Amy Coney Barrett’s Scandal Discovered: She Seeks to Live Real Christianity

‘S taggering friendliness.” That’s how one reporter described his encounter with People of Praise, the apostolic community that Amy Coney Barrett and her family belong to. I’ve always heard wonderful things about Barrett, knowing more than a few people who teach or have studied at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., where the Barretts have lived. No doubt some of that goodness has to do with People of Praise. And yet, I just finished a piece that used the word “sinister” in association with People of Praise. Evidently because we no longer have the capacity as a people to recognize that there was a world before Margaret Atwood novels. The use of the word “handmaid” now has to be about A Handmaid’s Tale instead of the greatest of the Christian apostles, Mary, most holy, as some of us pray daily. Some pray the Magnificat every evening, remembering the words of praise Mary proclaimed in her humble ascent to God’s miraculous work for her — to be the Mother of Jesus. This is Christianity 101. But many of us in the current culture never took that class.

Of course, I understand why the lived life of Christianity can seem so exotic. What do many see of Christians? A debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris and Mike Pence? If you have no knowledge of or experience of Christianity, it may sound a lot like fights over abortion. Maybe it sounds more like an ideology or a political platform than a way of life. So I apologize on behalf of some of us Christians who aren’t always overwhelming the world with love, when that’s our mission! To show Christ in the world. We are about more than wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade.

We are the Sisters of Life, for instance. Right next to New York Police Department headquarters in lower Manhattan, the Sisters of Life have their Visitation Mission. “Each of these women could run her own country,” is how someone recently described them to me. They are wildly talented women who could have been wives and mothers, and many were professionals in the secular world — including doctors, nurses (“galore,” as one puts it), engineers, and at least one astrophysicist and a Columbia University psychiatry professor. They each have humbly and completely given their life to Christ and His people. They are the front lines of the so-called culture war. Their weapons are the virtues. They love. They look at people with a bit of the love God has for them. They know each man and woman on the streets they meet was made in the image and likeness of God, chosen to be on this earth for a purpose.

And when a woman comes to them for help, they walk with her, and they love her whatever she decides. They help women choose life, including inviting them to move in with them at another of their convents, their Holy Respite home. They also help them to heal after abortion. Their charism is life, and it is joyously life-giving, even as they confront such intimate evil in the world. And it’s a charism we so need in this time of tremendous death — not just from abortion, not just from the coronavirus, but from suicide and efforts to push doctors into assisted suicide. Death, which faith understands can be new life, has become a poison to strangle men and women in misery. But with the Sisters, there is an alternative. This is what Christianity is!

Amy Barrett became a rock star when California senator Dianne Feinstein accusingly said to her, about her faith, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” What Feinstein meant was that religion is all fine and good if it stays politely within the confines of your Sunday morning. Don’t let it mess with the rest of your life. Many today, as both a matter of ideology and practice, don’t believe in religious freedom the way that Constitution-loving people like Barrett believe in religious freedom.

Real religious freedom is not mere freedom of worship — it’s the freedom to live faith out in the world, to be an integrated whole. This was the conflict the Obama administration inflicted on the Little Sisters of the Poor. These women cannot have anything to do with the insurance costs of things that are, according to the dogma of their faith, evil. And it’s not a blind obedience, either. When we look at the world through the eyes of our faith, it all makes sense. The violence on the streets is about so much more than the screams. It seems that the anger and desperation would all be inevitable when we’ve spent nearly half a century with a law that allows the murder of a child in the womb through all three trimesters of pregnancy. What does that say about the relationship of the mother to the child and vice versa? What does it say about us? It dehumanizes. So much that we do these days dehumanizes.

So how do we untie the knots? How do we live in this mess as people of integrity, who live the virtues, out in the world? We form intentional communities — live a little like the Acts of the Apostles.

During that vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence was right to call out Kamala Harris for her grilling of a judicial nominee over his membership in the Knights of Columbus. Hostility to concrete religious faith has become alarmingly mainstream. That’s what we are seeing in the bewilderment about the Barrett family and People of Praise. Opus Dei, Communion, and Liberation — there are many movements and ministries in the Catholic faith and Christianity more broadly. It’s people choosing to walk together in faith. They show us the way. We need more, not fewer people committed to truly living the Christian life. Even if you don’t believe the dogma, you probably want them for your neighbors anyway. Their staggering friendliness — and the Beatitudes — has its benefits.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.