America’s identity crisis reveals itself in issues ranging from guns to abortion to the celebration of pride, one of the deadly sins.
Confronting America’s identity crisis, from guns to abortion.
‘W ho are we? Where are we going?”
These are fundamental questions that Monsignor James P. Shea, president of the University of Mary (North Dakota), asked repeatedly while speaking as the honoree at the recent annual dinner of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. These are critical questions to be asking daily as individuals and as a nation.
We witness slaughters of children in school, of people in a grocery store. From where I sit, New York State is eager to become an abortion travel destination. On a recent day in the Empire State, the twin focus of legislatures was gun control and more abortion. When might we unite in wanting to protect all the innocents, born and unborn? Catholic schools, which can be beacons of virtue and opportunity in cities, are having to close, but leading Catholics insist on expanding abortion, so there are no children to fill the schools. Who are we? Where are we going?
Pope Francis often talks about how the church is not and can never be an NGO. It’s not a social-service organization. As Monsignor Shea put it:
We provide education, health care, services for the poor and suffering, foster care and adoptions, and other social services because we believe, deep within our souls, that God has asked it of us. Our lives have been overwhelmed by the demands of love. We are not service providers, we are not philanthropists, we are communities of faith responding in unity to the call of God.
One of the big Supreme Court cases last summer involved Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia. The city no longer wanted to work with the church because of Catholic beliefs about marriage. But that’s not pluralism. And that’s certainly not respect for religious liberty. The United States is not so much about prohibiting as about protecting. Or are we? We protect the right to life, the right to religious liberty. And yet, who we are and where we are going suggests something else. The unborn all too often are being relegated to a woman’s health-care choice. But it’s death just as much as the barbaric deaths in a classroom are; we’ve just come to decide that it’s acceptable death. Every child, in the classroom and in the womb, deserves our love and protection. Every incentive in our culture should support exactly that.
The pain of a parent who loses a child is inconsolable. When so many die, as at the school in Uvalde, we are rightly horrified. When a child dies suddenly, we know that this is not the way things should be. And yet, there are certain deaths — miscarriages — that we all too often treat as routine. But the pain of a parent is still real. The human loss is true. With abortion, we insist it’s not a loss so much as an exercise of empowerment. That’s a lie, and it forces women — and men — to live with a pain that they have to find some way to anesthetize or act out of. The most intimate violence leads to more violence.
I don’t know enough — or want to know enough — about guns to know what the best policies are, but clearly angry young men who are mentally ill should have some obstacles to getting their hands on guns. But there’s something much more than legislation that needs to happen in the United States today. When we treat one life as if it is not worthy of protection because it is inconvenient, we open deadly doors to casting aside other lives.
Who are we? Where are we going? I noticed one retail store had American-flag jewelry for Memorial Day. Then we move from red, white, and blue to rainbow pride. I don’t know about anyone else, but I actually struggle with pride in my life, as one of the deadly sins. All too often I can struggle with remembering that God is in charge and sees a bigger picture than any of us do. Once June passes, the retailers will be onto Independence Day. This year, could we consider celebrating independence from stubborn ideology? Could we see the humanity in one another? We can disagree, and we can see the areas of common ground. So many of us want to protect the innocent. For many different reasons, we disagree about the humanity of some of them. Let’s talk about that. Let’s work together where we agree. Don’t let the loudest voices with the most money drown out reason and civility.
As Monsignor Shea put it:
Religious freedom is a value we all share, but it’s not enough. We don’t aspire to a civilization of religious liberty, we aspire to a civilization of love. Religious liberty is not the end game, it just gives us the elbow room to reach into our hearts and then stretch our arms out widely to a world in need. The Constitution and Bill of Rights do not create but rather acknowledge and make space for the human capacity to serve from transcendent motivation.
He added: “When we are clear about who we are and where we are going, we can foster that civilization of love.”
But to know who we are and where we are going, we are going to do more listening and less caricaturing. Have a barbeque with neighbors and talk about more than politics. Agree to disagree and share when appropriate, but do it with love and reverence for your common humanity. Don’t let the most destructive, divisive forces, often making money off anger, win. We are better than that, and our fellow citizens deserve better.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.