I want to thank Dr. Muñoz and Father Jenkins for inviting me to speak this afternoon. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to be here.
He then goes on to detail the five reasons.
A lecture named after Alexis de Tocqueville will naturally involve politics. That’s a good thing, and we’ll have plenty to talk about. But I don’t want to begin there today.
I spent much of last week helping my brother and his wife with the funeral of their daughter Allison, my niece. Allison was 32. She was intelligent, beautiful and set to be married on October 1. In May she was diagnosed with cancer. Last week she discovered that her medical treatments had failed. She died a few days later. I mention this not to cast a shadow on our discussion today – in fact, quite the opposite. Allison had a great life. She loved well, had a lot of joy and was very deeply loved. And that love will continue to live in the people who knew her.
I mention Allison because the farthest thing from anyone’s mind as she and we measured her life last week was politics.
Leon Bloy, the great French Catholic convert, once said that — in the end — the only thing that matters is to be a saint. That’s the ultimate task of a place like Notre Dame. It’s not to help you get into a great law school, or to go to a great medical school, or to find a great job on Wall Street, as good as those things clearly are. It’s to help you get into heaven – which is not some imaginary fairyland, but an eternity of life in the presence of a loving God. If you don’t believe that, you’re in the wrong place.
Life is a gift, not an accident. And the point of a life is to become the kind of fully human person who knows and loves God above everything else, and reflects that love to others. That’s the only compelling reason for a university that calls itself Catholic to exist. And it’s a privilege for Notre Dame to be part of that vocation.
My comments this afternoon are simple. They come in three parts. I want to speak first about the impending election. Then we’ll move to the theme of today’s talk: sex, family and the liberty of the Church. Then we’ll touch on a few things we might want to remember going forward as Catholic Christians.
I come from a place where the state attorney general was just convicted of nine felonies. The FBI is investigating Philadelphia’s district attorney. Philadelphia’s second district U.S. Congressman, Chaka Fattah, was forced to resign and then convicted of racketeering and influence-peddling. And several members of the state assembly from the Philadelphia area, as well as three state Supreme Court justices, were caught in various scandals.
This has all happened just in the five years I’ve been archbishop of Philadelphia. Pennsylvania has its own Wikipedia category – “Pennsylvania Politicians Convicted of Crimes” – with 58 separate entries. But the really curious thing about listing these bad actors is this. They’re familiar. They’re almost reassuring in the modesty of their appetites and lack of imagination. Selling your state assembly vote for the price of a necklace is wrong. But it’s hardly a new kind of bad behavior. And it doesn’t shake the foundations of the republic.
Regrettably, other things do.
I turn 72 later this month. I’ve been voting since 1966. That’s exactly 50 years. And in that half-century, the major parties have never, at the same time, offered two such deeply flawed presidential candidates. The 1972 Nixon/McGovern race comes close. But 2016 wins the crown.
Only God knows the human heart, so I presume that both major candidates for the White House this year intend well and have a reasonable level of personal decency behind their public images. But I also believe that each candidate is very bad news for our country, though in different ways. One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse control problem. And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities.
So where does that leave us? The historian Henry Adams once described the practice of politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.” And there’s plenty in our current political season that invites cynicism. But Christians don’t have that option. We’re not allowed the luxury of cynicism for at least five reasons.
Then, we read: But here’s my larger point: We’ve reached a moment when our political thinking and vocabulary as a nation seem exhausted. The real effect that we as individuals have on the government and political class that claim to represent us – the big mechanical Golem we call Washington — is so slight that it breeds indifference and anger.
Can we, as Australians, claim to be in any better a position?
As Christians, then, our political engagement needs to involve more than just wringing our hands and whining about the ugly choice we face in November. It needs to be more than a search for better candidates and policies, or shrewder slogans. The task of renewing a society is much more long term than a trip every few years to the voting booth. And it requires a different kind of people. It demands that we be different people.
Similarly, does not Australia suffer from the two deficiencies outlined below?In his classic work Democracy in America, Tocqueville noted that the success of American democracy depended, in large part, on the strong American attachment to family and religious faith.
In effect, families and churches stand between the individual and the state. They protect the autonomy of the individual by hemming in the power of government, resisting its tendency to claim the entirety of life. But they also pull us out of ourselves and teach us to engage generously with others.
As families and religious faith break down, the power of the state grows. Government fills in the spaces left behind by mediating institutions. The individual is freed from his traditional obligations. But he inherits a harder master in the state. Left to itself, as Tocqueville saw, democracy tends toward a kind of soft totalitarianism in which even a person’s most intimate concerns, from his sexual relations to his religious convictions, are swallowed by the political process.
And then, a gentle serve for Notre Dame, which which, in all nominally Catholic educational institutions, should give pause for thought:This is why so many Catholics — beginning, to his credit, with Bishop Rhoades — were so deeply troubled when Vice President Biden received the university’s Laetare Medal earlier this year.
Would that there were more such bishops.
For the nation’s leading Catholic university to honor a Catholic public official who supports abortion rights and then goes on to conduct a same-sex civil marriage ceremony just weeks later, is – to put it kindly – a contradiction of Notre Dame’s identity. It’s a baffling error of judgment. What matters isn’t the vice president’s personal decency or the university’s admirable intentions. The problem, and it’s a serious problem, is one ofpublic witness and the damage it causes both to the faithful and to the uninformed.
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