Virtue and the American Republic
A Pastoral Letter to the Church of Denver
J. Francis Stafford
Archbishop of Denver
The Feast of the Triumph of the Cross
September 14, 1989
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
1. The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you.
INTRODUCTION
2. On November 6, 1989, we shall mark the 200th anniversary of the appointment of John Carroll as the first Bishop of Baltimore: the first Catholic bishop in the independent United States. The bicentennial of the establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in America affords me the opportunity to reflect with you once again on America as a home of freedom, and specifically, to discuss with you the virtues required of us if we are to be a people who are truly free.
3. In my 1987 pastoral letter, “This Home of Freedom,” I raised several points for your consideration.
4. I explored the ways in which the American Catholic bishops, beginning with John Carroll, slowly evolved a “theology of democracy.” In their 1884 pastoral letter, the bishops suggested that the providence of God was at work in the unfolding of the American experiment in ordered liberty, as the American people worked to build a culture, a society and a politics fit for human beings made in the image and likeness of God.
5. I noted that America is never a finished product; that ours is truly an experiment in ordered liberty; and that each generation of Americans must take responsibility for founding and framing an American community built on the promise of liberty and justice for all. In that respect, all Americans, of whatever religious and political persuasion, must wrestle with the fact that the common good has far more to do with who we are than with what we own. A democratic republic, as the founders and framers of 1776 and 1787 knew, required a virtuous people if it were to long endure. Public virtue is essential in a democracy that would be truly free.
6. Over the past two years, many of you have spoken and written to me about “This Home of Freedom,” and I thank you for your interest in that letter. Among the issues you raised was this: what, precisely, do we mean by “public virtue?” That is the question I would like to explore with you now.
7. In doing so, I am continuing the reflection which the American archbishops and the members of the Roman Curia undertook this past March under the pastoral leadership of Pope John Paul II and in his presence. During our meetings in Rome, the question of Catholicism and American culture was vigorously explored. The “inculturation” of Catholicism in the contemporary United States includes this question of public virtue, particularly in terms of the ongoing conversation between the classical Christian understanding of virtue and the virtues and the concepts of republican virtue that animated the American Founding. In this pastoral letter, then, I invite all of you to join in a prayerful reflection on the promise and the pain of this distinctive moment in American Catholic history.
8. I am also writing at this time about questions of public virtue because I wish to stress the importance that I, as your archbishop, place on the distinctive holiness of the laity as disciples in and to the world. Having considered the theme of priestly spirituality in my 1988 pastoral letter, “In the Person of Christ, the Head of the Body: The Mystery of the Priestly Vocation,” I wish now to return to the themes of lay spirituality and holiness which I introduced in “This Home of Freedom.” Pope John Paul II begins his recent Apostolic Exhortation on the Laity, Christifideles Laici, by recalling the profound Biblical roots and the magnificent scope of the lay vocation: “The lay members of Christ's faithful people...are those who form that part of the people of God which might be likened to the laborers in the vineyard mentioned in Matthew's Gospel: ‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard’ (Matthew 20.1-2). The Gospel parable sets before our eyes the Lord's vast vineyard and the multitude of persons, both women and men, who are called and sent forth in it. The vineyard is the whole world (cf. Matthew 13.38), which is to be transformed according to the plan of God in view of the final coming of the kingdom of God” (Christifideles Laici, 1). It is an awesome vision and an extraordinary challenge, and I should like to locate my reflections on public virtue and the American Republic in the context of this biblically mandated mission of evangelization and service in and to the world.
9. Finally, I write to you on these matters as an expression of the pastoral office of the bishop as that was defined by the Second Vatican Council. The Council's Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church, Christus Dominus, instructs bishops to “proclaim the Gospel of Christ,” a proclamation which the Council taught is “one of the principal duties of bishops.” In fulfilling that duty, bishops “should demonstrate that worldly things and human institutions are ordered, according to the plan of God the Creator, towards the salvation of human beings, and that they can therefore make no small contribution to the building up of the Body of Christ.” The Council then urged bishops to “explain also how high a value, according to the doctrine of the Church, should be placed on the human person, on his liberty and bodily life; how highly we should value the family, its unity and stability, the procreation and education of children, human society with its laws and professions, its labor and leisure, its arts and technical inventions, its poverty and abundance. [Bishops] should expound likewise the principles governing the solution of those very grave problems concerning the possession, increase, and just distribution of material goods, concerning peace and war, and the fraternal coexistence of all peoples” (Christus Dominus, 12).
10. It is in the spirit of that Conciliar mandate that I offer you these reflections, as we in the Church in the United States look back in homage to the great work of Archbishop John Carroll, and as “we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” (The Roman Liturgy).
II. THE ETHICS FAD
11. The public virtue that concerns us here should not be confused with the passion for “ethics” in government which recently has seemed to obsess our political process. Looking back over the past 15 years or so, I take little satisfaction from the political debates that have surrounded the affairs and activities of various national and local politicians. No doubt there were issues of substance to be sorted out on these various fronts. But if we think about these issues with some care, and with a little distance from the partisan politics involved, we might well conclude that today's often-frenzied concern with “ethics” is not so much a sign of the health of our political community but a sign of how degraded aspects of our public life have become.
12. Even more gravely, the informal, taken-for-granted understandings that once set the foundations for public life no longer seem to hold. Convictions which throughout American history have been rooted in Biblical faith for the overwhelming majority of our people have given way to the attempt to create new and ever more complex legal codes. Questions of legal liability have replaced questions of personal responsibility and character. Legal maneuverings in turn fill the space that was once occupied by the kind of civil, political debate over the right-ordering of our lives and loyalties that one would expect from a people who had achieved some measure of agreement on the moral coordinates by which they proposed to conduct their common life. The “mystic chords of memory'' of which Abraham Lincoln spoke seem to have become badly frayed. ''Ethics,'' in the reductionist sense in which that term these days is so often used, has itself become the very disease of which it was believed to be the cure.
