Does the Pope Love America?
Buckley, Reid
Reid Buckley DOES THE POPE LOVE AMERICA? In the wake of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, conservatives are crying "foul!" But during his visit to the U.S. last fall, John Paul left hints they...
...Seeing that these principles are difficult, you express the fear that young people, for this reason, will turn away from the Church...
...John Paul is preaching nothing new in Catholic social doctrine...
...These two systems based on determinist principles," he declares, "are in one way or another programmatically atheist...
...We may be Beauty and the Beast, but we are of the same stock...
...John Paul's conception of liberty isn't the kind that stump speeches are made of, nor of the stripe mostly applied to celebration of our freedom under the Constitution...
...This is an ideal state of limited duration presupposing an uninterrupted stream of divine Grace pouring on a beleaguered community that was upheld by the belief of an imminent Second Coming...
...Determinism "is precisely this: man envisaging his own freedom as a function of the world and of what the world permits him...
...Surely John Paul, the Polish patriot who was brought up under the brutal heel of Marxism, and who has witnessed his brave fellow countrymen martyred on its brutal stakes, should above all people know the difference...
...Under the subjugation of both species of materialism, man is in danger of being cut "off from his own depths...
...From the first hour of his visit, the Pope gave every signal that indeed he was not going to bend Church teaching to accommodate happy Protestant pagans or bitterly estranged Catholics, also in many cases pagan...
...When Catholics stemmed mostly from immigrant families, their religious identity marked them: they were uneducated, ignorant, and servile...
...From the first, then," concluded Reagan, " our nation embraced the belief that the individual is sacred—and that as God Himself respects human liberty, so too must the state . ." To which the Pope tactfully (and ominously) replied: We thank you [the American people] for the goodness and sanctity, the kindness and wisdom, with which you have helped the entire world .. . He then declared that he had come as pastor of American Catholics, to "preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all who will listen to me...
...And in that fashion he continues, tracing the historical roots of both systems to principles each in its way conducing to moral error, each in its way exploitive and imperialistic, each in its way hostile to human solidarity and subjecting humanity to "structures of sin...
...To object that this hard doctrine is otherworldly and impractical is both correct and irrelevant...
...But surely .. . ABC featured a "Special Report" that night, in which anchorman Peter Jennings explained why American Catholics, once so docile to the dictates of the Vatican, are today so rebellious...
...He was giving notice by "the deep meaningbf the pursuit of happiness" that he was invoking the Almighty's blessing on a specific Christian perspective of America—wherewith he gently slapped Ronald Reagan's glib-ness on the wrist, adverting to that meaning no longer comprehended by our hedonistic society...
...And his diagnosis of the philosophical error we suffer from is correct...
...Totalitarian Marxist determinism is a grave danger to humankind, but "when you speak of the danger that threatens man in the contemporary world you also take into account the practical materialism which appears in the West in the form known as 'the consumer society.'" A "merciless war has been declared" on man's spiritual dimensions...
...He was here not only wielding a sword of contradiction, but wielding it in rebuke...
...Michael Novak notes in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism how degraded and deprived of dignity was the condition of the average French peasant or English yeoman in the late eighteenth century, until the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the replacement of mercantilism by capitalism unleashed the energies that liberated at least the advanced nations from basic material want...
...It is "the 'fissure' or breach in being, as we have called it, which opens man to the infinite—this is liberty...
...Such a [laissez-faire] use of freedom might seem at first 'liberating,' but subsequently it always turns out to be enslaving...
...Jennings and Rather and Brokaw), whose (Christ's) truth cannot be trimmed by human agency...
...He cuts closer in his criticism of the philosophical bent of our society, which is far from the perception of a Maritain...
...Of last fall's visit Tom Brokaw of NBC gloomily predicted (just as the Alitalia version of Shepherd One was touching down) that it would be fraught with "confrontation" on account of the Holy Father's "traditional views...
...John Paul is nevertheless correct on the most profound of philosophical levels...
...I do not deny that they are demands...
...Christians are nevertheless not let off the hook...
...last fall, John Paul left hints they missed...
...The consumer society does not make men happy...
...and that his sole, impractical, ridiculous, yet sovereign remedy is to summon us all as individuals and nations to sanctity should not surprise, because no other cure for our condition exists...
...His latest encyclical, Speaking in Public: Buckley's Technique to Winning Arguments and Getting Your Point Across, will be published this spring by Harper & Row...
...Educated...
...it is neither-a political nor an economic system that he is criticizing...
...Its main aim is to interpret [the complex realities of human existence], determining their conformity with or divergence from the . . . Gospel...
