A reader writes

I want to start by telling you that I am a big fan of your blog, I try to read every post.

I also would like to ask you a few questions. I understand that you may be busy, so if you're not able to discuss them all, it's very much understood. This is something of a response to John L Allen's "Thoughts on post-tribal Catholicism" which I know you're familiar with it since I found it through your blog. I have what I think is essentially one question that can be posed and discussed in a variety of ways. That is, can we overcome our ideological differences and remain members of the same Church, or are there some issues that are too divisive to allow for differing opinions.

It seems that I find myself reading your blog through a certain prism that I haven't quite figured out, which is to say that I haven't figured out your politics, though I don't want you to tell me, that's your business. When I say politics, I don't mean Democrat/Republican Electoral Politics, but politics as Aristotle saw them; the science that deals with the question of maximizing the well being of a citizenry. Your blog, as much as I can tell, attacks the far right and far left with equal measure, at least in the way you define the Rand-Marxism continuum. And as tempting as it is to want to separate one's voting with his religion, it's something that must be addressed. If the goal of any religion is to provide a framework of morality, then so to is it the mission of our laws and social norms to do the same. It's because of this that murder is both illegal and a sin. But while there's often significant overlap, it's not complete. Case in point: adultery, irreligious and not considered illegal (at least not in the U.S.). Is it possible that we can reconcile our differences by having a column for Catholicism and a column for My Politics, or is this too pick-and-choosey? Since electoral politics is not theology, and a voting booth is not a confessional is it possible to separate the strictly religious experience from the strictly politcal (secular) experience? This is the reductive question.

Perhaps the constructive form of that question is, Can we begin with the minimum of what makes us Catholic and build from there, calling each additional agreement progress?

Our religion manifests itself as politics nowhere more clearly than on the issues of abortion and gay rights.

I think that the issue of gay rights could be reconciled, since we are all called to chastity and virtue and a person of any sexual orientation is capable of avoiding sin.

But abortion, as you well know, has become the issue that has divided our politics and divided the Church, though I'm not implying that in either case each side of the debate is necessarily equal in size. This seems to be the intractable issue. Can one be politically pro-choice and religiously Catholic, or is it that the term pro-choice Catholic is an oxymoron impossible to reconcile?

I have no answers to these questions, and I have no side in the debate. I was just inspired by the idea of creating "zones of friendship" where we can debate this tribalization.

Wanted to keep this as short as possible, but I hope there are nuggets of good ideas that can begin a good conversation.

I think you are asking some extremely good questions and I'm dubious I have any really good answers. My edjimacation has not included Aristotle, alas, nor any formal book learnin' in the relationship between Catholic social teaching and political theory. Most of what I write concerning contemporary politics is me feeling my way along the basic bedrock contours of Catholic moral teaching ("Don't commit grave intrinsic evil. That's bad."/"Support the family, that's good.") and trying evaluate our politics according to these rather elemental themes. The reason it may *seem* like I have a lot to say about the length and breadth of politics is not really that I do, but merely that our current political scene is so deeply corrupt on some extremely basic issues that there is frequent ocassion to return to a couple of elemental themes again and again.

In other words, as long as the Thing that Used to be Liberalism insists on murder as a core value while the Thing that Used to be Conservatism insists on torture as a core value, I feel and obligation to point out that our politics is fundamentally corrupt and in direct polar opposition to the Faith on these points. It's really quite a minimalist approach.

As to the rest of my politics (i.e., my general approach to maximizing the well-being of a citizenry as distinct from what I mostly gas on about, which is minimizing the malfeasance of our Ruling Classes), I would say the closet approach I take to addressing that is found in a piece I wrote on Catholic Social Teaching and the Icon of the Family. As near as I can tell, Catholic Social Teaching and Political Though really puts the family at the center (as distinct from current ideological riptides, which put the atomized individual without social obligations, or the fictive individual called the corporation, or the State at the center.

Catholic theology tends not to speak of the "individual"--that purely autonomous and imperious Libertarian Self with no children, not permanent ties, and no obligations beyond "If it feels good and harms no one else without their consent then it's okay". Rather, the Church speaks of "persons": people in some form of familial relationship that mirrors the Persons of the Trinity. Not surprisingly then, a politics informed by this Catholic vision finds itself constantly at cross-purposes with an American politics that exists to serve, not persons and families, but individuals, corporations and the State.