13. We cannot “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity,” as we are charged to do by the preamble to our constitution, if the issue of public virtue is remanded over to the legal system alone. We need law, to be sure. But we also need to be a people of character, and we need to be a community of virtue. The business of creating an America that is a true community of character will not be completed (indeed, it may well be impeded) if we reduce the question of public virtue to a matter of binding our public officials and our people in ever more labyrinthine codes of legal liability. Our problems are more fundamental than that, and so must be our response. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reminded us of this essential truth in his celebrated commencement address at Harvard University in 1978:
”Western society has chosen for itself [a mode of organization]...I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is resolved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing else is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is also unheard of: everybody strives toward expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames…
”I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal code is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses.
''And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.”1
III. A PROBLEM RECONCEIVED
14. The great division in America today is not between races, classes or sexes, but between the responsible and the irresponsible—whether our focus is on the marketplace and the workbench, on interpersonal relationships, on reproductive technology, on the political process or the urban underclass.
15. Indeed, the very idea of “responsibility” has come under great pressure over the past several generations. We hear much in contemporary America about “rights,” but precious little about “responsibilities.” In significant parts of our elite political culture the pursuit of the common good has given way to the quest for virtually unencumbered individual rights.
16. Nor has this individualistic quest for the radically unfettered self been without public consequences. For its public effect is to reduce America to what some have called a “republic of procedures,” a republic in which the only thing that counts, morally, is our agreement on certain processes of governance and litigation. One would hate to think that the American Republic, which once proclaimed itself a novus ordo seclorum, a “new order of the ages,” had come to this: that the only thing on which we agree are the rules by which we take each other to court. Although we have yet to come to that kind of moral impasse in our common life, I believe we are moving in that direction.
17. There is an interesting historical analogy that can be drawn between our present circumstances and the situation which our founding fathers confronted shortly after the American Revolution. Under the Articles of Confederation, the new United States had lots of procedures, but no institutions capable of forwarding the common good. As a result, America was coming apart at the seams. There were rebellions in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. New Jersey was threatening war against New York. New England was pondering secession.
18. The founders and framers, men who but 10 years previously had proclaimed that the “inalienable rights of man” included the right of self-government, saw themselves becoming the laughingstock of the world; as early as the 1780s George Washington worried about “the humiliating and contemptible figure we are about to make in the annals of mankind.”
19. Their answer to this sorry situation was to call the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia—not simply to write a legal foundation for the country's central government, important though that was, but also to devise a system of governance that would allow the pursuit of the common good while defending the rights with which they believed “nature and nature's God” had endowed human beings.
20. The framers of 1787 did their work of constitutional construction within a set of moral convictions: chief among them, that rights were secured by institutions and by the virtues or moral habits of a people. Indeed, the framers believed that it was precisely virtue which turned what otherwise would be a mob into a people. Put another way, the Constitution of 1787 was rooted in the understanding that self-government requires a people who can govern their individual lives in such a way that their own interest and the common good were simultaneously served.
21. It would be entirely fallacious, on historical grounds, to suggest that the men who wrote the Constitution of 1787 were personally indebted to Catholic social thought, or indeed had very much of an understanding of the “constitutionalism” of medieval Catholic political theory as developed in particular by St. Thomas Aquinas. Nevertheless, the framers’ political philosophy had important affinities with classic Catholic understanding of the human person and human society. The political theory of the American Founding stressed human capacities for reflective thought and argument, which led in turn to reflective choice in public life. Similarly, in classic Catholic theory, human beings were characterized precisely by their ability to reflect and to choose. Indeed, classic Catholic social thought understood that we are most like God in our reflecting (”God is light”) and in our choosing (”God is love”).
22. Many of these points of intersection between the originating theory of the American Republic and classic Catholic social thought can be brought into focus by taking an imaginative look at the great seal of the United States on the back side of the one-dollar bill. What do we find there?
23. We find an unfinished pyramid, symbol of the Exodus from Egypt and the age-old human quest for freedom from cruel bondage.
24. That pyramid is set under the all-seeing eye of God's providence, a providence which has ordered creation toward human beings and which has ordered human beings toward God.
25. The pyramid suggests something else. Its facade has three sides, which remind us that the American system involves a culture, an economy, and a political community. Each of these requires the discipline of virtue if it is to contribute to the common good and the securing of those inalienable rights to which the founders and framers pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” A culture without the discipline of virtue would erode into decadence and liberty would be debased into license. An economy without the discipline of virtue would render cooperative enterprise impossible. A political community without the discipline of virtue would decay into the raw exercise of power in its most brute form: the capacity to inflict pain. Conversely, a culture disciplined by virtue opens the prospects of great human creativity: in the arts, in literature, in the whole life of the mind. An economy disciplined by virtue has shown itself capable of great advances in human material well-being. A political community disciplined by virtue secures individual liberties while allowing the free pursuit of the common good.
26. Each of the constitutive elements of the American system—a pluralistic culture, an enterprise-oriented economy, and a democratic political community—requires the discipline of virtue for its own proper functioning. And the discipline of virtue is also required if this complexly balanced system is to maintain that equilibrium among its parts that is necessary for the pursuit of justice in freedom.
27. In the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, the Second Vatican Council teaches that liberty in the public order requires the cultivation of that “interior liberty” which is the distinguishing characteristic of the human person (Gaudium et spes, 58). This teaching would have been wholly congenial to the framers who met in Philadelphia in 1787.
