Perhaps you have noticed how some persons (not you and I, of course) project their besetting sins and failings onto others. A man who seduces other men’s wives will keep his own wife under veritable lock and key. A snoop is sure others are snooping on him. The larcenous man fears theft. Christians who make little or no effort to live up to the moral and ethical standards of the religion they profess, and they are legion, take it for granted that Iran’s Shi’ite Muslim leaders are lying when they say they aren’t building nuclear weapons because their religion (in the form of a fatwa) prohibits it.
Of course many have an additional reason to suppose the Iranians are lying: the prime minister of Israel tells them so. He did it in grand style last spring in a speech delivered to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Remember?
I remember something else, this from a few years ago: a conversation the public wasn’t meant to hear between President Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy, then the President of France. The men were backstage at a meeting of world leaders and didn’t realize they were talking near an open microphone. “Netanyahu is a liar,” Sarkozy said. “Yeah,” replied Obama, “and I have to deal with him every day.” Did President Obama mean it only seems like every day, or was it possible that every day the Prime Minister of Israel actually phones the President of the United States to badger him into line, or try?
President Obama and Pope Francis resemble each other insofar as there is nothing either man can do in which those who hate them will see any good. In the case of Obama-haters they never credit him with being the first president we’ve had since Dwight Eisenhower who has stood up to the Israelis to any extent. Now they refuse to recognize that with the Iran nuclear deal he has declared outright independence from Israeli control of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Then again, perhaps they do recognize it. That may be why the large group of Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination all oppose the deal. Of course that sorry lot are also desperate to demonstrate that there is a substantial difference between their brand of liberalism (called conservative) and the President’s.
In any event, Congress takes up the Iran nuclear deal this month. At the moment of this writing, it looks as if the Administration will prevail, but it will be of great interest to see how many members of Congress, and which ones, oppose independence.
I have just spoken of the Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination. It amounts to saying they vie to determine which of them will be defeated by Hillary Clinton in next year’s general election.
Lacking the decency to go hide themselves in a desert at the time of Monica Lewinski, as they would have been compelled to do were the society as it should be, Bill and Hillary Clinton decided to brazen out the scandal. Developments have proven they were correct to do so, from their standpoint. He is now viewed as something like an old roué of an uncle and even by many as the nearest the country has to an elder statesman. And she, despite the persistent imagining of political fantasists that, come election, the majority of the American electorate will prove other than suicidal, is poised to follow Barack Obama into the White House.
The Clintons took the real measure of their countrymen years ago and as a consequence stand at the pinnacle of American society along with multibillionaires and entertainment and sports stars, proving thereby that a people truly do get the leaders they deserve.
If additional proof were needed it could be found in a speech delivered by Mrs. Clinton last April 23 to the annual Women in the World Conference in New York City. For years she has addressed each gathering of this body. This year she declared that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and cultural biases have to be changed” in order to assure all women access to “reproductive health care.”
Religious beliefs “have to be changed”? Some Catholics, seeing replays of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, have concluded she was threatening them with unprecedented political tyranny when she becomes president. That could be, but not when it comes to religious beliefs. Those have already changed, at least Catholic ones. Mind you, Church doctrine does not change, but when it is not taught, or is misrepresented, belief will – belief and practice.
It is not simply that Catholics in North America and Western Europe contracept and abort at a rate as great as, or greater than, non-Catholics. That’s been the case ever since Humanae Vitae was dropped down the institutional Church’s memory hole after its promulgation in 1968. Every survey on the matter has shown it. No, the changes have been more profound than that. I’ll tell you the main one.
When I came into the Church fifty years ago Catholic religious belief for most members of the Church was about overcoming self. In the mainstream Church today it is as much about asserting self as anything. A notorious instance of this was the opinion written by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic, in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In this case the Supreme Court upheld its earlier (1973) decision in Roe v.Wade that legalized abortion.
Kennedy wrote, as if never exposed to authentic Catholic teaching though he was born in 1936 and grew up in the “golden age” of prelates like Spellman of New York and Cushing of Boston: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Translation: Objective truth does not exist. Truth is whatever an individual, his very own self, decides it is or wants it to be.
The “right” discovered by Justice Kennedy was at the heart of what Bl. Pope Pius IX condemned 150 years ago as “the liberty of perdition.” More recently, of course, Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell that made same-sex “marriage” legal in the U.S.
The modern Catholic preoccupation with asserting self finds its most common expression in the notion of “self-fulfillment.” Of course Catholics are not alone in this preoccupation. Everybody nowadays wants to be “fulfilled,” fulfilled in his marriage (or by leaving it), fulfilled in his job (or by changing it), fulfilled when he goes to church (by apostatizing, if need be). Nothing could be more modern. But this is only to say that in their modernity nothing any longer distinguishes most Catholics from everybody else. To be sure, bishops here and in Europe have had a role in this change from self-abnegation to self-fulfillment. How? Why? My perspective on the question is historical.
In 1945, the year World War II ended, continental Europe had been “liberated” by the military forces of liberal democracy. This meant, for instance, that the crucifixes hung on France’s classroom walls by the government in power during the war were taken down and the Catholic religious instruction mandated by that government was stopped. From now on all religions, like all men, were to be equal. When the Church’s bishops, still predominately European, gathered at Vatican II it was with the purpose of adjusting themselves to the new political reality or, as it was said, bringing the Church “up to date.” American bishops and the periti (experts) they brought with them were an invaluable help in this. They were accustomed to operating according to liberal democracy’s norms and requirements. In a word, the bishops had institutional survival on their minds and The Church in the Modern World would be the principal document Vatican II produced. It can hardly be surprising that the result was a Church that became embedded — no, mired — in modern culture.
