The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, a Catholic and noted puffer of Camel unfiltered cigarettes, has been invited to deliver the commencement address this year at Washington’s Catholic University of America. In advance of this weekend’s commencement, a large group of CUA faculty has signed its names to a letter taking Boehner to task for his voting record and his party’s proposed budget cuts. Now it would be one thing for any group of professors to band together and make a public political statement against the policies of a political figure. But the CUA letter-signers aim at something more than that: invoking Catholic social doctrine, they offer Speaker Boehner a theological scolding.
The tone of the missive is not worth investigating too closely; suffice it to say that it is smug and condescending. The speaker finds himself welcomed in the opening paragraph with these cordial words:
It is good for Catholic universities to host and engage the thoughts of powerful public figures, even Catholics such as yourself who fail to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching.
How gracious of them. “Even” speaker Boehner should be given a venue at CUA, just like The Vagina Monologues, or perhaps Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, who notoriously spoke on the campus at Columbia in 2007, in which venue he denied both the legitimacy of Israel AND the existence of gays in Iran. It is good to know that such broad-minded faculty are willing to extend their tolerance even to the Speaker of the House.
The letter has already publicly charged Boehner with infidelity to the Gospel, though it has charitably conceded it might be because he is ignorant. Let’s take a look at the details:
Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it…The 2012 budget you shepherded to passage in the House of Representatives guts long-established protections for the most vulnerable members of society. It is particularly cruel to pregnant women and children, gutting Maternal and Child Health grants and slashing $500 million from the highly successful Women Infants and Children nutrition program. When they graduate from WIC at age 5, these children will face a 20% cut in food stamps…
(We’ll try to overlook the fact that the signers of this letter have no objection to using the word “preference” as a verb. I myself would preference to use the already-existing English verb construction “to give preference to” in this situation. Denys’s Rule: wherever language is mangled, reason is mangled, too.)
Now it is not obviously the case that Boehner and the GOP are right and the professors wrong about what is good for the nation; even if it were clearly demonstrated, that wouldn’t be the problem. Neither is the problem in the professors’ letter one of “mixing politics and religion”—for Catholics know that the two cannot be separated, and that we are obliged to bring the principles of faith to bear on public life.
The real problem with this kind of indictment is that it naively and immediately moves from general and universal principles to particular judgments about programs and budgets and food stamps without any serious deliberation about all the different ways to put principles into action. Indeed, there seems to be scant recognition of any difference at all between principles and practical matters; instead, the professors offer sentimentalism masquerading as serious Catholic moral thought, heavy on outrage and inflammatory language (note the “slashing” and “gutting” juxtaposed with the image of pregnant women), but very light on any consideration of prudence.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Prudence, says Aristotle, is the intellectual virtue of choosing means commensurate with our ends. The question of means does not seem to have occurred to the authors of this letter; without reflection but with plenty of indignation they assume that their favored means are self-evidently and exclusively derived from the ends of Catholic social teaching, which spares them the trouble of having to consider the difficult and even repellent decisions legislators work on 80 or 100 hours per week.
It’s easy to express strongly-worded feelings about the common good, but it is much harder to figure out what is actually going to serve it.
You see, it would all be so clear if the congress were sitting on piles and piles of gold, cutting food stamps and the WIC budget and refusing to give Bob Cratchit a day off for Christmas. Boehner and his party would patently be in the wrong if the federal government’s mysteriously-capitalized Maternal and Child Health grants were the ONLY POSSIBLE MEANS of the Catholic statesman’s fulfillment of his obligation to the poor and vulnerable. Catholic social and political doctrine would be a very simple thing to apply to politics indeed if it were already spelled out in all possible particular applications, updated hourly to reflect the new contingencies in every part of life, both public and private. But then it would be directions rather than doctrine, and we wouldn’t really be acting as morally responsible agents if all we had to do was carry out what was in our instruction manual, or our computer program.
Seventy years ago, the then-agnostic philosopher Mortimer J. Adler offered a respectful and Aristotelian criticism of the practice of Catholic education in America, stating the problem in terms of right ends and wrong means. I believe his insight is relevant to understanding what the professors seem to have gotten wrong:
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Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001)
I can understand why a Catholic educator might be impervious to any critic who attacked the ends of Catholic education, because somehow these ends are implicated in the central truths of the Christian religion, and thus there is a dogmatic confirmation for the conviction of reason about them. But certainly this is not the case with the means! The truth of Catholicism in religion and philosophy, for example, is no warrant for the efficacy or intrinsic excellence of the way religion and philosophy are taught in Catholic schools.
(from “The Order of Learning,” in Adler, Reforming Education. New York: Macmillan, 1988.)
It is important to note that when Adler (writing in 1941) impugns the teaching of religion and philosophy in Catholic schools, he does not have in mind instruction in DEFECTIVE doctrine, using heterodox manuals authorized by post-Vatican II synods of Dutch bishops, supplemented with books by Hans Küng and Sr. Joan Chittister. Rather, the object of his criticism is defective instruction in TRUE doctrine, like a mush-mouthed instructor ponderously reading aloud for an hour from a manual of dogma far too difficult for the children in his First Communion class and calling it teaching. The problem Adler describes is one of naïve and good-willed teachers, confident that WHAT they have to teach is true, giving no reflection to HOW to teach true doctrine and consequently making a muddle of it.
What Adler says about the confusion of means and ends in Catholic education is a lesson that all Catholics active in public life, from simple citizens and voters all the way to statesmen, and yes, even to university professors, must heed as they attempt to bring Catholic reason to bear on public problems: the truth of the general principles of Catholic social doctrine we rightly assent to is no warrant for the efficacy or intrinsic excellence of the means we favor to realize these principles in the commonwealth at the present time.
The CUA professors recklessly confuse the true ends taught by the Church with their preferred means, and they commit a grave offense against reason and charity when they claim that any brother in Christ who rejects their favored means is in fact rejecting Catholic doctrine.
It is not possible for Catholics in good conscience to dispute WHETHER the poor and vulnerable should be given aid and protection, but the difficult work of practical reason to determine HOW best to do so with public funds in a time of drastic shortages is entirely different. Catholics of good will and moral seriousness must take a careful look at what our elected representatives are proposing to do with the national budget, but in doing so we must be careful not to confuse principles with prudence.
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