Faithful Citizenship 2020:
The U.S. Catholic Bishops Need To Do Better
One of the real pleasures of being the director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union is found in the opportunities I have for interreligious encounters. We have a thriving program in Catholic-Muslim Studies, and our Catholic-Jewish Studies Program has existed for fifty years, growing up with Nostra Aetate’s implementation and with CTU, itself.
During our Holocaust remembrance observances here in the spring, I had an opportunity to hear a survivor speak about her experiences. She offered an ennobling account of her life, all she has seen and what she has learned about our shared humanity. Life is “the most beautiful thing,” she told us, and, “I feel connected to everything that is living.”
During the question-and-answer period, someone asked whether what she had seen in Germany during the 1930’s reminded her of what we see in the United States today. As the questioner spoke, our guest began nodding vigorously and her eventual reply — “Yes” — left no doubt. It was an unsettling moment.
My thoughts wandered to the U.S. bishops. This week we can expect the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to approve its quadrennial Faithful Citizenship document to inform Catholic voters ahead of the 2020 election cycle. What should it say in this moment?
From his prison cell awaiting execution, the Lutheran theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed a damning and plaintive question to his co-religionists in the face of Nazism: “Are we still of any use?”
Bonhoeffer was not writing about the actions of Catholic bishops in Germany, of course. His attention was both more narrowly focused on his own religious community and more broadly focused on all Christians and believers, entirely. Still, his question may describe our challenge today.
So also do we find interesting places to begin in the prison diary of Bonhoeffer’s contemporary, Alfred Delp, S.J., who also was martyred by the Nazis. Delp wrote about the “shame of the Church…who stood by and made no protest,” not only in Germany, but in Spain and in other places. Delp wrote critically that —
…recently the person turning to the Church for enlightenment has all too often found only a tired man to receive him — a man who then had the dishonesty to hide his fatigue under pious words and fervent gestures. At some future date the honest historian will have some bitter things to say about the contribution made by the churches to the creation of the mass-mind, of collectivism, dictatorships, and so on.
There were courageous men and women in the churches who opposed Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, of course. Yet the silence and complicity of too many religious leaders had its regrettable effect. Protestant churches were co-opted by the Nazis, and Catholic theologians like Joseph Lortz, Michael Schmaus, and Karl Adam attempted to harmonize Germany’s National Socialism with Roman Catholicism. Christian opposition to the rise of Hitler and other evil regimes hardly was uniform and, in retrospect, it even can seem exceptional. These are dark thoughts that should haunt us today. Such thoughts should plague U.S. bishops.
Earlier this year, the Anti-Defamation League found that the number of reported anti-Semitic acts in the United States has doubled since 2015. Islamophobic violence is rising. We have seen the comfortable, public re-emergence of overt racism and white nationalism in Charlottesville. These troubling developments in American life are mirrored by similar developments in other parts of the world. Ugly nationalism threatens to overtake the United Kingdom while the rest of Europe strikes out against migrants. Rodrigo Duterte in The Philippines carries out his own brutal brand of justice with the power of the state and cheering voters supporting him. In Kashmir, the Indian government imposed a security lockdown and a program of removal against Muslims. Not ever in the post-World War II period has there been a moment when so much racially-tinged lawlessness prevailed around the globe, mostly because at every other moment since the war the United States has been the voice that rallied the world toward something better. The effectiveness of the U.S. moral witness or its responsibility for values of peace and justice no longer are things we can take for granted.
Our history lacks a good comparison to guide us in a moment like this, and we would want to be very careful about comparisons in any event. Every historical comparison ultimately is doomed to fail, and this is especially true about comparisons to Nazi Germany. Mark Twain is credited with saying that, “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” This is a good guide for us. Circumstances always are different, and our human temptation to impose patterns and order where there are none will mislead us more than help us. Still, the our human flaws persist through time. Human nature does not change. Our sinfulness and our forgetfulness, in fact, are constants. It is not preposterous to look to the past in hope of learning, even if the lessons only are partially applicable and, inevitably, we surely will forget what we learn again.
With those caveats and that quick survey of the political situation as our context as we think about what the U.S. Catholic bishops seem poised to say about the 2020 election, we should make some general observations about the climate that Donald Trump has cultivated in the United States and around the world—
• he has strained longtime alliances with nations that share our values to favor Russia, North Korea, and others who abuse human rights and frustrate free government;
• he has embarked on an America First foreign policy and trade policy, rooted in the nationalism he has encouraged and espoused consistently;
• he has refused to condemn white nationalists, lending legitimacy to them and equating them falsely with those who protested against them;
• he has sought to enact a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States,” and;
• his program to deter migration from Latin America has gone far beyond the building of a wall to the probable violation of international law concerning asylum-seekers and the monstrous extremes of family separation and the detention of children in appalling conditions.
Certainly, there is more. Yet even this brief recitation makes clear that the present American government is engaged in an ongoing and unchecked pattern of discrimination against racial and religious minorities while it discards historic American commitments to our allies and to freedom-seeking women and men around the world and here at home. The dignity of the human person is under an assault by Donald Trump’s government that is unprecedented in at least the last century of American history.