...He is telling us what Christ wants and expects from us...
...My neighbor's freedom is then an irritation and a threat to mine...
...There is "the danger of a 'fundamental illusion,' that of man imagining that, thanks to the exclusive development of material civilization, he has become increasingly the 'master' of the visible world, even of the cosmos, without noticing that at the same time he has made himself dependent on this world, that he has subordinated himself to the power of the energies liberated, that he is becoming the object of all kinds of manipulations against which he can do nothing, precisely because he has completely delivered up to the 'world' his conscience and his liberty...
...It is the mechanisms of the free market that deserve the credit for this enormous good...
...He presses his position with M. Frossard...
...And the `world' has taken possession of him...
...John Paul was on a mission to his own, his faithful, who help to constitute and, merely by choosing to exist in it, to an indefinable degree tolerate and condone a society that he has no illusions about...
...Neither was there any among them that lacked...
...He does not—he cannot—love our present society, and though in Sollicitudo Rei he recognizes the philosophical and economic importance of private initiative, and the necessary political freedom under which alone it may prosper, he has shocked and angered conservative Catholics by insisting on what is to them the absurdity and outright slander of amoral equivalence between our liberal democratic system and Soviet Communism...
...chief of the materialist, "consumerist," programmatically atheistic liberal democratic state...
...This will explain John Paul's warmth with the old, the young, children, the afflicted, contrasted against the distant, diffident, even "somber" side of his character he displayed when treating with the American bishops in Los Angeles—laying out the law to them—and in the correctness of his attitude toward President Reagan (he was manifestly warmer with Jimmy Carter...
...those who are seeking and discovering, and those not yet finding, the deep meaning of [emphasis added] "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . ." God bless America...
...Nevertheless, even in a permissive society, he eventually becomes aware of it...
...But we have progressed in our privileged Western societies from relief of want and release from privation to an avidity of excessive and unnecessary consumption (just contemplate a moment the mailbox stuffed with those catalogs) that is nothing less than revolting when framed in the imagination beside the awful images of famine and misery elsewhere in the world...
...Conservative Catholics are outraged...
...It's this that the Pope means when he repeats to young folk everywhere: "The Truth shall set you free...
...I reply: [the Church] demands what the dignity of the person and the basic social order require...
...He is the Vicar of Christ...
...John Paul is not addressing himself to the wisdom of this world...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 bound up with the discovery of God...
...The key is the way we understand human freedom...
...Martin's Press, 1986), John Paul remarked that " . . two sorts of materialism can be noted, theoretical and practical...
...From the exhortations of Clement of Alexandria to Paul VI's Populorum Progressio (of which, indeed, Sollicitudo Rei is presented as an updating), the Church has taught that the things of this world, including the gifts of the talents and energies and invention that conjure from mere dust whole industries, are held in common, in trust, to be used by us for the common good, deriving as they do from the sole Creator...
...Those today who most earnestly and, in cases, viciously protest the Roman Catholic pontiff are not fundamentalists like Bob Jones, nor even Ku Klux Klanners...
...that "breach" in being through which our transcendent destiny is revealed to us has been obscured, and we have become swine...
...those who are struggling with the problem of each day...
...but they had all things common...
...secular humanism] naturally goes deeper...
...It is not a practical prescription for running an economy...
...Denial of transcendence can, he said to M. Frossard, "be the practice of a totally permissive society, in which everything is permitted precisely because the foundation of man's true freedom is denied...
...Emphasis added.] It never has done...
...Acts does not relate what the early disciples did once they had sold off all their capital possessions and consumed the proceeds...
...It therefore belongs to the field, not of ideology, but of theology and particularly of moral theology...
...that is what makes Sartre say, 'Hell is other people.' On the other hand, if freedom . . . is expressed in responsibility, that is, in the perception of the truth about human dignity—that of others and also mine—then Christian morality will seem 'liberating' in the inner experience of those who apply it conscientiously and honestly . . ." What's sauce for moral man, is sauce for economic man...
...We have utterly surrendered ourselves to the determinism of our culture...
...If freedom is the ability 'to do anything I wish' (orrather, 'anything I fancy'), then it is clear that, confronted with freedom in this sense, not only Christian morality . . . but any human system of morality can be considered restrictive...
...His brethren of the tube kept asking, rhetorically and of others, Will not the Pope cut and trim just a teensy bit on the doctrinal issues to accommodate his "restive" flock...
...You ask me," he tells M. Frossard, "what principles the Church teaches in the domain of sexual morality...
...Moreover, it is normally egotistical and antisocial...
...And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own...
...He came on an ecumenical mission...
