As we saw yesterday, Bishop McElroy doesn’t argue that we shouldn’t distinguish between basic principles and prudential judgments, but that that we ought to apply this distinction consistently -- not only when we are considering social evils such as poverty, but also when we are considering intrinsically evil acts such as abortion.  I closed by saying that this is an excellent point, but the devil is in the details.  Why?

First a bit more explanation.  Concerning poverty, the bishop says the principle which cannot be denied in good faith is that “Catholic teaching demands robust and effective legal sanctions against abortion.” Refusal to support legal restrictions on abortion is inexcusable, even if a legislator argues “that he is in fact doing more to reduce abortions by his support for aid to the poor and health care programs.” On the other hand, reasonable persons may disagree about questions like these: “Should the law criminalize abortion for the mother or for those performing the abortion? Alternatively, should there be noncriminal sanctions? What is the best pathway to outlawing abortion: a series of graduated proposals beginning with parental notification and prohibitions on late-term abortion, or an immediate full court press for comprehensive prohibitions?”

Concerning abortion, he says the principle which cannot be denied in good faith is that “In addition to promoting conditions that provide meaningful jobs for their citizens, nations must provide a humane threshold of income, health benefits and housing.” It would be utterly unjust to “systematically . . . decrease governmental financial support for the poor,” “reduce development assistance to the poorest countries,” or enact “tax policies that increase rather than decrease inequalities.” But reasonable persons may disagree about “financial structures,” “incentives for wealth creation,” and “income support programs that enhance rather than undermine family life.”

Now that devil.  The first difficulty with these examples is that the bishop’s statement of the principle to be defended concerning abortion is far too mushy. He should at least have said that abortion should be discouraged in every practical way, including robust and effective sanctions, sanctions implemented with the greatest possible swiftness and urgency (conceding that since citizens both in and out of government have to be persuaded, the swiftest possible way might conceivably be a series of graduated restrictions, becoming tougher over time).

More to the point is the second difficulty. Although the bishop complains that the distinction between principle and prudence ought to be applied consistently, he does not consistently apply it either. To keep the distinction straight concerning poverty, he should have said something like “governments must earnestly seek the most effective means to raise the level of meaningful employment at good wages, and to ensure that all citizens have access to decent housing and health care.” This would leave open just what the most effective means actually are. Instead he says the government should simply “provide” people with these good things.

It may seem a dubious proposition that the poor are really better off if governments simply hand over income with no strings attached, but whether dubious or not, it is a judgment of prudence. If the bishop thinks it is not a judgment of prudence but a principle of “economic justice,” all I can say is that St. Paul disagrees with him: “If anyone will not work, let him not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work” (2 Thessalonians 3:10–11).

Notice too that the bishop wants to have it both ways. To say as he does that reasonable people may disagree about how income support should be structured is to say there may be strings attached. Yet his warning that such support may not be systematically decreased is to say there may not be. For what is it to enact, say, a work requirement, but to say that for good reason, the income support of those who refuse to work shall be systematically decreased?

Conclusion tomorrow.

A long-running battle between the so-called Catholic left and the so-called Catholic right concerns which political issues the Church should speak about and which ones she shouldn’t. One crucial distinction is that teaching the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine go to the heart of her charism, but she has no special expertise in prudential judgments about how to apply them.

For example, the Church rightly insists that the effect of laws and policies on the poorest and most vulnerable must be considered before their effect on other groups. This is a principle of social doctrine. But she is not qualified to say whether a high minimum wage would help the poor by raising their incomes, or hurt them by throwing marginally skilled laborers out of work. This is a judgment of prudence.

As my choice of example may suggest, I think the Church often blurs this distinction. After all, the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops thinks that it is qualified to analyze the effects of the minimum wage.

So when a friend told me about an article in America, which according to my friend denied that the distinction between principle and prudence has merit anyway, I expected to disagree with it.

Well, I disagreed with many things in the article, but to my surprise, it didn’t deny that distinction. It was actually making a point about a different one, between social evils and intrinsically evil acts. But in the course of the argument, it came very close to a third distinction, and that one is crucial.

Could unraveling these three distinctions help Catholics who want to be faithful to the teachings of the Church but who disagree about governmental social policy come a little closer? I hope so. Let us try.

The article, “A Church for the Poor,” is by the most rev. Robert W. McElroy, auxiliary bishop of San Francisco. He writes, “It is frequently asserted, particularly in election years, that issues pertaining to intrinsic evils do not necessitate prudential judgment, while other grave evils like war, poverty or the unjust treatment of immigrants are merely prudentially laden issues on which people of good will can disagree.” But “the truth is that prudence is a necessary element of any effort to advance the common good through governmental action.”

In other words, Bishop McElroy accepts the distinction between basic principles of Catholic social doctrine and prudential judgments about how to apply them. His complaint is not that we shouldn’t distinguish them, but that we ought to apply this distinction consistently—not only when we are considering social evils such as poverty, but also when we are considering intrinsically evil acts such as abortion. Both kinds of issues involve core principles of Catholic teaching which cannot in good faith be denied and both of them involve prudential judgments about which reasonable persons may disagree.

Excellent point. The devil is in the details.

Part 2 tomorrow:  What devil?  What details?

Query:

I think the real resistance to natural law ideas today is grounded in the deeper resistance to belief in God.  Would you agree?  So how can one ever convince the skeptic of the natural law without first convincing him that God exists?  If he is sophisticated enough, he'll point to all the objections you make in your work to non-theistic conceptions of natural law, and say that neither God nor natural law is real.  We have to buy the whole package or nothing at all, don't we?