28. It is also a teaching of which Americans today of all political and religious persuasions need reminding. The liberties we enjoy as American citizens can never be taken for granted; and the first line of defense of those liberties lies not in our military might but in ourselves: in the kind of people we are and in the kind of communities we create. Unless rights are reconnected to responsibilities in our common self-understanding as a free people, we run the risk of what Washington in his own time feared: that Americans would be humiliated and contemptible figures in the annals of history.
IV. THE RECOVERY OF COMMUNITY AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE
29. There are many signs of hope on the contemporary American political-cultural horizon. Prominent among them is the continued generosity of the American people. In 1988, almost $90 billion were given to charitable activities in the United States (and more than half of that sum was given to religious institutions). Whatever else may or may not be said about today's alleged “culture of greed,” the American people remain the most charitable in human history. A sense of obligation that transcends and transforms self-interest is alive and well in the contemporary United States: as you, the people of this archdiocese, demonstrated so magnificently in your exceptionally generous response to the most recent Archbishop's Annual Campaign for Progress.
30. Another sign of hope today is the re-emergence of the theme of “community” in political philosophy. Perhaps in reaction to the “rights-liberalism” of the 1960s and 1970s, rooted as it was in a radical individualism that took the “autonomous self' as the primary measure of human happiness, distinguished political philosophers are paying increased attention to the meaning of and necessity for community if we are to secure the blessings of liberty bequeathed to us through the American Revolution.
31. This new emphasis on community in American political theory is entirely welcome from a Catholic perspective. Catholic social thought derives from the belief that the human person is created in the image of God, who is triune, a community of divine Persons, a trinity of light and love. Men and women made in the image and likeness of the trinitarian God are men and women who in virtue of their very nature are called into community. Community, in the Catholic understanding of social reality, is not something “added on” after we have secured individual liberties. Community in the Catholic perspective is of the very nature of the human person.
32. Paradoxically, this classic Catholic understanding lately has been reinforced empirically by the horrific effects of the breakdown of community which confront us in each day's newspapers. I am thinking in particular here of the crisis of urban life in America, the decay of our cities, the sexual abuse of children by adults, and the emergence of a completely new phenomenon without precedent in American history: a permanent underclass.
33. We have learned, through a pattern of human tragedy, that some forms of public assistance which tend to erode traditional patterns of community—particularly the family in both its nuclear and extended forms—exacerbate the very social problems they were intended to solve. Across the spectrum of debate on social welfare policy, there is today widespread agreement that the crisis of the underclass cannot be adequately addressed, much less resolved, unless there are new emphases on individual responsibility, the strengthening and maintenance of the family and the inculcation of virtue.
34. Similar understandings may now be discerned in the debates over crime and drug abuse. While there is much to be said on the “supply side” of the drug problem, there is considerable agreement that the “demand side” must be addressed as well. We cannot blame foreign drug lords for all of our problems. The evil trade would not exist were the demand non-existent; and by demand, I mean the demand of the wealthy as well as the demand of the impoverished. “Just Say ‘No’” may not be an adequate slogan for a national assault on the crisis of drug abuse, but it is an essential and irreducible component of the war against drugs. And saying “no” requires people of character and virtue.
35. A similar judgement is to be made on those radically disturbed adults who sexually abuse children. They cruelly exhibit one of the deepest signs of the modern-day “death” syndrome.
36. In short, whether the issue is the decay of our cities, the cycle of poverty in the underclass, the abuse of drugs and the wave of crime which it has engendered, or the abuse of children, there is a common and wholly welcome new theme in our public discourse: that there can be no rights without responsibilities. And the creation of a “responsible society” requires new attention to the nurturance of virtue, both private and public. Legislation and executive action are not enough.
37.The American experiment requires virtuous individuals, whose disciplining of their own lives creates the moral habits necessary for the great adventure of self-government. And it requires a new birth of public virtue: a new care for the common good, a new recognition that it is only in communities of virtue and character that the rights of individuals are secured.
38. What do Catholics in America bring to this new debate over community and public virtue? We bring an understanding of virtue, derived from the Christian classics, as a “moral habit” or “moral skill.” Virtues, properly understood, do not exist in some vague realm of abstraction. They exist in individual human persons and in the human communities that nurture those persons. Virtues, private or public, thus require both definition and development. All of us, as individuals and as a community, grow into virtue.
39. We bring an understanding of the human person as an individual ordered, by his or her very nature, to the pursuit of the common good. All of us—in our family life, in our work, in our participation in culture, and in our participation in public life—are called to seek the good of all, as well as our own individual good. As the Second Vatican Council teaches, “...the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good, according to his own abilities and the needs of others, also promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life” (Lumen gentium, 30).
40. We Catholics also bring to the ecumenical, inter-religious, and civic debate over the right-ordering of our lives, loves and loyalties a short list of those “cardinal virtues” which the Christian tradition has deemed crucial to the pursuit of the common good. Those “cardinal virtues” are usually understood to be prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.
41. By “prudence” we mean that moral skill which allows us to know our moral duty and to discern the concrete ways in which that duty is to be accomplished. According to Holy Scripture, the prudent man or woman is one who can interpret his or her specific situation in light of the Lord's will for His people; the prudent believer keeps watch, ever-mindful of his or her own human frailty and ever-expecting the coming of the Lord in glory (Psalm 90.12; Matthew 25.1-13; 1 John 4. lff.). In the civic tradition of the West, at least since Aristotle, prudence has also been understood to be the chief political virtue. Prudence teaches us that public moral decision-making is to be conceived more on the analogy of a conductor interpreting a symphonic score than on the analogy of an engineer factoring an algebraic equation. Prudence teaches us, in other words, that the moral life is an art as well as a science. Prudence is the moral skill that allows us, as a community and as individuals, to choose wisely and to bring the skills of human reason, informed by grace, to bear on complex issues of public policy.
