I had planned to participate in this week's Conference on Polarization, hosted by Georgetown University, in Washington D.C. Events intervened that made it impossible for me to make the trip. But I had put a few notes together in preparation for the conference, which I was then able to put into some order and send to the Kim Daniels, a good friend, and one of the conference's organizers. She generously offered to share my thoughts with the participants, and I take the occasion to post it here.
Dear Kim,
I am sorry I could not be with the participants in the conference these few days. But I want at least to share with you a few thoughts that have
been on my mind as the conference approached. In some sense, they are thoughts
that hang about me during my daily work as a bishop on the Texas-Mexico Border.
Polarization in the Church
happens when we lose sight of the luminous Center from which all Catholic life
and teaching flows. We are often speaking at each other from points of reference
that emanate from the Center but, like different points on different spokes on
a wheel, we appear frustratingly distant from one another. The luminous Center
is the person and then the teaching of Christ himself. Our conversations and
even our arguments, especially as they address the Social Teaching of the
Church, are helpful in the Church only if we are all looking at the Center when
we speak.
Thus, the central importance
of the passage in GAUDETE ET EXSULTATE, 96, wherein Pope Francis quotes Saint
John Paul II: “If we truly start out anew from the contemplation of Christ, we
must learn to see him especially in the faces of those with whom he himself
wished to be identified”. The text of Matthew 25: 35-36 is “not a simple
invitation to charity: it is a page of Christology which sheds a ray of light
on the mystery of Christ”.
In the Church, Christ is
contemplated as the One truly present in our midst, and this contemplation is
accessible to us primarily through the Liturgical enacting of his announcement
of the Kingdom and in the daily ecclesial reading of the Scriptures. But, the
liturgical and contemplative enactment, by the dynamism of grace itself, moves
us to see Christ, really, in the faces of those whom the Lord affectionately
names “the least of mine.” If this latter movement in the life of faith is not
present, the prior enactments are barren of the fruit the Lord seeks from his
people. This barrenness has bearing on salvation itself.
The Social Justice magisterium
is particularly subject to dismemberment into lesser, purely political parts if
we do not sustain a concerted effort to connect the teaching to the person of
Christ from whom it flows. Jesus speaking the Beatitudes, and Jesus announcing
what Pope Francis calls the Great Criterion in GAUDETE ET EXSULTSTE, 95, is the only light that can
persuade our own people to let go of postures that too often are simply
political positions disguised as religious convictions. What we need is a
thorough purification that is only possible if we agree to all go back to the
Center again, and from there judge the adequacy of one proposed political
enactment over another. We must all engage the words of the Gospel daily and
deeply.
A few quick points:
1) Of great concern is the reductionist
tendency to limit the bishop’s teaching authority to matters that are either de fide or, in moral matters,
intrinsically evil. This is a problem that has been a long time in the making,
wherein basically all ecclesial teaching ends up becoming only an argument
about Church authority. There are many evils that are so because they are
intrinsically so, (like the direct killing of an innocent), but there are many
grave evils that are so because the circumstances conspire to block basic human
goods, like family unity, or the natural law right of any human being to seek
self-preservation. I see this every day in the Rio Grande Valley, as does
Sister Norma Pimentel. In the end, it is about authority, but in a more basic
sense: The Church asks, because it is the Lord who asks. If we cannot show our
people how it is that the Lord himself is the source of what we teach about the
social order, about the cries of people considered too little to matter, our
people will never emerge from arguments about what is or is not binding in the
papal magisterium.
2) As a body, the Church is quite
capable of pushing the Gospel forward on all fronts. It helps if we can learn
to be aware of and grateful for so many different members of the Church who do
what they can on the issues they directly engage. We can’t all do everything,
but we can all do something and then be grateful others are doing other things.
This works in many beautiful ways in the Rio Grande Valley. Our pro-life
advocates are dedicated, but also aware of and supportive of other social
initiatives, especially in support of the immigrant poor. And the Catholic
volunteers at immigrant detention centers are amongst our strongest supporters as
we seek to address the struggles of un-wed mothers.
3) One of our biggest challenges
is finding a voice that is not immediately identified with either political
party. The Gospel and CST are larger than the confines of current political
discourse. Our voice must name the human good at stake in any given
contemporary issue. And it is a voice that must repeatedly call the political culture
to look at and encounter the human beings whose life and well-being are at
risk. Law is for the sake of the human person, not the human person for the
sake of the law. The opposition to evil only makes sense to people when they
have a sense of the good it destroys or diminishes to nothing.
4) Human relationality as a given
in the mystery of being human is at the metaphysical heart of Catholic Social
Teaching. We are related by a common humanity, and have real responsibilities
to each other by virtue of being human. This is the unspoken given of Scripture
itself. Our own people, whether they consider themselves to be politically
liberal or conservative, often assume uncritically the cultural primacy of
individuality, and thus see human relation as purely a volitional act, instead
of a reality into which we are born. In that sense CST must work to recast the
premises of social conversation about the social order. This is no short-term
goal, it is part and parcel of the evangelization of modern culture. And in
this effort, we cannot be afraid of Scripture in public discourse to our own
people, nor shy away from metaphysics in the halls of our Universities.
Pope Francis speaks of the
“throwaway culture”, as a description that encompasses all that undermines the
human good today. We use and throwaway unborn children, immigrants, laborers, the
disabled, the elderly, the terminally ill, and our own natural environment.
This is the condition that marginalizes and creates the “invisibles”. Returning, then, to the point about the
Christological center, for us, the dramatic clarity about the mystery of human
vulnerability, and the great dignity it entails, is provided by the image of
Christ in the womb of Mary, and Christ discarded and hanging on the Cross. The
unborn and the immigrant, the death-row inmate and the street person are
present in that continuum. In Catholic Faith, our salvation depends on how we
respond to the Christ in those places. In his visit to the United States, Pope
Francis called for the replacement of a throwaway culture, and a culture of
radical individuality, with a human culture that “protects and cares for”, a
culture of “radical care”. This is so important. Whoever is vulnerable, and at
risk,” is brother or sister to me.” In the end, this includes everybody.
In Christ,
+Daniel E. Flores, STD
Bishop of Brownsville
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