Catholics have, I think, an obligation to directly challenge and subvert this false vision of politics. That doesn't mean we can't work within the system too. But we can never be satisfied with merely doing that and we can't allow ourselves to be co-opted to serving that system. That's why I'm so hard on conservative Catholics (who being supernaturalists really ought to know better) when they sign off on saying "We have no king but Caesar" as he demands we knuckle under and celebrate Salvation Through Leviathan by Any Means Necessary.

So-called "progressive" Catholics are often Catholics who have really abandoned (or never encountered) the supernatural guts of the Faith and therefore reduced Jesus to a purely political figure whose corpse was eaten by wild dogs with no supernatural dimension left. The Eucharist is, for such people just a communal celebration of our Us-ness. The gospel is merely "social justice" and social justice is merely a sort of tepid Marxism, not the shocking message that God has become man, died and risen, and is here to free us from our sins and bring us to Heaven. For these folks, often tragically robbed of exposure to a supernatural gospel by wretched catechists who have stolen from them the truly radical nature of the gospel and replaced it with a watery liberal Protestant moralism, I am inclined to say, "Those to whom little is given, little is required." They simply have no clue what is going on in the gospel and so no clue what is going on in the world.

But self-proclaimed Faithful Conservative Catholics *do* know that Jesus is God and the Lord of History who we are bound to obey, even when it does not suit our politics. For these folk to denounce and ridicule the Church's teaching on intrinsically immoral acts, or to play with reducing Catholic moral teaching to "Opposition to abortion taketh away the sins of the world" in order to justify their rejection of docility to the Magisterium on the fullness of Catholic teaching... that, I think, is a more serious problem because "those to whom much is given, much will be required." So, for instance, just yesterday I was talking with someone who took it as axiomatic that the world is easily divisible between Stoopid Liberals who support abortion and oppose the death penalty and Smart Conservatives who oppose abortion and support the death penalty. The possibility that there might be, oh, a Bl. JPII and a Magisterium that oppose abortion *and* the death penalty was not to be considered. Opposition to abortion meant that you could sneer on and despise opposition to the death penalty as Stoopid Liberalism and, if this were questioned, you could follow it up with saying that, because opposition to the death penalty is not based on dogmatic or infallible teaching but was merely prudential, that basically means you can ignore it.

In short, opposition to the DP was being used as a tribal marker to Designate "Them". It even had a funny picture so those within the Tribe could quickly and easily identify and laugh at Those Stoopid People who oppose the Death Penalty as the Pro-Abort Maroons Who Aren't Us they so obviously are:



This represents as radical a failure to think with the Church (and, indeed, a fundamental contempt for and *refusal* to think with the Church as any memo from Catholics for a Free Choice. It's a choice to privilege one tribal group and its Unit Cohesion Mantras over the teaching of the Church about our unity in Christ. But, once again, since opposition to abortion taketh away the sins of the world, so long as you say you oppose abortion, then the rest of the Church's teaching (including the obligation to form our minds according to the whole of the Church's teaching and not just the bit about abortion) doesn't matter. Any attempt to direct our attention to other aspects of the Church's teaching is perceived as the attempt to minimize abortion, not as the attempt to say "Think with the whole mind of Christ and not merely with what is convenient to your tribal group."

In response to your last question, I don't think it is possible to be politically pro-choice and still Catholic in any meaningful sense. The murder of the most defenseless in our midst is, quite simply, a matter upon which there can be no compromise. However, that does not mean that we cannot form civil relationships with those who hold erroneous views on this matter. It's just that we cannot, in the slightest, compromise our own views. Catholics have, over the centuries, formed relationship with people who hold all sorts of views antithetical to our Faith. The notion that this is suddenly impossible now owes, not to the Catholic Faith, but to American tribal politics and the string pullers in both parties who find it useful to manipulate us for their own ends. Don't get played. Our mission as Catholics is, to paraphrase, St. Francis de Sales, to shake the walls of America and the West with love. One way to do that is to defy tribal shibboleths about who may and may not be spoken to and what may and may not be challenged. It's easy for us conservatives to challenge liberal shibboleths and PC pieties. And liberals need to do this too because there is a comfy superiority in liberalism that hold those outside the tribe in contempt.

But conservatives need to question their own comfy pieties and shibboleths as well and test them against the Faith, which not only challenges what we allow, but often allows what we assume is forbidden. One way to do that is, indeed, to move beyond tribalism, as Allen indicates. The reaction to Allen by the lefty PC tribalists in the comboxes over at the Reporter (he's a sellout and a whore for Vatican favors, doncha know) shows what will happen to those who attempt this, just as the contempt heaped on the apostles by their Jewish countrymen when they took the gospel to the gentiles does. But the gospel has always called us out of our comfy chairs.