42. Prudence, viewed from another angle, is not a matter of splitting the difference between contending positions. Rather, it is the virtue which allows us to live wisely amidst the inevitable ambiguities and uncertainties of life. Jacques Maritain, the great Catholic philosopher and layman, once reflected that moral theorists were “unhappy people. When they insist on the immutability of moral principles, they are reproached for imposing unlivable requirements on us. When they explain the way in which those immutable principles are to be put into force, they are reproached for making morality relative. In both cases, however, they are only upholding the claims of reason to direct life” (Man and the State). Through the development of the virtue of prudence, this “unhappiness” can be transformed into a measure of Christian joy.
43. “Justice,” according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is the moral skill by which human beings have “a firm and constant will to render each his due.” This “will to render each his due” operates through what traditionally have been termed commutative justice (what we owe each other in contractual obligations), distributive justice (how we order the goods of this world), and legal justice (the institutions and processes by which society pursues the common good). Cardinal James Gibbons' support of the nascent American labor movement in the late 19th century, the “Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction” in 1919, and the leadership taken by many Catholic bishops in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s were examples of the Church's efforts to help advance all three of these forms of justice in American society.
44. We should also note here one of the striking developments of Catholic social thought in our time: the magisterium's emphasis on democratic forms of governance as the most effective institutional expression under modern conditions of a legal justice which acknowledges those basic human rights and responsibilities which are to be secured by the moral skills of commutative and distributive justice. The 1986 “Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation,” for example, taught that “there can only be authentic development in a social and political system which respects freedoms and fosters them through the participation of everyone” (#95). Pope John Paul II has taken the discussion a step further by urging, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, that nations “need to reform certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions, in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones” (#44). The pope's challenge was directed in the first instance to the countries of the developing world, but his words bear reflection in the established democracies as well.
45. It is important to recall that in the Christian tradition justice is inseparable from love and is completed by it. The Second Vatican Council reminds us of this: “The presence of the Christian faithful in [public life] should be animated by that charity with which God has loved us, and with which He wills that we should love each other (see 1 John 4.11). Christian charity truly extends to all, without distinction of race, social condition, or religion. It looks for neither gain nor gratitude. For as God has loved us with spontaneous love, so also the faithful should in their charity care for the human person himself by loving him with the same affection with which God sought out man” (Ad gentes, 12).
46. To say that justice is completed by love is not to diminish the requirements of justice. Rather, it is to locate those requirements in a more noble context. Christians are required by their commitment to justice to respect the inalienable rights of all human beings. Christians are called by the love of God to conceive of that respect as more than a legal obligation. The “republic of procedures'' is insufficient. The virtue of justice and the Christian call to perfection lead us to seek what Pope John Paul II on many occasions has called the “society of solidarity.” “Those who are more influential,” the pope teaches, “because they have a greater share of goods and common services should feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess. Those who are weaker, for their part, in the same spirit of solidarity should not adopt a purely passive attitude or one that is destructive of the social fabric, but while claiming their legitimate rights, should do what they can for the good of all .... Solidarity helps us to see the ‘other’—whether a person, people, or nation—not just as some kind of instrument, with a work capacity and physical strength to be exploited at low cost and then discarded when no longer useful, but as our ‘neighbor’, a ‘helper’ (cf. Genesis 2.18-20), to be made a sharer, on a par with ourselves in the banquet of life to which all are equally invited by God” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 39).
47. “Fortitude” is the moral skill by which we stand firm in hope against the pressures and fears of this life. Fortitude calls us to courage; but fortitude linked to prudence helps us to discern the difference between the truly courageous and the merely foolhardy. Fortitude armed the great civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s; fortitude was the moral skill by which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took up the yoke of leadership, knowing (as has been made clear by his recent biographers) that such leadership could well be at the cost of his life. Fortitude has also been a virtue sustaining the right-to-life movement in its persistent defense of the unborn. Against the intense pressures mounted by virtually all of the major opinion-shaping centers of our culture, the right-to-life movement has insisted that the abortion license as defined by Roe v. Wade does not settle the issue—a judgement which has been vindicated on its own merits as well as in the court of public opinion. It is my prayer that this fortitude will be vindicated in our state legislature.
48. Finally, there is “temperance,” the moral skill by which we learn to control our passions and emotions by reason and to order those passions and emotions to the common good. Temperance does not require us to be public scolds. Nor does it, properly understood, lead us to reject the goods of this life. Rather, temperance teaches us moderation as consumers, chastity in sexual relationships and modesty in all things. Temperate individuals are essential for the responsible society, the “society of solidarity.” And a public moral culture that prizes temperance is essential in the grand adventure of self-government.
49.The Catholic tradition reminds us that we live the moral life, as individuals and as a community, by grace, and not simply by our wits alone. Through grace—the outpouring of God's life and love through the workings of the Holy Spirit—we live in both the City of Man and the City of God. We have here no abiding dwelling (see Hebrews 13.14), but we are called to build here a city fit for God's people. Because we live in the City of God by faith, hope and love, we are freed—in the fullest sense of human freedom—to be of service to the City of mankind.