While all this is happening, we should remember that Donald Trump enjoys an 85% approval rating among Republicans, and his overall popularity never has dipped below 35%. It seems certain we can say that there is nothing he can do to lose the support of a significant number of American voters. He does not command a majority, and his overall support may seem small. But, while we remain cautious of the comparison, we would do well to recall William L. Shirer’s description of the rise of the German National Socialist Party —
On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler’s life, [Germans] spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes — an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.
The relative smallness of Trump’s core support is little comfort. Even as a majority rejects Trump consistently today (as a majority rejected him in 2016), enough Americans support him to enable real damage to our institutions and to the lives of real people right now. The shape that damage threatens to take from here into the future is unclear. It will not repeat the trajectory of the Nazis. It will follow its own course toward the judgments history will make about it. From here we cannot know what that will be. But we do know what has happened so far. We can see the evidence of our own eyes. Should Catholics look away?
In conscience, at all, can we really afford to assume that we live in ordinary times? Doesn’t responsibility demand something greater from us?
We already know that the U.S. bishops do not plan a substantial revision of their Faithful Citizenship document this year. That is a terrible mistake.
Faithful Citizenship is a deeply flawed document. It comes from a flawed beginning, and every iteration of the document since the 1970’s has been flawed. Yet, it remains the principal way that the U.S. bishops speak to American Catholics about social and political questions before each presidential election.
The document has been flawed since its beginning simply because it was born in the post-Roe furor that did more than its share to teach Catholics that they should indulge an us-versus-them political ethic. That tendency has fed the polarization that has brought us to the election of Donald Trump and the political turmoil we are enduring today. Catholics represent a very large and influential segment of the American electorate. If Catholics spend two generations immersed in an understanding that sees politics in the “non-negotiable” terms of a zero-sum game played between those who are right and those who are wrong, it will have an effect on the whole political system.
The present version of the document is flawed for related, and yet even worse reasons. Substantively unchanged since the 2008 election cycle, Faithful Citizenship remains a recitation of culture war preoccupations because it is dominated by the things highlighted in its Introductory Note —
• The ongoing destruction of over one million innocent human lives each year by abortion
• Physician-assisted suicide
• The redefinition of marriage — the vital cell of society — by the courts, political bodies, and increasingly by American culture itself
• The excessive consumption of material goods and the destruction of natural resources, which harm both the environment and the poor
• The deadly attacks on fellow Christians and religious minorities throughout the world
• The narrowing redefinition of religious freedom, which threatens both individual conscience and the freedom of the Church to serve
• Economic policies that fail to prioritize the poor, at home or abroad
• A broken immigration system and a worldwide refugee crisis
• Wars, terror, and violence that threaten every aspect of human life and dignity
War and poverty are mentioned here. Yet, they are the apparent equals of “the redefinition of marriage” and “The narrowing redefinition of religious freedom.” It is difficult to miss the disproportionate emphasis on partisan issues here long known to benefit one political party in the United States.
What perhaps is more troubling is that, after the U.S. bishops discussed how Faithful Citizenship does not much reflect the teachings of Pope Francis (who was elected six years after the document was drafted) or how it does not speak to the “different context we find ourselves in” since Trump’s election, and one bishop even cautioned that, “the idea that we should be satisfied with Faithful Citizenship…[is] a dangerous public statement to make,” an overwhelming majority of bishops voted to keep the document. They seemed simply overwhelmed by what would be involved. They said that the task seemed too enormous to undertake. And while it seems true that producing a comprehensive guide to every issue would be a big job, it is the case that the bishops (and, the large staff at the Conference) have been able to do it before. Amid all the hand-wringing about the difficulty of re-writing Faithful Citizenship, it is difficult to elude the suspicion that this deeply-divided body of bishops’ real concern is the disharmony among them that would be laid bare by doing it. Our bishops, muted by their own disagreements, are not equal to the leadership demanded by these times.
It is not only the sexual abuse crisis that plagues the Roman Catholic Church. The bishops themselves have become combatants in the culture wars that have brought us to Trumpism during the last several decades. There is a deep division among Catholic bishops that falls (loosely, not precisely) along the line between bishops named by Pope Francis and those named by his predecessors. Among bishops named before Francis was elected, there is a marked tendency to engage in political combat that we find less among those named since Francis became pope. We should be sure to say that it is not their witness against abortion or euthanasia among those pre-Francis bishops that is problematic. The problem is how they perceive their role in the political life of a nation where many citizens are Catholic and do (or, should) agree with them while most Americans do not belong to the Church. Engaging the political process like lobbyists who want to win by any means necessary, these bishops have exposed themselves to charges of theocracy that are unfair. Yet, the charges arise because these bishops have preferred to get a policy outcome regardless of whether most citizens are persuaded about it. Inevitably, this has drawn too many Catholic bishops into the partisan fray since the 1980’s. It has fed our polarization and it has seen Catholic bishops set a poor example for political behavior for too long.
