Pope John Paul II’s forgotten wisdom on the American Founding.
As I argued in the first part of this essay, the Catholic Church has much to contribute to the revitalization of right reason and the moral foundations of democracy in a Western world that has increasingly lost sight of its civilizational soul.
But as Paul Seaton has compellingly argued in a recent article at The Catholic World Report entitled “Western Civilization Under Attack,” the current leadership of the Church no longer speaks with any confidence about the need to defend Western civilization, that civilizational order with roots in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome “in which the humanity of man has been most explored, extolled, and realized (if imperfectly, as such things must be).” As Seaton strikingly adds, if the West—including its deep-seated commitments to constitutional government, liberty under law, religious liberty, and the search for truth—“were to leave the stage of history, both as ideal and as reality, humanity would be immeasurably diminished.”
As I previously noted, however, the dominant voices in the contemporary Church have increasingly adopted the perspective of a left-wing NGO at prayer. For them, the poor are always “the poor in spirit” and are never angry, envious, rapacious, or manipulated by demagogues or ideologues (or somewhere in-between). International organizations always embody the good of humanity as a whole and never promote the interests of tyrannical and corrupt governments and misguided ideological movements.
Even Pope Leo XIV, who has admirably brought Christ back to the center of Catholic discourse and who recently warned the bishops of Amazonia that Christians should never worship or become enslaved to nature (a clear reference to the lamentable Pachamama episode during the Synod on Amazonia under his immediate predecessor), frequently addresses political matters in a facile and summary way. Wars are always a defeat for humanity, no peace is ever an evil peace, and scheming arms merchants cause wars.
The Vatican’s drift toward a naïve functional pacifism bodes ill for Catholic-Jewish relations since Israel has implacable (and nihilistic) enemies such as Hamas and is morally obliged to defend itself. “Never again!” Jews rightly proclaim. Negotiated settlements have crucial political preconditions that are perhaps best illustrated in the commonsensical appeal to “peace through strength” that so resonates with tough-minded and morally serious citizens. Blaise Pascal, whose fidelity to the Catholic faith no one can challenge, reminded his contemporaries in Pensées that there could be no justice—or peace for that matter—without force. When it came to politics, the French scientist and religious thinker was no naïve idealist.
But too many prominent Catholic voices today, popes included, sound very much like the deluded and self-righteous liberal Protestants whom the “Christian realist” Reinhold Niebuhr took to task on the eve of World War II for severing love from justice, ignoring the stark reality of original sin in individuals’ souls and in the messiness of collective life, and showing little or no understanding of the grave and unprecedented evil that was 20th-century totalitarianism.
When visiting the United Kingdom in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI praised the British people for standing up to Nazi despotism and aggression. He also commended them for putting an end to the international slave trade during the course of the 19th century. An older and richer Augustinian understanding of the relationship between the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, was clearly at work in Benedict’s public witness.
Such words would appear bellicose to the considerable number of Christians today who falsely identify the public witness of Christianity with sentimental humanitarianism and blind pacifism. Prudence remains the political virtue par excellence, and that holds equally for Christians who feel obliged to give practical and morally serious advice to citizens and statesmen. As the great French Catholic philosopher and essayist Charles Péguy once strikingly put it, utopian moralists don’t want responsible statesmen to have clean hands but no hands at all.
In the conclusion of the first iteration of this essay, I encouraged our promising new pope, so full of a zeal for holiness and so committed to the renewal of evangelization in the name of the saving grace of Christ, to give renewed attention to the concept of ordered liberty rooted in right reason and the moral law. These two themes were once central to Catholic moral and political self-understanding. I recommended that the new pope end his predecessors’ embarrassing and, in truth, mean-spirited and unbecoming efforts to relegate the Polish pope to a distant past of no real relevance to a Church increasingly committed to genuflecting before the zeitgeist in the form of “modern progress.”
I also noted that in a 1995 visit to the United States, while speaking at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport, John Paul II praised America’s founding documents for their fidelity to “unchanging principles of the natural law whose permanent truth and validity can be known by reason, for it is law written by God in human hearts.”
In an essay entitled “The False Prophets of American Conservatism,” Harry V. Jaffa praised the Polish pontiff for understanding that
the rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, being rights with which we are endowed by our Creator, are not to be understood blindly to emancipate the passions, but rather to direct them towards the ends approved by that same Creator, ends which are in the service of the common good no less than that of private pleasures.
Surely, the way in which the natural law and right reason serve to mediate biblical, philosophical, and American wisdom ought to be of intense interest to the pope from Chicago.
For those people of all faiths who wish to draw from St. Pope Paul II’s wisdom about the indispensable “moral structure of freedom,” I recommend that they turn to a vitally important speech that His Holiness delivered to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations Organization in New York on October 5, 1995.
On that occasion, John Paul II lauded “the risk of freedom” and celebrated the anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989, which
were made possible by the commitment of brave men and women inspired by a…vision of man as a creature of intelligence and free will, immersed in a mystery which transcends his own being and endowed with the ability to reflect and to choose—and thus capable of wisdom and virtue.
In so richly articulating the moral structure of freedom, John Paul II highlighted the intrinsic links between freedom, virtue, and moral truth, which is at the heart of the “inner architecture of the culture of freedom.” This moral structure of freedom provides powerful evidence that we do not inhabit “an irrational or meaningless world.” The universality of human rights makes no sense without a “human nature shared by everyone”—and by deference to a binding “moral law” that allows rights to be exercised virtuously and responsibly. While affirming a precious “common human patrimony,” John Paul II upheld the dignity of the self-governing nation and defended patriotic attachments (and the nations that are part of God’s providential design), but not rapacious nationalism. His concluding appeal to a “civilization of love” was shorn of all utopianism and sentimentality.
As Harry V. Jaffa saw so well, an older Catholic wisdom of the kind represented by John Paul II can allow Americans and other free peoples to understand and renew the moral foundations of democracy against the rampant debasement of modern freedom. Americans and Catholics alike have much to learn about the deep and sturdy roots of “the moral structure of freedom” so richly and eloquently articulated by the late great St. John Paul II.
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