...D uring his extraordinary conversations with Andre Frossard, the Catholic French author (Be Not Afraid!, St...
...Our utterly selfish, vulgar, and—when all is said and done—repulsive way of life...
...Imposing his authority, he set the tone for his mission: I come as a friend of the poor, and the sick, and the dying...
...The only people in our society who understand John Paul less are intellectual Roman Catholic liberal-democratic defenders of the capitalist system by which we flourish, whom, with his recently published encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis ("The Social Concerns of the Church"), he has smitten...
...They don't know how to handle—indeed, what to think of—this man who has been elevated to the status of Pope, because he does not traffic Reid Buckley is a novelist and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking...
...If we possess two coats, and our neighbor has none, we are to give him our second coat . . . not go on accumulating vestons a deux rangjes de boutons by Cardin and Bill Blass...
...for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need...
...It is within this non-programmatic dimension that his criticisms are to be considered—and taken to heart...
...John Paul, you see, was on a mission to another group also of Peter Jennings's acculturated, educated, and sophisticated Catholics—good folk, decent and moral folk, who pledge their intellectual allegiance to the grave errors against charity and justice irremediably at the root of our society, which is its irredeemable (pace Michael Novak and George Gilder) materialism...
...Paul preached—this we do have on record—that those who shirk work should not expect to be fed . . . from which we may infer that even then there were lazy souls willing to take advantage of the community...
...The most bitter and intractable of these protesters might be epitomized by the lapsed nun of lesbian inclinations whose milk of humankindness is curdled because Church law does not permit her to be ordained...
...Freedom" as conceived by most modern liberal democratic Americans is a transmogrified term, an invitation to enslavement, a subjugation of the will to error...
...In that gift inhered moral obligation...
...At the planeside ceremonies in Miami that night, President Reagan quoted (stumbling so badly over the pronunciation of the name that it was painfully evident he had never himself read the man) Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain on the Constitution, whose THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 19 200th anniversary, he reminded the Pope, we were in 1987 celebrating, saying of it: The Founding Fathers were neither metaphysicians nor theologians, but their philosophy of life and their political philosophy, their notion of natural law and human rights, were permeated with concepts worked out by Christian reason and backed up by an unshakable religious feeling...
...How could the Pope compare the generosity and nobility of the political faith (for all its faults) to which we pledge our troth to the monstrously evil political ideology that has dealt death to human beings by the millions upon millions and that has imposed more suffering on this poor globe in the past seventy-one years than anything to compare in all history...
...They cannot really credit someone who will compromise neither jot nor tittle...
...Mammon—is no less detestable to Christ...
...But he was here first of all to evangelize that increasing near-majority of his flock who are sorely in need of instruction in the tenets of their faith and in complex teachings on moral and sexual and also social-philosophical issues...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 21...
...What would be the point of his doing so...
...He would be a 'finite' and 'complete' being, totally determined by external forces and subject to the limits imposed on animate nature, and therefore to a death without hope...
...To the world, John Paul's exhortations may be the stuff of idle dreamers, but his diagnosis of those ills is no less condign...
...On this level determinism, of whatever school [totalitarian or in the liberal democratic "permissive society"], is a denial of freedom...
...It can also be the practice of a totalitarian state where man is only part of the whole, the property of the state, deprived of his subjective character where the laws are concerned, and the object of collective manipulation...
...He is addressed as "His Holiness," a courtesy that they unctuously observe...
...I think that in these two situations man, conscious of the rules and mechanism of his existence, can discover God, or convince himself that God alone can 'save him from complete determinism.' " But, shockingly to our ears, it "seems to me that man becomes more easily aware of this in the second case than in the first, in a totalitarian world rather than in a world of lax morality...
...Iiseasy to ridicule the superficiality of media types, which is to ridicule them for filling the mold their telegenic profession requires...
...The Pope cannot seem to approve of President Reagan, the chief of a philosophically corrupted society that has been so prodigally favored by God...
...As a denial of freedom," he continues, "determinism is consequently a denial of responsibility, and therefore of morality...
...On a yet more profound level, what is true liberty to the Pope...
...W hat then are we to do...
...Permissiveness does not make men happy...
...It's a kind of metaphysical superconductor to transcendence...
...We are enslaved to base nature, and we groan from ills of the soul for which there is no remedy in the materialist, determinist dimension...
...Without it, man would be enclosed in the world of nature and robbed of his transcendence...
...When we become conscious of the truth of our condition, our contingency, and the demands that we must put on ourselves in order to liberate ourselves from enslavement to human desires, then are we free...
...Because they—we rightwingers—have mislaid the meaning of liberty, the social and political right of self-determination, which derives from the precious gift of free will...