The so-called ‘Francis bishops,’ generally, prefer a different approach. What we see in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ present unwillingness even to try to address the implications of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States and around the world is the insurmountable division between those ‘Francis bishops’ who prefer another way and those bishops appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI who still are thinking in terms of winning a culture war.
What is faithful citizenship in these uncertain times?
The current plan to re-issue the 2007 Faithful Citizenship document with a supplement is entirely inadequate to the challenge we face. The inadequacy is measured by more than merely how the bishops will not address the implications of the Trump Administration. Rather the inadequacy is measured best by how the bishops have described their reluctance.
Several of the bishops in their deliberations described their difficulty in terms of mounting a full, comprehensive engagement with particular issues in the light of the “signs of the times.” It would be time-consuming. The scale of the task is overwhelming. Little wonder that the prospect should seem so daunting to the bishops. Not only are they deeply divided on the issues and how to prioritize them, but the issues are complex and working through them one-by-one is a formidable challenge for them as much as it is for each Catholic citizen.
Perhaps, though, the real problem lies just in that way that they have conceived the task: to think of Faithful Citizenship as an issue-by-issue checklist of policy positions. This issues-driven engagement with political life that dominates Faithful Citizenship is a big part of the problem.
It certainly is true that Faithful Citizenship aspires to be more than a voting guide. The subtitle describes the document in terms of “Forming Consciences,” and several pages are given to describing the principles of Catholic social teaching. This is important. Yet, the lengthiest portion of Faithful Citizenship is “Applying Catholic Teaching to Major Issues: A Summary of Policy Positions of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.” It is really quite unhelpful, even dangerous.
Let us choose just one example. Would abortions really end if Catholics succeeded to win a judicial reversal of Roe or to pass a constitutional amendment, even if most Americans were not convinced about it? It seems unlikely. Instead, what seems certain, is that the argument would enter only a new phase while abortions continued to take place (as they did before it was legal). The trouble is that seeking to ‘win’ in the courts or in the legislatures will not be effective to obtain what Catholics want, and only draws the church into binary political arguments and finds it eventually sitting on one partisan side. This is the heart of why Faithful Citizenship and the U.S. bishops’ approach to politics is so counterproductive. This issues-based approach tends toward the results that we have achieved with it. Faithful Citizenship tends to simplify complex political questions down to binaries, for-or-against, distorting the very nature of the political process until all that remains is polarization.
Pope Francis has suggested a different way to engage with politics. We find it throughout his teaching. Perhaps it can be found nowhere more clearly than in his address to the Congress of the United States in 2015 or his more recent apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate.
The theme that recurred most throughout Francis’s remarks on Capitol Hill was dialogue. Pope Francis called member of Congress and all Americans to be “at the service of dialogue” and to envision politics as “an expression of our compelling need to live as one.”
In Gaudete et Exsultate, Francis warns against “ how easy it is to become mired in corruption, ensnared in the daily politics of quid pro quo, where everything becomes business”(78) and how, in such a situation, “politics, mass communications and economic, cultural and even religious institutions become so entangled as to become an obstacle to authentic human and social development”(91).
As much as any good thing — even, “religious institutions” — politics can become corrupted by how we do it. How we embark upon politics will determine more about the sorts of outcomes we get from the political system than any list of policy positions or issue priorities. And, this is the message Francis is trying to send us. If we want a politics that conforms to our values, Pope Francis tells us that how we approach politics should conform to our values first. And this means that any testimony to faithful citizenship must begin in faithfulness to those fellow citizens who disagree with us.
We must engage in dialogue. We must listen. We must persuade. We must remember that our first goal is to bring forth the Reign of God, not to win an election or a political fight.
And, finally, the most important reason why we must do these things is because our ultimate political goal — especially now — is to transform the politics at work in our nation and our world today that is damaging our institutions and hurting real people right now.
Faithful Citizenship does not need to be an issue-by-issue guide to how Catholics should vote. Instead, it must be a guide to faithful citizenship which means living in peace with those around us. If the ugliness underway in our world ever is to be transformed into something less dangerous, we who are believers have an obligation to lead first by faithful example toward something different and better.
In a best of all possible worlds, Donald Trump will leave the White House and be replaced by a more conventional political leader in January, 2021 (or, sooner). This is perhaps the best reason why the bishops must re-think their approach to Faithful Citizenship.
We know that the trouble will not be over after Trump has left. His successor will begin her or his work amid the resentment of Trump’s disappointed supporters, and the polarized, partisan battle only will grow more bitter. The same voters who turned to Trump and who are enabling everything he is doing today still will be here in America. Our nation and our political community will not be substantially different. We will not be any better. There is no reason to think that, even if nationalism and discrimination once again go underground where they are harder to see, they will really have gone away.
And, we should acknowledge, that best of all possible worlds is far from the most likely scenario. We already have begun to sense the fragility of of our political peace in the United States. It is much harder to believe that, “It can’t happen here.” It can. It is happening. Students of history know it, and so do Holocaust survivors.
And, the Catholic bishops must do better. They must say something.
