Response to court nominee Barrett shows anti-Catholic bigotry, not theology, is threat
“The dogma lives loudly within you.”
Many take this remark from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein during Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Court of Appeals confirmation hearing in 2017 as a recent example of anti-Catholic bigotry.
More alarming, though, was the question asked by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a professed Catholic, in the same hearing: “Do you consider yourself an ‘orthodox’ Catholic?” In other words, does she hold what the Catholic Church has always taught?
Catholic theology is not a threat to America; the ideology of anti-Catholic bigotry is.
Faithful Catholics help many and harm no one; anti-Catholic bigots harm everyone. It is unimaginable that the senators’ harassment be applied to any other religious group. Why is this tolerated? When will it end?
Too many Catholics diminish their identity by embracing “Catholic” as an adjective and not a noun, much less a praxis. Faithful Catholics are glad to contribute to the great American adventure. Our republic succeeds when it acknowledges that and fails when it does not.
Faithful Catholics do not ask for any special privileges, but we insist that how we live and what we value and prioritize are already provided a secured space by the Constitution. An attack on faithful Catholics is an implicit attack on the Constitution, without which America means and is nothing.
John F. Kennedy’s 1960 breakthrough as a Catholic candidate came at a terrible cost, one not made fully evident until 1984, when New York Gov. Mario Cuomo spoke at the University of Notre Dame and separated faith from right reason in the political life of a Catholic public servant.
Cuomo relegated religious identity exclusively to the private domain, as if Catholic identity and heritage have nothing to contribute publicly. Consequently, someone who is more openly Catholic is often expected to leave the public square or be barred from it entirely.
Abortion and contraception are bad medicine, as well as dehumanizing. Even very public Catholics seem either unwilling or unable to make that case.
Each act of contraception and abortion reduces first a woman then an unborn child to the status of an object of inconvenience. Sadly, many public Catholics have become compliant with the media-driven and socially dominant religion of secular individualism and its demand that law and jurisprudence substitute emotivism for right reason and that medicine serve desires rather than human dignity.
It is not so much our faith but our intelligence that upsets anti-Catholic bigots — even Catholic anti-Catholic bigots. Usually, they cannot articulate what we believe about the Trinity and care about that belief even less.
The Catholic commitment to right reason, drawing upon a perennial tradition of natural law, and an abiding commitment to real science — these are the things that animate bigots against faithful Catholics. Reason intrudes upon the illusions that secular ideology sells and imposes.
Faithful Catholics must be neither silent nor silenced. Our moral tradition, thoroughly humane and humanizing, is available to any person of ordinary intelligence and good will.
We are not asking the state to endorse our Catholic faith; we as Catholics and Americans are insisting that what we can prove by reason not be dismissed or stifled. Orthodox Catholics live that moral tradition and offer it to others. We cannot do otherwise.
People who should know better are distorting what Catholics such as Judge Amy Coney Barrett can and should offer to America. These lies benefit no one.
As a bishop, I call upon the faithful and all people of good will to examine the Catholic moral heritage — a heritage available to all because it is true of all. We humans have a dignity and destiny that the state cannot give or cancel but must protect. Let us act accordingly.
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 8:03 AM.