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At this critical moment in history, there are two social justice priorities for the Catholic Church in the United States: the defense of life at all stages and in all conditions, and the defense of religious freedom for all. During this Fortnight for Freedom, in which the U.S. bishops are calling all Catholics to pray and work for religious freedom, it’s important to reflect on the linkage between these two great causes.
As the language of the First Amendment to the Constitution indicates, religious freedom in the United States has always been understood as one of a cluster of fundamental freedoms—spheres of free thought and action essential to individual liberty and civil society. That idea of constitutionally limited government—a government that makes no theological judgments (religious freedom), that does not control the media (freedom of the press), that does not control thought and culture (free speech), and that does not occupy all the “space” in society (freedom of assembly)—rests, philosophically, on the premise of fundamental human equality.
Yet the premise is counterintuitive. We know that all men and women are not created equal in intelligence, beauty, wealth, linguistic skills, or ability to hit a curveball. Everything we see, every day, everywhere, speaks of human inequality. How, then, sustain a constitutional order of freedom on the basis of human equality? Is equality a pious fiction, a noble lie we tell ourselves?
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to solve this problem by reference to a fundamental human equality, and to “self-evident” rights reflecting that equality, that were “endowed” in us by “Nature, and Nature’s God.” Today, when the idea of divinely constructed “human nature” has disappeared from our high culture (and a lot of our law), that argument is under severe pressure. Jews and Christians can argue that their commitment to the premise of civil equality derives from obedience to the commands of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, in various forms of the Golden Rule; but will such an argument convince non-believers?
In his 1993 encyclical, “Veritatis Splendor” (“The Splendor of Truth”), Blessed John Paul II proposed an imaginative solution to this problem, which is fundamental to all democracies and especially acute in democracies soaked in the solvents of aggressive secularism and its companion, radical skepticism. There is a way in which all men and women, unequal-in-every-other-aspect-of-their-lives, are equal, the Pope suggested: “Before the demands of morality all are absolutely equal,” he wrote. Everyone is equal before the demands of the fundamental moral law that we can know by reason.
What are those demands? What are those moral truths? Lying is wrong. Theft of what rightly belongs to another is wrong. Everyone must honor promises, vows, and legal contracts. All must be free to seek truth in the depths of conscience, without social, cultural, or governmental coercion.
And the inviolability of every innocent human life must be respected from its beginning to its end.
These fundamental moral truths can be known by anyone willing to think carefully. Recognizing them does not require any prior theological commitments (although belief in the God of the Bible certainly shortens the path toward those truths). These truths are, if you will, built into us. We do not invent them; we discover them.
The fundamental democratic premise of the radical, inalienable, civil equality of all citizens is at the root of the American constitutional order—the American way of being a political community. That premise is no pious fiction, no noble lie. It can be “demonstrated” and defended, by reason. And that defense leads inexorably to the right to life as the primordial human right, and the right of religious freedom as the “first freedom” in the political order.
In defending religious freedom and the right to life from conception until natural death, U.S. Catholics are not just defending what is “ours.” We defend America. We seek to give America new birth of freedom, rightly understood. We act, not as sectarians, but as free citizens. We act on behalf of all, and on behalf of truth.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
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Comments:
Is this truth available to unaided human reason the way "thou shalt not steal" is? If so, then there has to be some pagan people who recognized it. Is there any such pre-Christian, pre-Jewish people?
While I do not believe that a zygote is a person, I can understand how someone may believe that life, i.e. a person, begins a conception. I don't care to dispute that issue. I really don't think that a person's mind can be changed on this issue by debate or argument. I'm not looking for an argument.
I'm just looking for some straightforward answers so I can understand both sides.
Thanks in advance.
In addition, because Catholics believe that personhood may begin at conception and that the sanctity of sex is compromised by contraception, we pray that the country might not do evil by making it possible/required for people to do participate in evil. And finally, all our prayers and fasting are ways to remind ourselves of our imperfection and dependence on God. Did this answer your question?
As a Catholic, I see it this way:
The Catholic Bishops in our country have recognized, as have many other people of good will, that the religious freedom we've always thought of as a great constant of our American culture, is now under a question mark. Specifically, it is being redefined as merely the "freedom of worship", away from the freedom to exercise one's religion in the public square, for the benefit of all.
One of the primary focal points of this redefinition is the oversight of the six hundred plus Catholic hospitals in our nation. The Bishops, who are ultimately responsible for the Catholic identity of these institutions, are being told that they must provide employee services that the Catholic faith recognises as immoral. Assuming we continue on this course, then:
If the Bishops acquiesce to these demands, they themselves will no longer be Catholics in good standing with the teachings of our Lord. They will have become, shall we say, "patriotic bishops". But if they do not, they'll lose control over these hospitals, and may I add, over two hundred universities, couple thousand primary and secondary schools, combined, and a myriad of charitable groups.
Thus, under this scenario, the public work of our Faith on behalf of all our fellow citizens will have ceased. These formerly Catholic institutions will likely continue to function, but under a different name, management, and most importantly, different understanding of what is a human person.
Taking the above into consideration, the enormous potential consequences for our American culture, indeed, our very identity, are worth a fortnight of reflection. Thank you, Amy, for asking this question.
I'm not as well-versed in all the details of the Fortnight for Freedom as I should be (as a practicing Catholic), but I'll share with you what I understand thus far.
Fortnight for Freedom is a proposal from the American Catholic bishops, for Catholics in America to participate in more rigorous prayer and fasting for the two weeks leading up to July 4th, with the intention of preserving religious freedom in our country. Rather than acting out in a kind of political activism or protesting, the Church leaders, I think, are encouraging the laity to turn to God and pray harder in a unified effort together, as prayer is often times more powerful than protests.
