On the seamless garment, and Catholics writing about politics.

here is a species of read­er who always seems to know bet­ter than you what ought to inter­est you and what you ought to say. Just as often, this read­er (or Face­book denizen) knows all the things a writer like you should not both­er with.

I get e‑mails with the instruc­tions, “Hey, Alt! You should write a post about the Johan­nine com­ma!” or “Hey, Alt! Did you see this stu­pid thing that Mr. Y post­ed at the-pope-is-the-antichrist.com? You ought to refute that!” One would think I took were a DJ, or an impres­sion­ist, and took requests.

Or peo­ple will say, “Hey, Alt! Stop writ­ing all these wild attacks on Mr. Trump! I liked you bet­ter when you wrote about Catholi­cism!”

Or, more omi­nous­ly: “Be care­ful, Alt, you’re becom­ing like one of Them. Lots of peo­ple have stopped fol­low­ing you, you know, you’ve been brain­washed by Shea, you’re in it for the big Patheo$ buck$, peo­ple are shaken—shaken to the core!—it’s ugly.”

What I mar­vel at in all this is the idea that there is some sort of dis­tinc­tion between writ­ing about Catholi­cism and writ­ing about pol­i­tics. It is as though these were sep­a­rate spheres that ought nev­er inter­sect, as though the Church—or lay Catholic writers—should nev­er have any­thing to say about pol­i­tics or vot­ing. This would have sur­prised St. Augus­tine.

It is not thus, of course; no one hon­est­ly believes such non­sense. The real mean­ing, when some­one says “Write about Catholi­cism, not pol­i­tics,” is: Gee, you know, when you write about pol­i­tics, you are just wrong, so don’t do that; write about the kind of thing I will agree with.

But the Church teach­es us about the moral dimen­sion of pol­i­tics all the time. It leaves us lat­i­tude, to be sure; we can apply those moral con­cerns in dif­fer­ent ways; the Church does not dic­tate every last detail or every last pol­i­cy; it is lic­it for Catholics to dis­agree about polit­i­cal ques­tions.

But let us not pre­tend that we’re talk­ing about some­thing sep­a­rate from Catholi­cism when we talk about pol­i­tics.

When Judge Andrew Napoli­tano said, “Hey, Pope Fran­cis, stick to sav­ing my soul, not my pock­et­book,” he real­ly meant some­thing dif­fer­ent from “The pope should not inter­fere in pol­i­tics.” What he meant was, “I like cap­i­tal­ism, so don’t trou­ble me about its evils.” If the pope had spo­ken about the evils of Marx­ism, Napoli­tano would not have been trou­bled in the least.

Mr. Napoli­tano gave the pope the same order ear­li­er this year, telling him that he should stay out of pol­i­tics when it comes to Mr. Trump. Some­how I doubt Mr. Napoli­tano would have had sim­i­lar instruc­tions if the pope had had bad words to say about Mrs. Clin­ton.

Like­wise, when peo­ple say to me, “Hey, Alt! Don’t write about pol­i­tics so much, write about Catholi­cism,” they mean some­thing more along the lines of, “Don’t trou­ble me by speak­ing ill of Mr. Trump.” If I wrote some­thing about the evils of Mrs. Clin­ton, those same peo­ple, I sus­pect, would not bewail my focus on pol­i­tics. They might even com­mend me for my firm stand against an abor­tion sup­port­er; they might give me acco­lades for my firm adher­ence to Church teach­ing. (As though I am adher­ing to some­thing dif­fer­ent when I oppose Mr. Trump—neohoodooism per­haps.)

I am just spec­u­lat­ing.

•••

This is real­ly a post about the seam­less gar­ment. Once more the lay­gis­teri­um is hard at work on Face­book, con­demn­ing it as heresy. This time the anath­e­mas were fly­ing in the com­ments to a post that was all about how Mark Shea’s dis­missal from the Reg­is­ter was the fruit of many holy nove­nas. (Will Sim­cha be next? Let us pray.) Now, I do believe that schaden­freude is a mor­tal sin (CCC 2539); but not to wor­ry, con­fes­sion­als are open, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for Ple­nary Indul­gences abun­dant, in this Year of Mer­cy.

(The author of that post, to my utter amazement—or maybe not to my amazement—is a priest, Fr. Richard Heil­man. Fr. Heil­man spends a great deal of his time adver­tis­ing him­self as “Trump’s prayer war­rior” and telling us that we ought to “wrap Trump in prayer.” I won­der if any­one has told him he ought to knock it off with the pol­i­tics and get back to say­ing Mass and hear­ing con­fes­sions. I’d be inter­est­ed to know.)

In any case, the Seam­less Gar­ment, accord­ing to one com­menter, “reg­u­lar­ly ignores the mas­sive evil of abor­tion to take on minute issues”:

Let’s say we are tor­tur­ing ter­ror­ists, let’s say a high num­ber: 10 a day, every day, for the past sev­er­al years. Even if that is the case, 200x that num­ber of chil­dren are being slaugh­tered. Not at all the same.

Sev­er­al things are amiss here, and one of them is that this is not at all what the Seam­less Gar­ment says. The Seam­less Gar­ment does not say that all moral issues involv­ing the sacred­ness of human life have the same grav­i­ty. For behold, the wicked and abom­inable Mark Shea him­self has made that wery point, and with great speci­fici­ty, here. The idea “that the death penal­ty is just as intrin­si­cal­ly immoral as abor­tion, or that the min­i­mum wage is just as grave a ques­tion as euthana­sia” is a “par­o­dy” of the Seam­less Gar­ment. It is not the Seam­less Gar­ment itself. So says the wicked and abom­inable Mr. Shea.

