, we are called to be in it, hold to it, be "reconciled" to its teachings.
I must not accuse Garvey of modernism. He often writes quite consistently with Catholic understanding. But he also writes so ambiguously that what he thinks and writes must be challenged in the cause of Catholic loyalty. That is why I have written this column. It isn't likely that any needed counter to Garvey's ideas will show up in Commonweal.
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