Presentation:
John McGreevy: I’ll take about 10 or 12 minutes simply to summarize my paper.
Since I’m neither a
philosopher nor theologian, I’ll not presume to inform this audience precisely
what Catholic civic engagement should be. What I am is an historian, and my
modest contribution to this weekend’s discussion surely lies in reflecting upon
the Catholic experience in the United States and how that experience might
illuminate or obscure the choices faced by contemporary Catholic leaders. In my
paper, I briefly examine the Catholic response to three issues central to the
relationship of Catholicism and Liberalism:
- the
slavery debate of the 1850s and 1860s;
- the so called “social questions” of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
- and
the ongoing struggle over abortion.
On slavery, I
argue that Catholic opposition to slave emancipation cannot be reduced to the
American racial dynamic. Catholic intellectuals tended to accept slavery as a
legitimate, if tragic, institution. This acceptance rested upon the pervasive
fear of liberal, individualism and social disorder that so shaped Catholic
thought during the nineteenth century. Indeed, even Pope Gregory XVI’s cautious
1839 decision to condemn only the slave trade not slavery itself stemmed from
abolitionism’s association with a European liberalism that papal advisors
considered anti-Catholic and revolutionary.
The same is true of the
United States. Orestes Brownson, the
foremost Catholic polemicist of the
1850s emphasized the radicalism of American abolitionism, which he described as
destructive “of the state, of government, of religious institutions, of all
social organizations, and of all law but the law of every man unto himself.”
Italian Jesuit, neo-Thomist theologians like Luigi Taparelli had basically the
same argument about slavery: while one must not approve slavery but that it was
a legitimate social institution, and that abolitionist calls for immediate
slave emancipation tended to leave a “false idea of an inalienable right to
freedom.”
Second, on the social
question or the problem of economic inequality that so agitated social
commentators on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 19th century:
The same trajectory of Catholic
intellectual life that prohibited the viewing of slavery as a distinct moral
dilemma reinforced the tendency to view poverty as less an individual failing
than a social problem. I realize that that observation now seems unremarkable,
that poverty is less an individual failing than a social problem. But Thomas Haskell and others have noted
that one of the most momentous shifts of the nineteenth century was from a
formalist understanding of the human self—a in which self-denial, temperance,
and education were regarded as the solutions to economic distress—toward an
antiformalist understanding that stressed social explanations for individual
crisis.
Precisely because they
rejected the tenets of political and theological liberalism in the 19th
century, ultramontane Catholics found this more social understanding of
political economy congenial. Invisible hands caused visible problems. As
Archbishop of Perugia, the future Leo XIII in the 1860s, denounced socialism,
of course, but he also attacked “modern economic schools” eager to consider man
a “machine, suited to production.” Again the contrast with the debate over
slavery is striking. The same Catholics disenchanted with economic liberalism
only reluctantly advocated slave emancipation, if at all. Slaves deserved adequate food, clothing and
shelter, of course, and respect for their religious and human dignity, but the
possibility of a moral slave system, at least in the abstract, was kept open. Philadelphia archbishop Francis Patrick
Kenrick defended slavery in his influential moral theology, which is more or
less the standard moral theology textbook of American seminaries in the 19th
century. He defended slavery because he thought that attempts to free many
slaves at one point might mean that the “condition of society would always
remain uncertain, with very great danger to the people.” But at the same time, at a moment when this
was unusual, Kenrick encouraged workers to unite in association and advocated a
minimum wage.
The career of John Ryan, the
famous Catholic social thought figure at Catholic University in the early 20th
century, best exemplified this Catholic-liberal rapprochement. Ryan wanted a “living wage,” which was capable of
supporting a (male) breadwinner and his family. He wanted the state to regulate
the working hours of women and children. He thought progressives should battle
socialists through addressing the real demands of workers. All this placed
Ryan, you might say, on the moderate left wing of American social reform. Like
John Dewey and the founder of the New
Republic, Herbert Croly, Ryan viewed economic reform as the top priority,
showing little interest, for example, in racial segregation. Catholics like
Ryan held very traditional ideas about men’s and women’s roles, but so, too,
did many non-Catholic reformers. That is the second part of the social
question.