And, from a pedagogical point of view, how is a teacher to persuade religious skeptics of the existence of the natural law without “coming clean” that you do have to buy the whole package?

Reply:

Yes, I've given a lot of thought to this problem.  A lot a thinkers try to motivate the discussion of natural law without mentioning God.  If they find it helpful, why not?  But I think they must have a certain kind of skeptic in mind rather than skeptics in general, and I can't help noticing that conversations which begin by avoiding the mention of God don’t usually go on that way.

My own approach is to start where the skeptic is already -- wherever that may be.  I don't hide the fact that I think an adequate account of natural law requires belief in God, and when I'm teaching, I don't hide the fact that the mainstream of the tradition has taken that view too.  But unless there is special reason to do so, I don't open the conversation with a skeptic by saying "Premise one.  There is a God."  God will make His own appearance in the conversation.

There isn’t any way to know ahead of time how such conversations will work out.  Some atheists come to believe in natural law, then think "But then there must be a God!"  Good.

Other skeptics come to believe in God, then think "I must have been wrong to think there is no natural law!"  Good.

Still others are tempted to believe in natural law, then think "But that can't be right, because then there would have to be a God!"  Okay, then we talk about God.

There are even some who come to believe in natural law, but insist that they can make natural law theory work without God.  This in turn induces errors in their conception of natural law itself.  In that sort of conversation, the most helpful place to begin is usually to demonstrate the errors.  Eventually God comes into that conversation too, but I try not to jump the gun.

Query:

When I was an atheist, I used to do things like place a Coke can on a table and say, “God, I'm a mere mortal. I want to believe but I'm skeptical.  Just move the Coke can six inches and I'll be your faithful disciple from this moment forward.”  Why didn't God ever move the can?  There must be a reason, but I can't fathom it.  Why do you think he makes us ‘work’ for our faith?  The confirmation of faith is always indirect and explainable in other ways.

Reply:

I think part of the answer lies in the fact that the personal reality of God is different than impersonal realities like the atomic mass of hydrogen or the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle.  I can know those kinds of facts, so to speak, from the outside.  But I can only know a person, so to speak, from the inside -- something like the way I know myself.  We shouldn’t overstate the distinction, because outside knowledge has a place in personal relationships.  I came to know about my future wife while we were courting, and it was necessary to do so.  But there was a difference between knowing about her and actually knowing her.  In order to get over the gap from one level of knowledge to the other, I had to trust that what I believed about her was really true.  It wasn't like having her stand next to a yardstick or putting her on a scale.  Now you may say that since I had gone beyond evidence that can't be explained in another way, I knew less than before.  Actually, I knew more.  Knowing about her was the precondition for believing in her, but believing in her was the precondition for coming into contact with her reality in an entirely different way.

I think it is like that with all truly personal relationships.  Some impersonal knowledge is necessary in all of them, but it isn't enough.  One who seeks only impersonal knowledge can afford to say, "I know in order to believe."  But at some point, anyone who seeks personal understanding must say with St. Anselm, "I believe in order to know."  At this point, the new mode of knowledge begins.

In this life we groan in longing, because faith gives us only a foretaste of this different mode of knowledge.  But it is a powerful foretaste.  One of the apostles makes a remarkable observation about it in Hebrews 11:1.  The passage is usually mistranslated so that it seems to say faith is the confidence of the things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  But in Greek, the two key words don’t mean “confidence” and “conviction” at all.  What the apostle is actually is that in faith we glimpse the actual substance of the things hoped for, and have the proof of things not seen.  In heaven this glimpse rises to the level of vision, but it is evidential even now.

What I am suggesting is that the premise of the question is mistaken:  I think the final evidence for God is profoundly direct, and not at all explainable in other ways.

Query

After reading the Bible, it seems that God has “receded” from us -- Martin Buber’s term -- relative to his level of interaction with people in the Old Testament.  There must be a reason why He doesn’t just “come out of the closet,” appear to us in a cloud of light, speak to us, etc.  But why?

Reply:

I can see why Buber thinks that God has receded.  We don’t receive completely new revelation any more; that sort of prophet is no longer sent.   Interestingly, rather than conceding these facts with embarrassment, the Church insists on them; they’re an article of faith.  But it views them differently than Buber.  Rather than having receded, God is closer than ever, but His mode of self-disclosure to the community of faith has changed.  The Old Testament mode of revelation was never more than an incomplete and preliminary arrangement.  The disclosure was limited to verbal messages through the prophets, and not many people were prophets.  All this changed with the Incarnation, and it changed again at Pentecost -- events Buber does not reckon with, since he doesn’t believe in them.

The reason the Incarnation made such a difference was that in Christ, instead of just speaking through intermediaries, God took our form and came among us.  In an exchange recorded in the gospel of John, Philip says to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.”  I think that’s Buber’s demand too.  Jesus replied, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip?  He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”

The reason the event at Pentecost made such a difference is that the Holy Spirit came to take up intimate residence with Christ’s believers, to dwell with them inwardly.  The prophets had a far-off hint that this would happen in the Messianic age.  God says through the prophet Joel, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.”

This outpouring is not necessarily dramatic, with wheels and eyes and clouds of light and all that sort of thing.  Moreover it doesn’t provide any utterly new revelation about God; instead it leads His followers into deeper understanding of His self-disclosure in Christ.  But the outpouring is better than the visions of the prophets, first because it is for the whole community of faith, second because it plants the seeds of the love that it commands.  I think this is part of the point of Christ’s remark to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”