50. The tradition of the Catholic Church affirms, in other words, that politics is not the most important reality; the Kingdom of Christ, which is to come in glory at a time of the Father's choosing, is. But Christian faith in the final triumph of God's will and purpose is not an excuse for indifference or sectarian withdrawal. We are called, in charity but also in truth, to the public square where the public's business is debated and decided. The Christian layperson, convinced of the Father's good pleasure in regard to the people He has called into being, can take up the burden of politics with a sense of proportion. Through baptism, Christians already live in an anticipatory way in the light and love of the Triune God. That reality of faith calls the laity to assume public responsibilities without making politics the final measure of the human good. In a century scarred by totalitarianism—the claim that the state is omnicompetent—Christian understandings of the limits of the political serve an important cautionary function: they put boundaries on coercive state power, and thus open up the possibilities of a politics of consent. Conversely, the classic Catholic claim that grace builds on nature orders us to a politics which is open to the critique of transcendent moral norms, a politics which knows that the state exists to serve society, a politics which promotes the common good while defending the inalienable rights of all people.
51. The American experiment in ordered liberty is nourished from many sources. But we would be untrue to history, as well as unfair to the present American reality, were we not to recognize that for the overwhelming majority of our people the democratic enterprise is but one expression of Biblical understandings about the nature of the human person, human society and human destiny. Others sustain their democratic commitments by different warrants. We wish to understand their convictions, and we shall defend their right to press their case democratically in the public square. We ask only that they grant us the same liberty.
V. VIRTUE, PLURALISM AND DEMOCRATIC CIVILITY
52. Renewing the American experiment in ordered liberty requires, finally, that we deepen our understanding of the meaning of pluralism and its relationship to democratic civility.
53. To call America a “pluralistic society” is, in one sense, a matter of simple empirical accuracy. Television, telephones, fax machines, interactive computer terminals and all the other artifacts of modern communications technology notwithstanding, America has not become homogenized. Regional vocabularies endure, so do patterns of ethnic identity, be they expressed in music, dance, crafts or cooking. Americans are truly e pluribus unum—”one out of many”—as one of the mottos on our currency puts it.
54. But when we speak of American “pluralism,” we are referring generally to something other than the sheer fact of our racial, ethnic, religious and political diversity. We are, or we ought to be, talking about one of our qualities as a democratic people going about the business of ordering our common life. We are, or we ought to be, talking about a moral commitment we have made to each other: a moral commitment to engage our deepest differences within the bond of democratic civility.
55. In this sense, we misunderstand genuine pluralism if we equate it with indifference to those differences or with mere tolerance of minority opinions on matters of public policy. America is called not simply to toleration but to a true pluralism. And pluralism is not just the acknowledgement of differences, but their engagement in a vibrant and civil public debate. The paradox of pluralism lies in that we discover our unity more fully and at a deeper level when we engage our differences and work through them in a civil manner.
56. It is no offense against genuine pluralism, then, to argue that virtue is central to the life of the American Republic. The true offense against pluralism, and against democratic civility, lies in one of two directions: either in the imposition of radically secularized norms of behavior on the entire community or, perhaps even worse, in a bored indifference to the claims to truth which others of our fellow citizens are pressing in the public square. It is precisely in plumbing the depths of our own religious and philosophical tradition on this matter of public virtue—and in challenging our fellow countrymen to a similar process of self-examination—that we transcend “pluralism” as a mere description of empirical reality, and make our most important contribution to pluralism as an attribute of the national character.
57. That character will continue to be tested, perhaps preeminently, in the ongoing debate over abortion. The abortion debate, even prior to the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, has been characterized by a marked lack of democratic civility. For democratic civility necessarily involves a commitment to truth, and the truth about the abortion license has taken a terrible beating these past 20 years. We are persistently told by the national media and by abortion advocates, for example, that the majority of Americans support the abortion license as defined in Roe v. Wade. In fact, however, every reputable piece of survey research has demonstrated that Americans reject abortion as a means of contraception, reject abortion when an unwanted pregnancy will cause economic hardship, and reject abortion when the procedure is undertaken to resolve problems of personal relationship between a man and a woman. Approximately 75 percent of the American people oppose abortion when the reasons given for terminating a pregnancy are those under which 99 percent of abortions today are obtained. Surely, democratic civility requires an acknowledgement of these facts.
58. But the answer to the abortion license lies not simply in the marshalling of facts and their civil brokerage into the public debate. Nor does the answer lie solely with the Supreme Court, important though its boundary-setting is. No, the answer to the abortion license lies in who we are as a people. Will we be a people hospitable to the most defenseless among us? Will we be a people who once again decide to expand rather than contract the boundaries of the community of the commonly protected? Will we be a people who have understood that the quest for radical autonomy, for a life in which we are freed from the consequence of our actions, is in truth a quest for bondage and enslavement? Will we be a people who affirm in our culture and in our law that rights cannot be secured unless responsibilities are assumed and borne?
59. We do not offend against genuine pluralism or democratic civility by pressing these questions onto the public agenda, doing so with charity but also with a firm commitment to the truth. Indeed, if the founders and framers were right that the survival of republican democracy rests on the character of the people, we serve the republic by our insistence in and out of season that these questions be forthrightly engaged. We must continue to work for the right-to-life of the unborn, as we work for the dignity of all men and women regardless of age, race or class, because God wills it. But we also take up that task because we respect and honor our fellow citizens and wish our country to be true to her most endearing qualities.
VI. LOCAL IMPLICATIONS
60. The responsibility which the Catholic faithful bear for this task includes not only the reasonable statement of principles which should govern discussion of public policy issues, but also active participation in the political process which yields practical programs of social action. The vitality of our belief and the strength of our conviction must be focused to produce practical responses to the challenges we face as American Catholics. I wish now to share some reflections with you on two critically important areas of local concern which demand a response rooted in the qualities of virtue and character.
THE CRISIS IN HEALTHCARE: A MEDICAL EMERGENCY
61. Across the nation, the provision of adequate health care for the medically indigent population has become a critical concern. In our 1981 statement, Health and Health Care, the Catholic bishops of the United States wrote that “the Church considers health care to be a basic human right which flows from the sanctity of human life,” and we called for the adoption of a national health insurance program. The question which we face here in Colorado is how to fulfill this responsibility in an age of rising need and shrinking fiscal resources.
