A (now open) letter to Ross Douthat

Ross:

"The pope is a socialist!" I ribbed my conservative Catholic friend in an email.

No, not Francis: Benedict. Benedict! I was referring to then-Pope Benedict's just-released encyclical, Caritas In Veritate.

The pope should have just told people to obey the Ten Commandments, my friend replied ruefully. Not all that stuff on wealth inequality, workers' rights, and, worst of all, redistribution. Rush Limbaugh famously called Pope Francis a Marxist, but maybe the arch-conservative Benedict was the real lefty.

Ross, your newsletter reminded me of that 2009 exchange, and more recent disagreements with Catholic acquaintances about God's project and expectations. (Disclosure: I'm an atheist.)

From the standpoint of an eternity seeker, the beauty of the Ten Commandments is they ask so little of us, and they mesh nicely with with a rules-based understanding of morality that often figures prominently in Catholicism. Obey these rules, imbibe the sacraments, and your heavenly reward is assured. Can that really be what God's project is all about?

Never mind that the commandments were conspicuously absent from Jesus' teaching.  (I hate that hanging apostrophe, but my 1970s edition of Strunk & White insists it is proper for Jesus and Jesus only, so I wince and obey.)

Catholicism layers on its own rules. As you imply, Cuchet’s "culture of obligatory practice" is somehow necessary to demonstrate that the Church is a serious enterprise. The canonical (pun intended) example is, as you put it, the "requirement laid on Catholics to attend Mass on pain of serious sin."

Serious? According to the nuns at St. Michael's (c. 1963), the sin was mortal, meaning the punishment was eternity in hell. From an early age it was not lost on me that one way to avoid that risk was to not be a Catholic. Which is just bonkers.

If the (often arbitrary) rules are necessary for Catholicism to demonstrate its relevance, then Catholicism has a problem. Jesus was not about rules. Jesus was about how to live. About man's relationship to God, and, especially, man's relationship to man.

Which brings us to the Gospels, which I summarize as: What you do to the least of these, you do to me.

Or as Pope Francis put it in private correspondence: "[T]hat through which we will one day be judged: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to me.’"

The Gospels, at least, provide a plausible explication of God's project—a project that has to do with fundamental morality, meaning, and purpose. Surely God didn't create the universe and all that's in it in order to impose a formulaic structure whereby creatures can win heavenly reward.

In the introduction to his Reader, and in a very different context, Edward Abbey wrote that "the best and most deeply felt of my writing flows toward fiction, toward the creation of symbolic structures, the telling and retelling (always trying to get it right) of one of our oldest stories."

That parenthesized phrase, always trying to get it right, has stuck with me these several decades as the essential distillation of life's purpose. For me, the "it" is literally everything. At first glance the distinction between this maxim and the ledger-maintenance practiced by many Catholics may seem subtle, but in fact it's profound. The latter is concerned with the disposition and fate of one's eternal soul; the former with the essential practice and continually discovered meaning of every aspect of one's being, in relation to all that is.

Ledger-maintenance in service to rules runs the risk of making purpose self-centered, to the point of being inherently selfish—even when one is doing ostensible good. Lost is the sense of doing good for good's sake. The danger and perhaps tendency is that one's motivation becomes the formulaic seeking of reward and avoidance of punishment—a motivation that can short-circuit the possibility of deeper, open-ended kinds of meaning and even genuine goodness that's utterly unconcerned with how a good act will further one's own eternal prospects. Even the practice of virtue, including in service to others, can become less about being one's best self and more about polishing the resume with an eye toward that ultimate final interview.

Given all that, notions such as universal justice are secondary or arguably even irrelevant to the program of self-upkeep that's accomplished by following the rules, keeping one's nose clean (in a specifically prescribed way, such as obeying The Ten Commandments), and imbibing the sacraments—what I call "doing the magic." The magic can be enhanced by layering a large measure of ritual such as Eucharistic Adoration over top of everything. Do these things, burn a little incense, and you have a no-fail recipe for attaining heaven. Can that really be the point of God's project?

The Gospels seem conspicuously absent in all this Catholic churn, despite their appearance in the liturgy every week. How is it that Catholics are so disconnected from Jesus and his teaching despite its ubiquity in their formal worship? Many seem entirely oblivious to the Gospel message which, if they actually paid attention to it, might strike them as shockingly radical. How can that be?