Finally abortion: The
politics of abortion rested upon the politics of birth control. The 1873
federal law banning the distribution of contraceptive devices through the mail
did not stem from Catholic lobbying, and neither did various state restrictions
in the late 19th century. And yet, from the 1920s into the 1960s,
Catholics became the primary opponents of any loosening of restrictions on
access to birth control in the United States. In the 1920s Catholics helped
defeat laws that allowed public advertisement of birth control products and
greater access to information on contraception. In the 1930s and 1940s Catholics
fought better legislation and tried to keep remaining state laws that
prohibited the opening of birth control clinics, and limited the ability of
doctors to prescribe birth control even for married patients. This Catholic
confidence in the cause of birth
control quickly evaporated. As is well
known, birth control became the central intra-Catholic debate of the 1950s and
1960s, and a rapidly increasing number of Catholic couples, priests, and
bishops—certainly a considerable majority as early as 1964—came to doubt the
traditional teaching.
When Paul VI announced the
formation in 1964 of a papal birth control commission dissent became far more
public. A parallel development, even among those favoring the traditional
teaching on birth control, was a new set of distinctions between what was
permissible in the public realm and what was permissible in the confessional.
Jesuit John Courtney Murray famously persuaded the bishops assembled at the
Second Vatican Council to stand for religious freedom. At precisely the same
time, Murray was advising Boston’s Cardinal Cushing to permit a relaxation of
the Massachusetts birth control laws.
Specifically on the matter of birth control, Murray emphasized that “It
is difficult to see how the state can forbid, as contrary to public morality, a
practice that numerous religious leaders approve as morally right.” Now you can hardly imagine, I think, a less
propitious beginning for the Catholic struggle against the relaxation of
strictures against abortion. Catholic recalcitrance
on the matter of birth control in fact had prompted Estelle Griswold of
Connecticut to push for appeal in the courts as opposed to the state
legislature. It is the 1965 Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut that creates, in a sense, the basic right
to “privacy” and sets the stage for Roe
v. Wade. The most divisive moment in American Catholic history occurred in
the aftermath of Humanae vitae (1968), and the teaching on contraception
and its all-male source instantly made Catholic discussion of sexuality more
contentious. Finally, the long intra-Catholic discussion of birth control also
culminated in a widespread belief, as I say, that no single religious group
should impose its own moral vision in a diverse society. And this argument that Catholics by arguing
against abortion will try to impose a specific set of religious values on a
secular society became a dominant argument of prochoice emphasis in the late
1960s and the 1970s.
Slowly,
Catholics mustered a response. By the
mid ‘70s, as on the birth control issue between the 1920s and 1960s, Catholic
leaders and intellectuals led the fight against legal abortion. Catholics themselves are only slightly less
likely to approve of legalized abortion than non-Catholics, and some of this
resistance can still be traced, as I say, to the neuralgic problem of a church
with few visible women leaders advocating positions on matters of particular
concern to women. But in contrast to
the birth control debate, debate on the issue of abortion, in the last
generation, has frequently been toward the prolife side. Arguments that
legalized abortion inevitably creates a welcoming climate for euthanasia, the
death penalty, and a less generous regime of social provision have garnered
increasing numbers of supporters.
What does it all mean_ In the broadest sense the history of
Catholic civic engagement is one of attempting to articulate a more socially
oriented Catholic vision of society in a deeply individualist political culture. During the 1850s we saw this in the slavery
debate, in the Catholic inability to see the importance of abolition because
they associated abolition with political liberalism. In the early twentieth century say, until the 1940s, this same
very social Catholic sensibility melded quite nicely, if not perhaps to great
effect, with an American liberalism far more interested in economic planning
than individual rights, and quite appreciative actually of Catholic ability to
talk about the communal whole. After World War II, American reformers began to
focus on individual rights once again, as they had in the 1850s. And here
Catholic opposition, first, access to birth control and then more powerfully to
legalized abortion made Catholic civic engagement a more fraught enterprise.
Two morals:
- Catholics
eager to engage issues of the day must not reflexively dismiss programs or
reforms that seem to spring from suspicious sources. The anti-Catholicism of many American abolitionists, precisely
because they held views about individual autonomy antithetical to powerful
Catholic traditions, is now well established.
But those same abolitionist also understood the inhumanity of slavery
more profoundly than all but a few Catholics.
- The
most effective Catholic witness to Christian values in the public sphere has
come through placing single issues in a more systematic framework. In this regard, I, at least, find the
“consistent ethic of life” compelling, and, not as is sometimes alleged, as a
way for more liberal Catholics to dodge the wrenching issue of abortion. Instead, such a framework—and, again, I
think the contrast with birth control is stark—may ultimately persuade a vast,
skeptical and largely non-Catholic public that opposition to abortion does not
rest upon opposition to women’s equality.
Farina
Response
Tentler Response
Panel Discussion
McGreevy Full Paper
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