62. In the Denver metropolitan area, the pressure upon both the public and private sector to provide indigent and uncompensated care has reached a critical level. The Colorado Hospital Association has calculated unreimbursed hospital care in Colorado during 1987 to have been more than $139 million, with funds available from the state medical indigency program totalling only $31.9 million for the same period. Because of the low rate of reimbursement, only 35 of Colorado's 103 hospitals participated in the program. With the privatization of University Hospital, Denver General Hospital must serve as the primary public provider of health care for citizens otherwise unable to obtain it. It is estimated that Denver General Hospital alone currently absorbs more than $19 million annually in uncompensated costs for treatment of the medically indigent. Major contributing factors to this enormous deficit include an uninsured patient population of 48 percent and inadequate reimbursement from both Medicaid and health maintenance organizations. Spiraling health care costs in the area promise no relief from this desperate fiscal situation: the average hospital bill in Colorado climbed to $6,501 in the first three months of 1989, 15.9 percent more than in the first three months of the previous year.
63. Prudence demands that we recognize this growing health care crisis in our community as a threat to the common good and a challenge demanding a concerted and practical response. Because of the enormity of the problem, increased cooperation among local governmental entities and the public commitment of elected officials to long-range strategic planning is absolutely essential. Measures to broaden the revenue base for the support of Denver General Hospital through the formation of a metropolitan health authority should be actively considered.
64. Our concern for justice in health care requires that we ensure equal access of the poor to quality medical care. But the justice we seek cannot be viewed as merely a problem of resource allocation. Rather, our perspective flows from the quality of compassion constitutive of the Christian virtue of justice. Compassion rooted in justice leads us to realize on a deeply personal level that the suffering of anyone because of inadequate medical care diminishes everyone. In practical terms, compassion demands that we aggressively pursue the inclusion of the poor in a form of government-funded health care insurance program.
65. The pluralistic nature of our democratic system necessitates a commitment to the arduous task of forming the consensus required for legislative and governmental action. In attempting to reach agreement on action to resolve the immensely complicated problems of health care in our state and nation, it is fortitude which alone provides a stable center of patience and civility for dialogue among those espousing conflicting interests and opinions. Fortitude gives us the courage to challenge, but also the wisdom to listen.
66. Finally, temperance leads us to address the question of how the consumption of scarce resources necessary to meet our individual health care needs impacts others. In practical terms, temperance demands that we take responsibility for the preservation of our own health.
Statistical research has definitively established that immense medical resources which would otherwise be available to our people are expended in the treatment of conditions linked to personal health neglect and behavioral addictions. Our health is a gift from God which is too often appreciated only when it is lost. Temperance calls each of us to moral and civic responsibility in maintaining our health and avoiding needless claims upon resources urgently required by others. This obligation extends beyond proper diet and exercise to include personally harmful and socially expensive addictions, particularly smoking and alcohol abuse.
67. In regards to smoking, for example, the most recent specific statistics available are from a computer model designed by the Center for Disease Control. During 1985 in Colorado, direct costs (i.e., not including costs from lost productivity, etc.) for hospital and professional medical treatment for smoking-related ailments are estimated to have been $329 million, or approximately seven percent of the total health care costs. Furthermore, in regards to alcohol, based upon an extrapolation from national statistics, it is estimated that in Colorado in 1988 the total cost of alcohol abuse (i.e., including health care treatment as well as lost productivity, etc.) was approximately $2 billion. If we are part of the health care problem, temperance invites us to take appropriate personal action.
ROCKY FLATS: A TEST OF MORAL ECOLOGY
68. In a recent essay, the President of the National Geographic Society bluntly summarized the ecological threat faced by the world community: “Disposal of the bitter fruits of high consumption—trash and toxic waste—has become an intractable problem. We are victims of our own success, drowning in our own garbage.”2 At the end of a century which has seen more material progress than the preceding aggregate of human history, we face a fleeting decade of choice during which the future of this fragile planet may well be decided. As members of the nation which invented the “consumer society” and which enjoys the highest standard of living known in human history, we cannot refuse moral responsibility for this state of ecological emergency nor refuse to participate in local, national and international efforts to repair the damage caused by neglect and excess.
69. We need look no further than the Denver metropolitan area to understand the threat which faces us. The filing of a federal suit against the Department of Energy and Rockwell International for illegal radioactive and hazardous waste disposal at Rocky Flats, and a subsequent threat of plant closure by the Governor of Colorado, have brought the problem of environmental protection in the nuclear age literally to our doorstep. Statistical data released in the aftermath of these disturbing developments have called into question the effectiveness of safeguards designed to protect the quality of water and air in the suburban Denver area. The sheer quantities of materials released into the atmosphere and water supplies of our community by the Rocky Flats plant—331,000 pounds of industrial solvents and coolants, 64,100 pounds of ammonia and corrosive acids, and 148.9 million gallons of liquid waste—justify the fullest possible investigation of the alleged disposal violations.
70. Various plans of action have been suggested to address the possible environmental dangers posed by operations at Rocky Flats. Some suggest the imposition of tighter controls and a cleanup of the facility, estimated by the Department of Energy to cost an astronomical $1.8 billion. Others, many of whom are prompted by the additional concern of nuclear weapons production at the plant, call for its permanent closure.
71. Our responsibility to address the serious environmental threat which pollution from Rocky Flats represents requires a perspective defined by the virtues drawn from the Christian tradition and based in a realized conviction of shared responsibility for God's gift of creation. The imperative of stewardship embraces not only the measured right to use the wealth of our world for the common good, but the corresponding obligation to respect and preserve its richness as a sacred trust for generations yet unborn.
