Anyone interested in the United States Catholic world will have noticed the sharp differences of opinion among Catholics and Catholic publications about many areas of church and national life. Some commentators claim that it amounts to a schism. In Australia there is similar polarisation, but no talk of schism — Australians don’t do disaster movies. In both nations the exchanges within churches echo trends in national life that heighten disagreements, lessen respect, and tend to confine conversation circles to people of similar views. People become annoyed if those opposing their views gatecrash their forums. This trend creates problems for Church sponsored publications.
Participants in Catholic conversations often accuse their opponents of politicising faith. Sometimes the charge is true. It is easy to seek support for political allegiance by appealing to faith. One blatant example was of Donald Trump conspicuously holding a Bible when photographed outside a Washington church. Such practices, of course, are not confined to one side of politics.
In contemporary public conversation, however, something more than politicisation is involved. It has three characteristics. First, it is partisan. It represents a particular kind of politics in which opinions are stated and positions framed in opposition to one’s enemies. Participants are less concerned to commend their own beliefs than to discredit those of their opponents. They appeal to listeners to barrack for their opinions, not to reflect on them. In such a world to be undecided is a sign of weakness.
Second, much contemporary public conversation is programmatic. Participants come to it with a package of convictions that are seen to belong together. As a result when observers see one position taken they can be reasonably certain of a range of other views that will be held. If speakers are enthusiastic about Pope Francis, for example, we conclude that they are also likely to see climate change as a religious issue and to be unfazed about the legalisation of same sex marriage. The corollary of this expectation that if someone is unpredictable, as for example, by strongly endorsing both the Black Lives Matter and the Right to Life movements, listeners will be puzzled or even feel a sense of betrayal.
Third, as a consequence of its partisan and programmatic character, public conversation is characteristically simplified. It focuses on only a few of the multitude of complex relationships that are involved in any human affair. Freedom of speech is defined narrowly as the right of individual speakers to speak, omitting the relationships created by speech with other persons and the groups and society from which they are part. Issues are reduced to simple sets of relationships that determine them, with the complexity of human relationships lost sight of. In any serious conversation within society these subtle and diverse relationships bear respectful conversation. When conversation is narrowed, the space for understanding is also narrowed.
This narrowing has made it difficult for any publication sponsored by a faith-based organisation to sustain conversation that encourages public reflection on all salient relationships involved in public issues. On the one hand it must move outside the specific language and conceptuality of the tribe to engage its participants in a public language. On the other hand it must work from the moral centre that lies at the heart of its faith tradition.
In the Catholic tradition, that centre is the claim that each human being has an inalienable dignity that forbids anyone to be treated as a means to other goals, whether of profit, security or unity. Furthermore no human being is an isolated individual, but each must be seen in relationship to other people and to the larger world. As a consequence, every human action, whether by individuals, by social groups or by governments has a social license.
'It is about exploring the myriad of relationships that are interlocked in any of the ethical decisions that we face as human beings. This means that no subject can be taken off the table.'
The difficulty facing Catholic sponsored magazines in the public conversation arises from the fact that some conclusions Catholics have drawn from the dignity of each human being are widely seen as incompatible with one another. The inalienable dignity of each human being underlies not only the received Catholic accounts of inequality, respect for the environment, warfare, slavery and racial discrimination. It also underlies the accounts of gender relationships, abortion and euthanasia. In public conversation these are seen to belong to different and opposed packages.
The challenge that this polarisation poses lies in the pressure that its exerts on magazines to yield to a programmatic, oversimplified and partisan understanding of conversation. Under the pressure of readers who, in the name of the magazine’s moral centre, expect the magazines to endorse their raft of positions and to condemn that of their opponents, they will be tempted to exclude arguments favouring one side in contested issues, or to leave the issues untouched on the grounds that the conflicting opinions are too firmly locked in.
That is understandable in a magazine directed to a church audience. But it would be regrettable in a magazine that hopes to encourage broad and civil public conversation. Its task is to commend the human values enshrined in its moral centre while challenging narrow human judgments. It is about exploring the myriad of relationships that are interlocked in any of the ethical decisions that we face as human beings. This means that no subject can be taken off the table. It also means recognising that people who come to contradictory conclusions can help one another to come to a deeper understanding of the rich complexity of the world. The acknowledgment of the dignity of each human being demands no less.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Steeple of church (Akira Hojo/Unsplash)