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Published: August 13, 2008

No more “pick and choose”

San Francisco archdiocesan newspaper columnist comes out against Catholic political compromise

Notes from a Cultural Madhouse

By Christopher Zehnder

I generally don’t like reading most diocesan newspapers. I find them rather middle-of-the-road affairs, unwilling to take strong stances (where such are necessary) in opposition the prevailing culture or in addressing the real controversies that beset the Church today. Diocesan papers savor too much of the milk of human kindness than of the strong wine of truth and right.

Every once and a while, however, I find a fine article in a diocesan newspaper. One such article was a recent piece in Catholic San Francisco, the newspaper of the San Francisco archdiocese. It was a guest commentary, “American Catholic structural polarization,” and was written by George Wesolek, director of the archdiocese’s Office of Public Policy and Social Concerns.

In this piece, Wesolek states the obvious -- “further polarization in the Catholic community will happen during this presidential election season.” This polarization, he says, is “poisonous and infectious to the ecclesial community” and “makes us increasingly ineffective in living out Catholic social teaching and producing change for social justice.”

Wesolek traces this polarization among Catholics back 34 years to a decision by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to “set up a separate Pro-life ministry with its own staff and network right across the hall from its office for Social Development and World Peace (Justice and Peace).” This move, says Wesolek, “set in motion a chain of developments that has compartmentalized Catholic social teaching and helped to create two Catholic constituencies.”

One of the constituencies mentioned by Wesolek concerns itself with “justice and peace” issues – poverty, economic justice, accessibility to health care, war, and capital punishment. The other constituency concerns itself almost solely with “life issues” – abortion and euthanasia. “These two constituencies,” Wesolek notes, “often have little in common; have opposite worldviews regarding culture and politics and, frankly, dislike each other.”

The great evil of the dichotomizing of Catholic social teaching is that the two constituencies – justice and peace Catholics on the one hand, pro-life Catholics on the other – each come to ignore important aspects of Catholic social teaching. The people in these constituencies, says Wesolek, “pick and choose their favorite Catholic social teaching concept and discard or trivialize other important elements.” This has allowed Catholic politicians, says Wesolek, “to claim the mantle of faith by using terminology, sometimes taken directly from the ‘Compendium on Catholic Social Teaching,’ to describe their beliefs about the poor, the unborn and the like,” while they “proclaim only part of the teaching, not all of it.”

Wesolek notes how the creation of the two constituencies has given Catholics cover to ignore important aspects of Church teaching. The Justice and Peace folks, for instance, says Wesolek, “quickly grabbed onto Cardinal Joseph Bernadin's ‘consistent ethic of life’ metaphor implying if not asserting outright that certain Catholic politicians who were pro-abortion made up for it by being good (and therefore acceptable under the Catholic mantle) on a host of other issues on the spectrum: poverty, health care, etc.” Such defenders of the “consistent ethic of life” end by denying the centrality of being pro-life. They “will overlook a Catholic politician's perfect 100 percent rating by NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) and do anything to elect them with an equal amount of passion,” says Wesolek. “Although it is now difficult (one hopes) to maintain Catholic identity and be ‘pro choice,’ they survive by winking and nodding at the abortion issue, basically trivializing it.”

Wesolek notes, however, that the pro-life constituency has not been blameless, for it has “developed a tunnel vision approach, which would not even mention any other issue regarding the poor other than abortion.” The singular concentration on the issue abortion drove pro-life Catholics “completely into the embrace of the Republican Party,” which “brought with it support for no tax-and-spend policies and a philosophy of government that does not align with classical Catholic social teaching and Vatican encyclicals of the last 100 years.”

What both constituencies miss, says Wesolek, is that Church teaching “does not have different principles for different social issues. There is no set of Catholic teaching that applies only to life issues or only to issues of economic or social justice.” At the core of Catholic social teaching, says Wesolek, “is the anthropological assertion that every human being has a dignity that is sacred -- that every person is made in the imago Dei regardless of race or creed, whether rich or poor, smart or not, athletic or disabled. That principle extends from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death and includes everybody in between.” So it is that the Church concerns herself with and advocates for “the African who lives on less than 65 cents a day, for the millions of children with no medicine who die before the age of five, for those with no food or shelter both abroad and in our own country, for the unborn and the vulnerable elderly.”

Wesolek notes how, over the past 30 years or so years, “there has been a gradual evolution of the [U.S.] bishops' clarity on Catholic social teaching,” with their rejection of “the confusion about abortion and euthanasia being ‘one of many issues on the spectrum of life.’” The next step in bridging the social justice/life issues gap, Wesolek suggests, is to join – both at the diocesan and national level – peace and justice and pro-life offices into one office directed toward Catholic social action. “A unified structural model of social action works. Both the life constituency and the peace and justice constituency get the same message,” says Wesolek. “The action on behalf of justice at the ‘Walk for Life’ and at the Conference on Global Poverty model to them the completeness of the Catholic social teaching message. Pro-life people are becoming aware and supporting action for the poor, supporting the end to the death penalty, while ‘justice’ people are marching at the West Coast Walk For Life.”

I cannot help but agree with most of what Mr. Wesolek has said about the polarization in the Catholic Church in the U.S. Though members of a universal institution that spans centuries, American Catholics seem incapable of rising above the petty division of their own time. I suppose this only witnesses to the power of culture to influence our minds and habits – and American Catholics do not live in a Catholic culture. But, while we don’t live in such a culture, it is our task to form a Catholic culture within our families, our parishes, and larger Catholic groups, and this task must begin with a renewed attention to the fullness of Catholic teaching in all areas, and more particularly, in the political and social realm. It is good to see that, in the pages of a diocesan newspaper, someone like George Wesolek addressing an issue that seriously compromises the Catholic witness in this country.

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