A Catholic who is certain he grasps and adheres to the basic doctrinal formula for salvation needn't, by definition (and the Church is all about definition), concern himself with such extraneousness as the plight of migrants and refugees, or seeking a just economic system for the poor. Certainly not global warming, despite it being featured in a papal encyclical. (As one elderly Catholic once told me, who needs encyclicals anyway? The brothers and nuns at his parish school taught him what is required to be a Catholic. Thus minds can be closed even to propaganda that originates from inside the system.) All the reasons one might care—concern for God's creation, for example—are optional because they are outside the algorithm. Many Catholics would have no conception of climate change as a moral question, despite the pope's best efforts. Some have told me that it's of no concern, since in any case they'll be dead before the worst happens.

And isn't that the problem? No all-encompassing sense of morality? When salvation is achieved through adherence to rules, anything outside those rules is outside the moral sphere. There is only getting to heaven, algorithmically.

As long as certain boxes are checked, and transgressions are avoided or promptly mitigated (thereby keeping one's soul "clean"), eternal life is assured. Which, as always, is the entire point. In this framework the Gospels seem completely beside it. (Despite Jesus teaching that one must not accumulate wealth, and how hard it is for a rich man to enter God's kingdom, one Catholic I know assiduously attends to his investments, every single day, and assures me that he's in great financial shape out to age 100. He evinces no apparent curiosity about why Jesus said what he did, and no indication that it should apply to him. [I recorded some thoughts on that elsewhere.] I assume he gives generously from his surplus.)

One can thus arrange for one's sojourn on Earth to be as opulent as possible, and then move on to even better things in the hereafter. What a great religion. There is no sense of what is beyond your fair share, of any obligation to humanity, and certainly none to all of God's creation. Pope Francis means well, but can be ignored.

Is all of this unfair to Catholicism? Too much of a caricature? I think not. Which is not to say there aren't plenty of Catholics with expansive moral understandings grounded in the Gospels, and even beyond.

The problem with Catholicism is not that it insists upon a framework that ignores the Gospels or other broad moral categories. It doesn't. At its best, Catholicism is capable of soaring to impressive moral heights. The problem, rather, is that it readily enables a fixation on a kind of personal piety that neglects what matters most. It gets everything backward. All the structures and definitions are arranged, whether intentionally or by historical accident, to funnel those who are so-inclined into morally depauperate existences, even though those existences are decorated by all kinds of ritual activity, flourish, and embellishment.

The "so-inclined" designation is important. Psychologists and neuroscientists are exploring fundamental differences in brain wiring that, for example, distinguish liberals from conservatives. (Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain is a dated but useful introduction.) It is therefore likely that there's a category of brains that are wired to prefer a rules-based paradigm. Catholicism could readily constitute a happy home for such individuals, who surely represent a significant fraction of the population.

Thus, the (now relaxed) requirements to fast before communion, or not eat meat on Friday, makes perfect sense to perhaps half the populace, although I can't imagine how it makes sense to God. That a completely arbitrary rule could be imposed on pain of sin is for such persons a feature, not a bug.

The other half sees this as abject craziness. How could any such arbitrary imposition carry moral weight? What kind of God would punish transgressions against it? What kind of church would promulgate it?

Meanwhile, the foremost moral imperatives of our time are the alleviation of suffering, and the potential maximization of all beings. Perhaps I should say of all things: Our scope of moral concern ought to be expansive. A rules-based Catholicism that fixates inwardly on personal piety ought to become increasingly irrelevant as humanity's moral maturity advances. (And advance it does: No longer do we break people on the wheel.) Did Vatican II anticipate that?

As for me, the atheist, Edward Abbey's always trying to get it right means that the work, all of it, is never done. Not, at least, until my days run out. Always trying to think better, write better, be better. Is there meaning in that worthy of the name? Meaning despite the fact that my existence will necessarily come to an end? There better be: It's all we've got.

Anyway, any morality worth caring about ought to be equally accessible to atheists and theists alike. If there's a God of everything, surely that's what he's after.

Copyright (C) 2022 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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