Our politics will benefit from it.
‘The political turmoil of this year has left us in moral incoherence.”
No, that’s not a premature assessment of the 2016 race for the presidency of the United States, still only in its beginning stages.
But the line may resonate. It is actually from William F. Buckley Jr., speaking to the Heritage Foundation at the end of 1999, after President Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives. Buckley pointed to one politico, former senator Dale Bumpers, who argued against removing President Clinton from office; Bumpers was in effect defending conduct that he had earlier referred to as “indefensible.” Buckley warned: “In the absence of durable perspectives, language loses its meaning and reality slips through the mind’s grasp.”
Look away for a moment from South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and travel in your imagination to Valladolid, Spain, in March 1545, to a scene Dawn Eden highlights in her new book, Remembering God’s Mercy. A Jesuit priest, Father Peter Faber, arrives at the royal court intending to enter the chapel there. But the porter outside does not recognize him, and he isn’t allowed in.
Faber later recalled in his spiritual diary, Memoriale: “I remained there at the door for a while, remembering that I had often allowed various sinful thoughts and evil spirits to enter my soul, while leaving Jesus with his words and his Spirit to knock and stand at the door.”
He continues: “I also reflected on how Christ had been so ill received everywhere in the world. And I prayed that it be granted the porter and me not to stand and wait too long before the gates of paradise, undergoing purification. Many other thoughts, too, came to me in that place, causing me deep remorse. So it happened that I came to love the porter all the more, he being the cause of my devotion.”
Who does such a thing?
But Faber made no scene. He received the inconvenience as a gift.
Reflecting on the life of Faber, whom he has named a saint, Pope Francis said: “An authentic faith always involves a profound desire to change the world. Here is the question we must ask ourselves: Do we also have great vision and impetus? Are we also daring? Do our dreams fly high? Does zeal consume us (cf. Ps. 68:10)?”
Pope Francis said in that same address: “We who are selfish want nonetheless to live life aspiring to great deeds.” (There’s hope for all of us. Even as we stew outside the door!)
A few months ago, a famous, respected professor at an Ivy League university who found Pope Francis astonishingly refreshing said to me something along the lines of: Jesus was pretty clear in the Sermon on the Mount. You remember, where the Beatitudes were laid out: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
The professor, who is not a Christian, brought this up because he saw Pope Francis as representing that wealth for the nations: Jesus and His Gospel message, a radical way of life which, if lived widely, would change the world. It would keep the poor, the sick, and the otherwise forgotten from ever again being lost in the chaos of everyday life.
Indeed, Pope Francis has referred to the Beatitudes as the Christian’s “identity card.” Relaying this in her book, Eden is quick to confess that her passport doesn’t show the face she wants people to see — and she is far from alone there. But Francis isn’t pointing to a mugshot. As Eden puts it, “He wants me to picture myself at my best.”
The best that we have is, in fact, the best that we need.
If our politics is missing moral coherence, this is because such coherence is often missing from our lives.
Buckley said in another speech, this one to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute: “We cannot repay in kind the gift of the Beatitudes, with their eternal, searing meaning. . . . But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude — defined here as appreciation, however rendered, of the best that we have, and a determined effort to protect and cherish it — our failure here marks us as the masses in revolt; in revolt against our benefactors, our civilization, against God Himself.”
On the eve of Ash Wednesday, John Kasich seemed to be setting the stage for 40 days of something different, at least rhetorically.
Back on the campaign trail, I thought of Faber as I listened to Ohio governor John Kasich’s speech the night of his second-place finish behind Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primary. Kasich was about to rev up his campaign with some new momentum, and yet, on the eve of Ash Wednesday, he seemed to be setting the stage for 40 days of something different, at least rhetorically.
“The people of New Hampshire have taught me a lesson, and from this day forward, I am going to go slower, and spend my time listening, and healing, and helping, and bringing people together to fix our great nation.” He said: “We’re all made to help the healing of the world, if we would just slow down.”
We can’t be good stewards if we never take the time to notice what we ought to be grateful for.
It of course did not go unremarked that there seemed, in what Kasich had to say, something of the polar opposite of the brash Trump triumphalism. And as an approach to life — and even politics — that could make quite the difference.
In that 1999 speech, Buckley quoted John Adams, writing to his wife on July 3, 1776. Buckley wrote of Adams, “to inaugurate the new regime would require, as he put it, a ‘purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues, or there will be no blessings.’”
The blessing of a campaign season can be in a remembrance of who we are. Lent at a time of chaotic, angry politics could include an ecumenical prayer such as the one with which George Washington ended a letter to a Hebrew congregation in Newport, R.I., in 1790: “May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. She is co-author of the new revised and updated edition of How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice (available from Our Sunday Visitor and Amazon.com). Sign up for her weekly newsletter here. This column is based on one available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.