...They are (in order of fanaticism) feminists, homosexuals, and assorted soidisant Catholics who persist in so styling themselves though they "dissent" from some of the Church's fundamental doctrines, such as the sinfulness of premarital sex, the prohibition against contraceptives, and the absolute outlawing of abortion...
...hoirs of cacophony, not angels, proclaimed the good news of John Paul's second visit to the United States this past September...
...to admit this is to regard the epiphenomenon as the fundamental phenomenon of humanity...
...John Paul writes in Sollicitudo: "The Church's social doctrine is not a 'third way' between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism...
...He is—his miter proclaims him—Vicar of Christ (an incomprehensible status, an impossible claim, a stumbling block and an absurdity to Messrs...
...And now he comes down harshly on the reality that we have become, in contrast to the idealization of a Maritain or, before him, of a Tocqueville—explaining John Paul's unalterable disapproval of our society, which no hoopla, no sentimentality, no fervent welcomes, no gushings about the sacredness of individual liberty on our soil—perceived by him to be material, carnal, and contemptibly superficial—are able to sweep aside...
...But that is the essential point, that man fulfills himself only to the extent that he knows how to impose demands on himself...
...He is no political scientist, no economist...
...The Pope cannot seem to approve of President Reagan, the chief of a philosophically corrupted society that has been so prodigally favored by God...
...Those folk do not understand the phenomenon of John Paul at all...
...And the rub is:our capitalistic, "consumerist" economy depends for its continuing prosperity on exciting an insatiable desire for more and more redundant goods, else the factories cease production, the paychecks stop, and our American way of life of ever mounting consumer credit collapses...
...It is this unalterable philosophical view of the realities of transcendent human nature that provides the commensurately unalterable foundation for those "antiquated" and "restrictive" and "authoritarian" doctrines on human sexuality, in which his distressed critics on the right join...
...Upwardly mobile...
...The] 'breach' in being which reveals man's transcendence is walled up...
...Oh, they were a scream...
...And therefore—the inference—no longer peasant-stupid submissive to archaic moral doctrines imposed from on high...
...This, said the Pope in his rejoinder to President Reagan's words of greeting in Miami, is the freedom that sets us free...
...In both cases the transition from enslavement to freedom is usually John Paul's conception of liberty isn't the kind that stump speeches are made of, or of the stripe mostly applied to celebration of our freedom under the Constitution...
...And these words he repeated on the morrow to the students of the University of South Carolina, of whom 98 percent (or something) hail from Protestant homes, and of whom probably 80 percent debauch on all available occasions, and of whom maybe 1 percent understood what he was talking about, yet who cheered him wildly...
...The most frenetic and nonplussed of his antagonists are the network intelligentsia...
...The only freedom that truly cansatisfy is the freedom to do what we ought...
...in, and cares nothing for, Gallup polls...
...This harsh philosophical condemnation, striking at the root of our liberal democratic economic materialism, cannot surprise us, because not the most strenuous of ratiocinative acrobatics can do more than praise the (out of the dung heap cometh gold) happy material fruits of the mechanisms of our society, which, the Pope nonetheless points out in Sollicitudo Rei, do not of their own transfer nor extend to the wretched of the earth, and which—our society in its worship of Gumps-Banana Republic-I...
...What the phrase is now exclusively taken to signify—the pursuit of worldly goods and pleasures—does not recommend itself to the Holy Father...
...Paul was a great believer in work...
...I am referring," he writes, "to two opposing blocs, commonly known as the East and the West...
...His specific and irreduceable [sic] spiritual dimension is denied...
...the first [Marxism...
...Now: they are mainstream Americans...
...And that is the true meaning and sole non-eristic value of human freedom, the act of personal will that brings us into concordance with the desires of our Creator...
...One cannot wish freedom to consist purely and simply in the latitude to act as one wishes...
...The determinism of that other materialist way, Marxism, is no alternative, though it has proved attractive to many Christians of the suffering Third World...
...This pop analysis was echoed on the other televisionchannels: ill-educated, unsophisticated, primitive folk—you know, like Juan Valdez, who picks Folger coffee beans in Colombia—are John Paul's kind of Catholic...
...those who are rising and falling and stumbling on the journey of life...
...The second sort [the practical: our liberal capitalist system in America] is the most widespread...
...Atheism is the guarantee of their existence and development, just as God is the guarantee of human freedom . . ." T hus the Holy Father asserts that 1 we—to the degree that we assent to the secular determinism of the American system—are as much the philosophical enemy of Christ as the totalitarian determinism of the East...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