72. On the premise that flawed decisions inevitably follow from inadequate reflection, prudence demands that we not hasten to judgement without full knowledge of the facts. Responsible local and national officials deserve the time to assess adequately the situation and publish their findings so that the public dialogue to follow will permit informed decision making. Fortitude will provide the strength and firmness of purpose to examine patiently all aspects of the complex problem which Rocky Flats represents.
73. At the same time, justice joined to temperance will serve to remind us that we must be prepared to accept corporate responsibility for payment of the social costs entailed by the course of action we choose. Clearly, the closure of Rocky Flats cannot be debated in isolation from the economic impact it would have on the common good of our Front Range communities. Of particular concern is the welfare of our 6,000 friends and neighbors in the metropolitan community currently employed there. A just and responsible decision to close the Rocky Flats facility would require that we acknowledge the effects that such a decision would have on others in our community, and give their claims full attention and consideration.
VII. A TALE OF TWO HEROES
74. We learn the moral skills of public virtue in argument, debate, reflection and action; we also learn about virtue by pondering the lives of virtuous men and women. This year, historical anniversaries offer us an occasion to learn from two heroes on the American scene. One was the first President of the United States; the other, the first Catholic Bishop of Denver.
75. Ours is an age in which the suspicion that all idols have clay feet, or at least a clay toe or two, is widespread. All the more reason, then, to marvel at the fact that the memory of George Washington, 200 years after assuming the presidency, remains virtually impregnable in the civic pantheon of American heroes. This past April, when the nation celebrated the bicentennial of Washingtons's first inauguration, the columnist Edwin Yoder wrote of Washington that “the further you look into his character and performance...the more you are forced to concede his greatness—indeed his uniqueness. No one is flawless; but for public purposes Washington comes as close to flawless as any figure in history.''3
76. In George Washington, we find a vivid exemplification of public virtue in the service of republican democracy. Washington's insistence on the impartiality of the chief executive in matters of great public importance, his clemency toward rebellious citizens, his decency in dealing with the Native Americans and religious minorities—all of these qualities illustrate the interplay of personal character and public virtue. The small Catholic community of the 1790s was particularly grateful for Washington's leadership, and made that known to the new president shortly after his first inauguration. In response to a letter of congratulations from John Carroll, Charles Carroll of Carrollton and other prominent Catholic leaders, Washington wrote of his hopes for America in words that should still move us today:
”I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality. And I presume that your fellow citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their Revolution, and the establishment of their government; or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic religion is professed.
”I thank you, gentlemen, for your kind concern for me. While my life and health shall continue, in whatever situation I may be, it shall be my constant endeavor to justify the favorable sentiments you are pleased to express of my conduct. And may the members of your Society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity, and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free government, enjoy every temporal and spiritual felicity.”4
77. But Washington gave us more than a model of personal rectitude and political sagacity. His tenure of office, and his decision to leave office, demonstrated in fact what the founders and framers had asserted in theory about self-government. Few of Washington's time believed that the elected chief executive of a large republic could avoid one of two temptations: to become autocratic, and thus disfigure democracy, or to become a mere figurehead, under whose benign neglect mobocracy would soon rule. Yet Washington defied the expectations of his age, and indeed of previous ages. In doing so, he made an unparalleled contribution to securing human liberty. As Edwin Yoder put it, “If government of, by and for the people—popular sovereignty—matters, Washington, its great founder, matters as much. He broke the mold of his age and transcended its political imagination. He proved that, with character and vision, a magistrate could find ground to stand on between anarchy and autocracy and could successfully rule men by serving them first.”5
78. There is considerable and welcome discussion today about revivifying the study of American history by telling our children the stories of the heroes of democracy. If we would look for a person whose personal and public conduct teaches much about the importance of personal character and public virtue to the life of the republic, we need look no farther than to George Washington.
79. In the first part of the fourth century, Lactantius, one of the fathers of the Church, wrote, “...virtue is the doing of good and not-doing of evil. ... Cognition is of no value unless it is followed by action” (Divine Institutions, 6, 5, 10). This being the case, then there can be no doubt that certainly one of, if not the most virtuous man in Colorado history, was our own Bishop Joseph P. Machebeuf, the first Bishop of Denver. ''A giant of our region of God's earth,” he has been called, and his deeds have been rendered “heroic.”6 Not only did Bishop Machebeuf know virtue, he acted virtuously. In fact, so effectual was his ministry in the region of Pikes Peak, that he has been named by his biographer for all the state: “The Apostle of Colorado.”
80. In Joseph Projectus Machebeuf we have a vivid exemplification of the exercise of virtue solely for the cause of the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ on the frontiers of the republic and for the unity of the Church.
81. Father Machebeuf arrived in Colorado in 1860 and entered Denver City in October of that same year. Throughout this great state he discovered a population of peoples unique and of vastly different nationality and description. Here Machebeuf encountered, first in Conejos, then in Pueblo and elsewhere, our ancestors of Mexican heritage. As vicar general for the Pikes Peak territory and later as bishop, Machebeuf would speak dearly and with great love for the Mexican people. “They have the ardent faith that removes mountains. During all my years in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, I have felt so much at home among these good people, and were it in my power to select, I would choose my place as bishop among them” (Howlett, p. 401).
82. Indeed, Machebeuf took occasion from the pulpit to chastise his Denver congregation for their ill will towards their Mexican brothers and sisters and for the racial prejudice which he judged they harbored toward them. He made it a hallmark of his ministry in the state “to understand the Mexicans and love them” (Howlett, p. 399). His example, both by word and by deed, continues more than 100 years later to speak strongly to us in the Church of Denver. In this last decade of the 20th century, all Coloradans need to join hands and hearts to eradicate the evils of racism and of racial and ethnic prejudice.
