The challenge to understand

Liz Di Nunzio (not a Trump enthusiast) posted a short item yesterday about understanding your opponents; she defended Trump supporters from blanket charges of racism and xenophobia. She is emphatically not a Trump supporter, but is serious about understanding the other side. Understanding: it’s admirable.

I saw a good friend at Mass this morning. Fr. Francis Martin is slip-sliding toward the fullness of the life, and so he’s not celebrating Mass in the morning any more; I went to St. John Neumann. There, I saw Susan Abel, who spends many mornings in front of the Germantown third-trimester abortion clinic. She shared a vignette. There was a woman approaching clinic, with someone already inside doing paperwork for her. She avoided the pro-life counselors outside, stood off by herself. After some tension and hesitation, Susan walked over to about ten feet away from the troubled woman, and said quietly, “I understand the pain of abortion.” The woman came over immediately, talked a bit, and left with her child intact. Understanding saved a life.

Understand. I have chosen to live my life in the crack – the divide, the chasm, the abyss, whatever – between the left and the right. I believe I am supposed to make each side comprehensible to the other. Whoo-ee, am I bad at it! Over four decades of practice, and I’m still a beginner, likely to cause trouble instead of helping anything. I admire Liz and Susan, and try to do the same. Try.

So here’s a scrap of an idea from a failed bridge. This is a scrap from a Catholic pro-lifer, to a Catholic pro-lifer, about the Catholic left.

I think it would be worthwhile to study “social sin.” Most conservatives don’t like the term, but I think it’s indispensable for understanding most of the divisions in American (and Catholic, and global) life.

#1! Permit me to urge you: Start here, with a poem by Pope John Paul II, “The Armaments Factory Worker”:

I cannot influence the fate of the globe.

Do I start wars?  How can I know

whether I’m for or against?

No, I don’t sin.

I only turn screws, weld together

parts of destruction,

never grasping the whole,

or the human lot.

I could do otherwise (would parts be left out?)

contributing then to sanctified toil

which no one would blot out in action

or belie in speech.

Though what I create is not good,

the world’s evil is not of my making.

But is that enough?

Is it “sinful” to make weapons? How can it “sinful” to turn screws? Am I really responsible for the things that go out the door of a factory where I work? The Pope does not answer this question, at least not in this poem. It’s a question, not a thesis. If you wrestle with this question, you can talk to the denizens of the 20^th and 21^st centuries; but if you don’t, you can’t. (Or: so says one leftie.)

#2! Sticking with Pope John Paul II. In 1984, he wrote a letter about penance and reconciliation. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but it’s over 30 thousand words, with 207 footnotes. So you might not race out to get your copy today. But it’s definitely worthwhile to read paragraph 16, “Personal Sin and Social Sin” (1,410 words).

(It’s available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_02121984_reconciliatio-et-paenitentia.html.)

The Pope said that people use the term in at least four different ways. The first is probably too fuzzy to be useful, although it contains an important idea: in a sense every sin, regardless of how private, damages the Body of Christ, and can therefore be called “social.” The fourth usage is completely bogus, he says: contrasting personal and social sin, watering down and almost abolishing the idea of personal sin, recognizing only social guilt and responsibility.

Between these two extremes, there are two legitimate definitions – both useful. The left uses them; the right does not. And these conceptual tools are fundamental to clear thought about our times. If you avoid them, you are crippled.

One paragraph:

“Whenever the church speaks of situations of sin or when she condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behavior of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.”

He wrote that over three decades ago. And yet, today, there are still many Catholics whose view of sin does not include: xenophobia and anti-immigration laws, religious bigotry and Islamophobia, dismantling health care for the poor without rebuilding a better system, breaking contracts with small and independent entrepreneurs and underpaying workers, expanding an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, to mention just a few.

Third step: my ideas, not the Pope’s. Having quoted Pope John Paul II, I should specify firmly and repeatedly that the following is my thought, emphatically not his. Even if you reject my thoughts, go get his. You need them. You NEED them.

An oddity: pro-lifers struggle to explain what’s wrong with abortion. Part of the explanation seems so obvious that pro-lifers don’t believe for a moment that someone who misses the bloody-photo argument will listen to anything else. And yet: if a pro-lifer explains abortion as a structure of evil, as a social sin, how many pro-choicers stop and listen? This a language that takes the message across many barriers. It’s not magic; people don’t become pro-lifers in one quick moment. But if you’re having trouble communicating, maybe it’s worthwhile trying something new. Abortion is a social sin.

Here’s another oddity, and this is the one that got me writing this morning. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who supports the Pope and American bishops on immigration – AND supports Cardinal Burke in his confrontation with the Pope over marriage and divorce and communion. I am sure such people exist, but offhand I can’t identify any. (What do Grisez and Finnis say about immigration? For sure, I listen to them on marriage, because of what they say about war.) In general, it seems to me that there’s an overwhelming congruence: “conservatives” on immigration are “conservatives” on divorce, and “liberals” are “liberal.” But why? What’s the connection? Why does your view on immigration serve as a moderately reliable predictor of your view on divorce?

Perhaps, just perhaps, this: liberals use the thought and language of social sin, and conservatives don’t. It’s been 32 years since the Pope’s letter defining the term. Using that term makes it possible to see xenophobia as a sin. So Pope Francis says it’s not Christian to build a wall. If you insist on seeing that assertion without reference to social sin, it was a ridiculous thing to say. There are good Catholic bricklayers, building sin-free walls. And yet, an honest reader who understands social sin, and is aware of the Pope’s repeated forceful pastoral exhortation that we break free of the sin of xenophobia, can and will understand what Francis said without a split second’s hesitation.

But Cardinal Burke – God bless him – rejects the Pope’s teaching on immigration, does not accept the repeated pastoral exhortations to open our hearts to refugees. And so when he talks about sin, I find it impossible to take him seriously. I think that a moral teacher who overlooks xenophobia and bigotry and abusing workers and ending health care for the poor and proposing new nukes – but wants an audience for his theories about divorce and remarriage – has absolutely no credibility. If you overlook huge evils, but want to keep the sinners out of the communion line, it’s just not possible to hear you.

Xenophobes are welcome to communion. Bigots are welcome. Bombers are welcome. Torturers are welcome. Tax evaders are welcome. Abusive employers are welcome. Liars who won’t pay bills are welcome. But the divorced and re-married: they are a public scandal.

I can’t get my head around that. I cannot take seriously the moral teaching of someone who is unaware of social sin, doesn’t use the category, seems unaware of the problems, or even dismisses the structures of sin as irrelevant and sides with the perpetrators.

Constructive communication between the left and the right within the Church can (and should?) begin with the teaching of St. John Paul II – not only of the theology of the body, but also on structures of sin. Without it, we have little or no hope of understanding each other.