Even Car­di­nal Bernardin him­self said that wery thing:

[N]uclear war threat­ens life on a pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­in­able scale; abor­tion takes life dai­ly on a hor­ren­dous scale; pub­lic exe­cu­tions are fast becom­ing week­ly events in the most advanced tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety in his­to­ry; and euthana­sia is now open­ly dis­cussed and even advo­cat­ed. Each of these assaults on life has its own mean­ing and moral­i­ty; they can­not be col­lapsed into one prob­lem, but they must be con­front­ed as pieces of a larg­er pat­tern.

Not even Bernardin believed that all issues had the same weight or the same grav­i­ty.

No, the error is the belief that, because abor­tion is such a grave issue, I may dis­re­gard all else and—for example—become a sin­gle-issue vot­er. I can vote for the per­son who promis­es with a great flour­ish to end abor­tion across the land, and all else be damned.

The error is the idea that one life is of less worth than six­ty mil­lion lives. In fact, they are equal.

The exis­tence on earth of abor­tion does not give us a license to ignore the fail­ure of employ­ers to pay a just wage, or water­board­ing, or unjust war­fare, or the plight of refugees. Although the one issue has a dif­fer­ent moral weight than the oth­ers, the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Coun­cil, in Gaudi­um et Spes, reminds us that we are to be atten­tive to all of them:

At the same time, how­ev­er, there is a grow­ing aware­ness of the exalt­ed dig­ni­ty prop­er to the human per­son, since he stands above all things, and his rights and duties are uni­ver­sal and invi­o­lable. There­fore, there must be made avail­able to all men every­thing nec­es­sary for lead­ing a life tru­ly human, such as food, cloth­ing, and shel­ter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a fam­i­ly, the right to edu­ca­tion, to employ­ment, to a good rep­u­ta­tion, to respect, to appro­pri­ate infor­ma­tion, to activ­i­ty in accord with the upright norm of one’s own con­science, to pro­tec­tion of pri­va­cy and right­ful free­dom even in mat­ters reli­gious. …

In our times a spe­cial oblig­a­tion binds us to make our­selves the neigh­bor of every per­son with­out excep­tion and of active­ly help­ing him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old per­son aban­doned by all, a for­eign labor­er unjust­ly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlaw­ful union and wrong­ly suf­fer­ing for a sin he did not com­mit, or a hun­gry per­son who dis­turbs our con­science by recall­ing the voice of the Lord, “As long as you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it for me (Matt. 25:40).

Fur­ther­more, what­ev­er is opposed to life itself, such as any type of mur­der, geno­cide, abor­tion, euthana­sia or wil­ful self-destruc­tion, what­ev­er vio­lates the integri­ty of the human per­son, such as muti­la­tion, tor­ments inflict­ed on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; what­ev­er insults human dig­ni­ty, such as sub­hu­man liv­ing con­di­tions, arbi­trary impris­on­ment, depor­ta­tion, slav­ery, pros­ti­tu­tion, the sell­ing of women and chil­dren; as well as dis­grace­ful work­ing con­di­tions, where men are treat­ed as mere tools for prof­it, rather than as free and respon­si­ble per­sons; all these things and oth­ers of their like are infamies indeed. They poi­son human soci­ety, but they do more harm to those who prac­tice them than those who suf­fer from the injury. More­over, they are supreme dis­hon­or to the Cre­ator. (GS 26–27)

In this con­text, John Zmi­rak is wrong when he claims that the Seam­less Gar­ment is a “poi­son pill to kill off the pro-life move­ment” and attrib­ut­es such a scheme to Car­di­nal Bernardin and the wicked and abom­inable Mr. Shea, whom no one may coun­te­nance. Both acknowl­edge that abor­tion and euthana­sia have a greater moral weight than, say, the death penal­ty or an unjust wage.

The dan­ger is not that the Seam­less Gar­ment will “kill” oppo­si­tion to abor­tion; rather, the dan­ger is that oppo­si­tion to the Seam­less Gar­ment will make abor­tion and euthana­sia the only moral issues involv­ing the right to life, and all the rest be swept under the rug under the guise of “pru­den­tial judg­ment.”

•••

Because the prac­tice of pol­i­tics involves impor­tant moral con­sid­er­a­tions, Catholics ought to be writ­ing about pol­i­tics. This does not mean that they will always come to the same con­clu­sions; the Church gives lat­i­tude for con­science and for apply­ing the same moral con­sid­er­a­tions in dif­fer­ent ways.

I sus­pect that many incor­rect­ly think that, if a Catholic writes about pol­i­tics, he is instruct­ing oth­ers on what they need to believe, or how they need to vote, in order to be good Catholics. In fact, he may be doing no more than express­ing his own opin­ion and work­ing out the moral ques­tions for him­self. Express­ing an opin­ion the Church allows is not the same as bind­ing oth­ers to the same opin­ion.

This does not mean that cer­tain moral con­sid­er­a­tions are nego­tiable. But it does mean that there needs to be char­i­ty, as well as open-mind­ed­ness to per­sua­sion (imag­ine that!), when some­one has a dif­fer­ent point of view on a polit­i­cal ques­tion.

And char­i­ty works both ways. To express an opin­ion does not, by itself, imply that some­one who has a dif­fer­ent opin­ion is a dis­obe­di­ent Catholic. Those who are anti-Trump need to receive the same char­i­ty that those who are pro-Trump demand for them­selves.