But bishops have always been concerned with institutional survival. They used to be the friends of aristocrats. Indeed, cardinals became themselves “princes” of the Church. When the bourgeoisie replaced aristocrats as the rulers of society following the Revolution that began to unfold in 1789, no institution was more middle-class than the Church. Now the formerly Christian West is secular-liberal everywhere and its politics at least nominally democratic. The Church reflects this, most notably in the only Mass familiar to most Catholics, the one celebrated according to the so-called “Ordinary Form” of the Roman Rite. With everybody gathered around a table instead of kneeling before an altar and glad-handing one another as a “sign of peace,” it is a people’s Mass suitable to an age in which the will of the people governs instead of the will of God.
Only think of the “hymns” celebrating people — celebrating self — that became popular in the people-centered post-Vatican II Mass: Dream the Impossible Dream, On the Wings of Eagles. You can soar, do anything, be anything you want, a rock star, a celebrity, President of the United States! There was even a Cardinal-Archbishop of Los Angeles (Roger Mahoney) who formally taught that Our Lord becomes present at Mass “first of all in the gathering of the people” and after that in the Gospel. This was in a document entitled Christ Among Us. It did not mention the Eucharist.
A people governed according to the norms and requirements of liberal democracy, and happy to be so, get the religion they want as well as leaders they deserve.
Speaking of the religion brings me to another upcoming event. Pope Francis will be in the U.S. this month and is coming right here to Washington D.C. where I live. I have no plans to join the crowds trying to glimpse him when he is here. It isn’t because I hate Francis. It is because seeing a pope stopped being a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me years ago. During the long pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II I must have attended at least a couple of dozen of his Masses in the U.S. and overseas. His appearances became routine to me, as doubtless they did to him.
There was the ritual bending down and kissing the tarmac as soon as he got off his plane until age and infirmity prevented it. When they did, two young persons raising a plate of the local soil for him to pretend to kiss became the practice. After the airport came the first big photo-op of the visit. He would be driven to the cathedral and cameras whirred and clicked as he prayed before the tabernacle in whichever side chapel it had been relegated. And so on from there.
It was all so routine that when something unplanned took place, it became memorable — like at the Mass he celebrated in a park in Miami. It wasn’t enough for its organizers that they put on the program a Spanish-speaking Baptist minister for a Scripture reading and sermonette. They also included a troupe of liturgical dancers. Night had fallen and almost as soon as the dancers began their gyrations Miami was hit by a sudden tropical storm, a real downpour, complete with lightning. A bolt of it hit a lighting mast. The klieg lights exploded, showering the crowd below with sparks and glass. Everybody ran for cover. The Pope, reporters were later told, finished the Mass in a trailer behind the stage.
I wanted to think, and still want to think, God was demonstrating what he thought of liturgical dancers. Yet I have my memory of St. John Paul’s first visit to Washington, which I did not cover as a reporter. It was 1979. He had not yet been shot. The Popemobile did not exist. I stood with 300,000 others lining Pennsylvania Avenue as he rode by, standing in the back of an open convertible. He looked to me like a general reviewing his troops, and I was thrilled.
When I did begin covering St. John Paul’s trips, his Vatican handlers sometimes intimated that there was a theory, or hope, that by means of his travels he could, as it were, go over the heads of national bishops’ conferences to rally the rank-and-file faithful in defense of the true “renewal” Vatican II was supposed to propel.
Well, the theory didn’t work. By the end of his pontificate fewer Catholics were attending Mass, bothering to get married when they lived together, or baptizing the children they didn’t abort than at its beginning.
What happened? Nothing except that modernity had stronger appeal than a Protestantized Mass and homilies about a TV show the priest had recently seen. Now here comes Pope Francis. I hope he talks about more than being good citizens of the planet. Sooner or later, the world needs to hear again a homily from a pope about the importance of being a citizen of Rome.
One thing about Francis different from most of his recent predecessors is that he appears not to be cowed by women. No wonder. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires he had to deal with Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez who rammed legislation to legalize abortion through the nation’s congress. She is a tough lady. However, one thing about her is that unlike, say, Merkel of Germany and Rousseff of Brazil, she acts feminine, wears a skirt and always has the good form to put on a hat or veil when she meets with Francis. On his side, he is scrupulously cordial, as is any pope with any visiting head of state. Something else: To my knowledge, and I think it would be news if it happened, she has never pushed their face-to-face relations to a confrontational point by presenting herself for Communion from his hand.
Will he know who Nancy Pelosi is when she does? He has banked his reputation on being seen to practice what he preaches, and as Archbishop of Buenos Aires he instructed his clergy not to give Communion to legislators who supported legal abortion. Will his briefers, fearing a moment that could be more than awkward, decide to keep him ignorant of Pelosi’s pro-abortion record? Maybe. On the other hand, he has probably made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to be blindsided on this trip the way he was with the “gift” in La Paz in July of that hammer-and-sickle crucifix. Might someone suggest to Pelosi beforehand that she not present herself for Communion? Can we imagine her reacting in any way except to say, “Are you kidding? I am the most important woman in the U.S. Congress.”
In any event, it will be another thing interesting to watch.
