I recall Fr. Francis
Martin saying that all the federal government has to do is wise up to its own
ideological contradiction with the Catholic Church and remove its tax-exempt
status to finish it off financially in the United States. George Rutler says
the same but only better.
* * * * * * *
Post-Comfortable
Christianity and the Election of 2012
Shortly
before he died in Oxford in 1988, the Jesuit retreat master and
raconteur, Bernard Bassett, in good spirits after a double leg
amputation, told me that the great lights of his theological formation had been
Ignatius Loyola and John Henry Newman, but if he “had to do it all over,” he’d
only read Paul. “Everything is there.” There is a temptation to
think that God gave us the Apostle to the Gentiles in order to have second
readings at Sunday Mass, usually unrelated to the first reading and the
Gospel. But everything truly is there. Paul was one of the most
important figures in human history, and a great character to boot. That
is, a character in the happiest sense of the word. “But by the grace
of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain” (1 Cor 15:10).
Tragedy
and comedy intertwine, ultimately issuing in glory, whenever he is on
trial. He longs to live and to die in the same breath: ”For to me to live
is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:210). Whenever he is on
trial for his life, he invokes a forensic brilliance to save the very life he
is willing to sacrifice. Just as Jesus who had come into the world to
die, slipped through the mob in Nazareth because his hour had not yet
come, so does Paul become his own defense when on trial, ready to die by God’s
calendar and not man’s. In Caesarea, he confounds Antonius Felix, the
Roman governor of Judaea and Samaria, and a little later he does the same
to the successor of Felix, Procius Festus. The best court
scene is Paul before Marcus Annaeus Novatus, who had taken the name of his
adoptive father Junius Gallio, the rhetorician and friend of his father Seneca
Sr. whose son Seneca, Jr. was the noble Stoic. Nero forced Seneca’s
suicide, but before that, in Achaia where Gallio was proconsul, Paul was
bit of a Rumpole of the Bailey, in how he played the jury like a piano to the
frustration of the judge. The point is this: Paul, both innocent
and shrewd, was willing to suffer and did so regularly, as he was not
loathe to recount at length, and he was also ready to die, but as death comes
but once, he wanted it to be at the right moment.
There
is in Paul a model for Catholics at the start of the Third Millennium which
began with fireworks and Ferris wheels but is now entering a sinister
stage. Like Paul, it is not possible to be a Christian without living for
Christ by suffering for him, nor is it possible to be a Christian without
willing to die for him when he wants. The Christian veneer of
American culture has cracked and underneath is the inverse of the blithe
Christianity that took shape in the various enthusiasms of the nineteenth
century and ended when voters were under the impression that they finally had a
Catholic president.
This
new period is not “Post-Christian” because nothing comes after
Christ. We can, however, call it “Post-Comfortable
Christian.” Niebuhr, looking out from New York’s Neo-Athens on Morningside
Heights with its Modernist Christian seminaries and highly endowed preaching
palaces and office towers of denominational bureaucracies, caricatured the
Messiah of mainline religiosity: ”A God without wrath brought men without
sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ
without a cross.” The virtual collapse of those institutions
on Morningside Heights, is mute testimony to the truth of his irony.
The
bishops of the United States have asked the faithful to pray for religious
liberty, now facing unprecedented assault. The national election in November,
2012 will either give Christians one last chance to rally, or it will be the
last free election in our nation. This can only sound like hyperbole to
those who are unaware of what happened to the Slavic lands after World War I
and to Western Europe in the 1930’s. St. Paul was writing to
us when he wrote to the Galatians and Corinthians and Washingtonians – or
rather, Romans – in his lifetime.
Unless
there is a dramatic reversal in the present course of our nation, those who
measured their Catholicism by the Catholic schools they attended, will soon
find most of those institutions officially pinching incense to the ephemeral
genius of their secular leaders, and universities once called Catholic will be
no more Catholic than Brown is Baptist or Princeton is Presbyterian. The
surrender will not come by a sudden loss of faith in Transubstantiation or
doubts about Papal Infallibility. It will happen smoothly and quietly,
as the raptures of the Netherworld always hum victims into somnolence, by the
cost factor of buying out of government health insurance. Catholic
businessmen with more than fifty employees will be in the same bind.
Catholic institutions and small businesses owned by those with religious and
moral reservations about government-imposed policies, will wither within a very
short time, unable to bear the burden of confiscatory tax penalties. As
analysts have figured, an employer offering a health plan that does not comply
with the preventive services package and other requirements under the federal
health plan could be subject to a confiscatory penalty. The fine, imposed
through a civil penalty or excise tax on a non-exempted religious employer
could be as much as $100 a day for each employee insured under a plan at
variance with federal law. The burden would amount then to $36,500 for
each employee.
Add to
that the approaching discrimination against Catholics seeking positions
in commerce and public life. Catholics will not be suitable for
public charities, medicine, education, journalism, or in the legal
profession, especially judgeships and law enforcement. As the bishops, by
the acknowledgement of many of their own number, failed to articulate the cogency
of doctrines on contraception and other moral issues, so will they now,
despite the best intentions, not be able to stem the radical attrition among
native Catholics whose eyes are on mammon, and among recent immigrants whose
privileges are guaranteed only if they vote for opponents of the Church.
The general election of 2012 may rally the fraction of conscientious Catholics
among the sixty million or so sympathetic Catholics. If their influence is not
decisive, and the present course of federal legislation accelerates, encouraged
by a self-destructive appetite for welfare statism on the part of
ecclesiastical bureaucrats, the majority of Catholics with tenuous commitments
to the Faith will evaporate, as did the lapsed baptized in North Africa during
the oppression of the emperor Diocletian.
Should
the present direction of the federal government be endorsed by a reiterative
vote in the November elections, more blatant threats to the Church will begin,
culminating in a punitive suspension of tax exemptions on church properties,
once the Church’s moral precepts are coded as offenses against civil rights.
The test case in this instance will be what is known in Orwellian diction as
“same sex marriage.” In the Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland,
argued in 1819, the same year that Daniel Webster reduced Chief Justice
Marshall to tears in the Dartmouth College case which vouchsafed private
charters, Webster said: “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily,
a power to destroy.” Chief Justice Marshall, an antecedent of Chief
Justice Roberts, said “That the power of taxing (the bank) by the States may be
exercised so as to destroy it, is too obvious to be denied, and that the power
to tax involves the power to destroy (is) not to be denied.”
St.
Paul would have understood this. After all, he lived through its
precedents. His self-defense in the secular courts showed his disdain for
bravado and theatrical martyrdom. He enjoyed common sense, reason,
and native intelligence in outwitting evil, for he knew as did St. John
Vianney, who was not as bright as the student of Gamaliel but whose heart was
at least as large, that “the Devil is stupid.” Because of that, the Devil
can only get his way with the help of stupid Catholics.
This
year offers the best and possibly last chance to see how many actually
obey Christ’s pastoral instruction in a conflicted world: “Behold, I am
sending you out as a sheep among wolves, so be shrewd as serpents and innocent
as doves” (Matt. 10:16).
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