83. Machebeuf also found in Colorado men and women whose hopes ran high-for mountain gold and instant success. “Prospectors,” “fortune hunters,” “gold-seekers,” “frontiersmen” and “adventurers” were what they were called. “They came for immediate gain, and they expected to go away as soon as their object was attained...Few ever came to Colorado in the early years who did not hope soon to go again and leave it to its natural denizen—the Indian” (Howlett, p. 269).
84. Although most had planned to leave upon the discovery of their fortunes, many were forced to remain by unrealized ambitions and subsequent impoverishment. They had hoped to start anew back home; instead, here, in poverty, insecurity, loneliness and anxiety, they stayed. Paradoxically, some had left behind them in their native state the one thing they needed most: faith. “They came to find a fortune,” it was said of them, “not to seek religion.”
85. It was to this people that Machebeuf was sent and gladly came—to preach by word and example that the ultimate and only fulfillment, the true fortune, is Christ. With quiet courage and fortitude, he set about his task, not missing an opportunity to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and to provide whatever he could for the material needs of his people. Virtue, it is said, is the living legacy of the dead. And it is certainly part of Machebeuf’s living legacy to us. “His purpose was ever single—to save souls and advance the interests of the Church, his work was always in this direction and his activity was unceasing. In all these things, he was above criticism. His mistakes—and who has not made mistakes?—came from his very virtues. His heart was too big and his confidence in men and things was too great” (Howlett, p 390).
86. Machebeuf remains today, 100 years after his death, an example of Christian virtue for us in the Church of Denver. Husbands and wives, young people, religious, deacons and priests can all look to Machebeuf for a model of virtue and the living out of a virtuous life. His single-hearted commitment to preach the Gospel and to foster the unity of the people of the state inspires us to continue his work, which yet seeks to be fulfilled.
VIII. FROM DEBATE TO PRAYER
87. In closing these reflections on virtue and the American Republic, I am mindful of the fact that, in the renewal of the American experiment in freedom and justice, we are called to more than careful reflection, civil debate and full participation in the political process. We are called to prayer. I ask you to pray for the United States of America, that she might fulfill the great promise of her founding. I ask you to pray that we might indeed become a community of character and virtue, a hospitable society, a nation whose domestic life and international presence reflect the true meaning of human freedom under God. And on this bicentennial of the establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in America, may I commend to you and your pastors Archbishop John Carroll's “Prayer for the Civil Authorities,” which he composed in 1791. Its language is of another age, but its sentiments ring as true today as they did in Baltimore some 200 years ago.
88. And so, let us pray:
”We pray Thee, O almighty and eternal God! Who through Jesus Christ hast revealed Thy glory to all nations, to preserve the works of Thy Mercy, that Thy Church, being spread through the whole world, may continue with unchanging faith in the confession of Thy name.
”We pray Thee, Who alone art good and holy, to endow with heavenly knowledge, sincere zeal, and sanctity of life, our chief Bishop, John Paul, the vicar of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the government of His Church; our own bishop; all other bishops, prelates, and pastors of the Church; and especially those who are appointed to exercise amongst us the functions of the holy ministry, and conduct Thy people into the ways of salvation.
”We pray Thee, O God of might, wisdom and justice! through Whom authority is rightly administered, laws are enacted, and judgement decreed: assist with Thy holy spirit of counsel and fortitude the President of the United States, that his administration may be conducted in righteousness, and be eminently useful to Thy people over whom he presides; by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion; by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy; and by restraining vice and immorality. Let the light of Thy divine wisdom direct the deliberations of Congress, and shine forth in all the proceedings and laws framed for our rule and government, so that they may tend to the preservation of peace, the promotion of national happiness, the increase of industry, sobriety, and useful knowledge; and may perpetuate to us the blessing of equal liberty.
”We pray for his excellency, the Governor of this State, for the members of the Assembly, for all judges, magistrates, and other officers who are appointed to guard our political welfare, that they may be enabled, by Thy powerful protection, to discharge the duties of their respective stations with honesty and ability.
”We recommend likewise, to Thy unbounded mercy, all our brethren and fellow citizens throughout the United States, that they may be blessed in the knowledge and sanctified in the observance of Thy most holy law; that they may be preserved in union, and in that peace which the world cannot give; and after enjoying the blessings of this life, be admitted to those which are eternal.
”Finally, we pray to Thee, O Lord of mercy, to remember the souls of Thy servants departed who are gone before us with the sign of faith, and repose in the sleep of peace; the souls of our parents, relatives, and friends; of those who, when living, were members of this congregation, and particularly of such as are lately deceased; of all benefactors who, by their donations or legacies to this church, witnessed their zeal for the decency of divine worship and proved their claim to our charitable and grateful remembrance. To these, O Lord, and to all that rest in Christ, grant, we beseech Thee, a place of refreshment, light, and everlasting peace, through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen.”
89. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
+ J. Francis Stafford
Archbishop of Denver
September 14, 1989
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross
ENDNOTES
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” in Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, Ronald Berman, ed. (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), pp. 7-8 [emphasis added].
2. Gilbert M. Grosvenor, “Will We Mend Our Earth?” National Geographic 174 (December 1988) p. 766.
3. Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., “He Broke the Mold,” Washington Post, April 30, 1989.
4. See Documents of American Catholic History, Volume 1, John Tracy Ellis, ed. (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1987), p. 172.
5. Yoder, op.cit.
6. David M. Clark, S.J., “Forward,” in Life of Bishop Machebeuf, 1987 edition, W.J. Howlett (Denver: Regis College, 1987), p. iii [referred to as “Howlett.”].