The reason for the Fortnight is precisely to defend religious freedom, especially with many of the infringements upon it that have occurred in recent months and years. The HHS mandate especially, which forces All Catholic churches, hospitals, schools, etc., to pay for and provide contraceptives and abortfacients for their employees. This mandate, I think at least, was intentionally aimed at the Catholic church because the church is the one major opponent to abortion and contraception in American society and culture today. Catholics value human life, in all forms, especially the most vulnerable and innocent (babies in the womb) and oppose any artificial means that would prevent the conception of a life because the very contraceptive act is going against nature, and opposing God's plan, for who was meant to be and live on earth. Preventing people who were meant to be born, to live.
So, as the Catholic Church has stated, definitively so, that abortion and contraception is intriniscally evil - that is, the very nature, the very act of abortion and contraception is Always evil and never OK (keep in mind God always forgives those who have done this and are sorry, He is Mercy Himself), but because Catholics are called to protect human life, and to foster its development and flourishment, they cannot, with good conscience provide and pay for people to have abortions or use contraceptives. It would be like buying a gun for someone you know is suicidal - you are essentially an accccessory to the fact, and cannot in anyway contribute to such an evil. This violation of our conscience, and this tyrannical encroachment of forcing people to go against their conscience and have to Pay for something they hold to be the most evil problem of our day, abortion, obviously contradicts our freedom of religion.
The HHS mandate, and other court cases which have dealt with the govt intervening into religious affairs show this administration's avid attempt to control religion and essentially take away our rights of religion. Government should not even be this involved in our personal lives in the first place to force people to provide this service or that service anyway, the federal govt morally has no right, and no legitimate authority to enforce such an absurd thing as the HHS mandate. If the mandate was enforcing companies to provide for dental coverage, that would be disproportionate bc the federal govt is not to be in control of the more intimate dealings people's lives. But to say that not only is the govt forcing organizations to provide this service (which is the govt usurping more power than its entitled to), but that it is a 'service' that we believe to be intrinsically evil, is of tyrannical calibre. And this despotic action on part of the fed govt, and on the president, is a very dangerous move toward a new space where bit by bit the govt decides what your rights are and what aren't. And before you know it, your not free, but living under an oppressive regime, not free to worship and serve God because the state demands your worship unto itself. This is the way many communist countries went, eliminate freedom of religion, of speech, of press, so the govt and those in power can control our lives, control our Healthcare, what we think, we say, publish, who we worship, and what we believe.
I hope that answers some of your inquiries! Let me know if there's any other questions you need answering to!
Michael, if we cannot use reason to make our case, we cannot persuade or even live peacefully among pagans and non-believers.
†
Just to explain the Catholic position, whether a zygote is a “person” does raise something of a philosophical puzzle for a zygote can split to form monozygotic twins i.e. two persons. These two people cannot both be identical with the original zygote. If they were, transivity of identity means that they would be identical with each other; which is absurd.
What Catholics would say is that the zygote is “living individual whole whose life is—all going well—to be the life of one or lives of more than one human being” (Anscombe) and that “the act of killing what is in the earliest stages of human life has evidently the same sort of malice as killing it later on when it is unquestionably a human, or more than one.”
The Church has refused to commit itself to any philosophical theory on this point. “"The Magisterium has not expressly committed itself to an affirmation of a philosophical nature (on the moment of appearance of a spiritual soul) but it constantly reaffirms the moral condemnation of any kind of procured abortion." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 22nd February 1987)
“Michael, if we cannot use reason to make our case, we cannot persuade or even live peacefully among pagans and non-believers.”
That is not so, Portalis, described as “the philosopher of the commission that drew up the Code Napoleon and very devout “Christianity, which speaks only to the conscience, guides by grace the little number of the elect to salvation; the law restrains by force the unruly passions of wicked men, in the interests of public order/public policy [l’ordre public - a difficult phrase to translate adequately]” Public policy is a concept well within the reach of pagans and non-believers.
After all, it was the Christian Emperor, Justinian, who placed the words of the pagan jurist Ulpian at the beginning of the Digest – These are the precepts of the law: to live decently, not to hurt another and to give to each his own.” (Dig.1.1.10.2 )
Only The True God can endow us with our unalienable Right to Religious Liberty, for Authentic Love is not possessive, nor is it coercive, nor does it serve to manipulate for the sake of self-gratification. Love exists in relationship.
Although it is true that in a secular World there are those who do not recognize the ordered, complementary relationship of Perfect Love that is The Most Holy and undivided Blessed Trinity, or those who deny the very existence of God, one cannot deny the essence of Love or that Love exists.
God Has endowed us with our inherent Right to Religious freedom because He Loves us and desires that we come to know, Love, and serve The Blessed Trinity as We are called to Holiness, communion with God.
It was this that led Laberthonnière, a hundred years ago now, to accuse the Neo-Thomists of his day of “a false theological notion of some state of pure nature and therefore imagined the state could be self-sufficient in the sense that it could be properly independent of any specifically Christian sense of justice.”
It led his friend and contemporary, Maurice Blondel, to insist that we must never forget “that one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny. Because, since it concerns the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly complete (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order”
Jacques Maritain, too, declared that “the knowledge of human actions and of the good conduct of the human State in particular can exist as an integral science, as a complete body of doctrine, only if related to the ultimate end of the human being . . . the rule of conduct governing individual and social life cannot therefore leave the supernatural order out of account”
Unless we insist, in Blondel’s words, that we can “find only in the spirit of the gospel the supreme and decisive guarantee of justice and of the moral conditions of peace, stability, and social prosperity,” we shall inevitable acquiesce in practice in the Liberal privatisation of religion.