The road to oppression is paved with utopian intentions.A couple of weeks ago I argued for the inclusion of the mind in the task of loving our enemies, tying that necessity to Christian participation in politics. There really is no such thing as being charitable without being reasonable. Nevertheless, the Church wouldn't recommend a purely rational approach to the common good either. Pope Benedict XVI recommends St. Joan of Arc as an example for Christians who engage in public life. As we'll see below, she's a great model of intelligent action driven by heartfelt motives. In times like these, we could use a renewal of her political brand of holiness. A society made up of heartless thinkers and their thoughtlessly “charitable” collaborators can only become a society of equally culpable guides and followers—both headed for ruin. So this week I'd like to point out a contrary but not contradictory truth about love: while thoughtless love is in the end uncharitable, heartless thinking will be equally irrational.
Some of the most outspokenly “charitable” people I've ever met are at the same time some of the cruelest—like those who are duped into donating to a Catholic “charity” organization I've mentioned, which collects money at Mass only to direct people to the cruel, secular welfare system that subjects the poor and needy to a moral re-education in the arts of career-dependency, birth-control, abortion, and divorce. The churchgoers who give to that charity, while they may give themselves a dose of self-satisfying love, are “loving” the poor thoughtlessly and, in effect, cruelly.
On the other hand the most rational plans of mice and men, by ignoring the human heart, oft go awry. As I wrote last week, nothing could be more starkly rational than the welfare state envisioned by the eugenicists of the Progressive Era. This statist dream of the elites never quite came true, and for the poor it quickly became a nightmare. Progressives thought that the human family could be herded and bred like dumb cattle. They treated the “common good” as a utopian, man-made machine that only needed a little specialized fine-tuning to be completed. But the human person is not as manageable as progressives thought. Whether free or imprisoned in a system that attempts to remove our humanity, human action is motivated by all the impulses of the heart, both fallen and divine. The “unfit” who were excluded from the market by high minimum wage laws did not just disappear from the human gene pool like they were supposed to do. Instead of exterminating all the miseries of life, the progressive agenda maximized them, in part by arranging for a permanently dependent underclass to be put in the impersonal hands of the secular state. The icy progressive rationality that tried to delete poverty as if it were merely a bug in a man-made system was surprisingly unintelligent in human terms.
The Catholic tradition is not so purely rational, and never silences the heartbeat of the Church long enough for the mind to do much thinking without it. In theology, the Church has wrestled over the centuries with all of the seeming contradictions within our faith, never cutting corners to insist (though it would have been much more simple) on grace over nature, justice over mercy, the humanity of Christ over His divinity, or the doctrine of original sin over the sinlessness of Mary. The same goes for the Church's involvement in politics. Even at the high water-mark of Roman Catholic power, the Church never established an official Catholic political order, as much as advocates of the Catholic State long for that final settlement.
Outside of our core dogmas, the marching orders of the Church are never satisfactory to those who desire a full and definitive set of orderly rules, once for all etched in stone so that, for goodness sake, we can finally get to work neatly and rationally “building the Kingdom” of God on earth. That sort of orderliness has always been left to voluntary associations within the Church, such as those who gathered under the Rule of St. Benedict. When the Franciscan Spiritualists emerged from such an association to declare that poverty was the universal rule of Christianity, the Church pronounced their view heretical. Even when popes called for crusades they did not do so by authoritatively minting a permanent class of Catholic knights to police the world. Rather, when popes made political moves they did so as politicians, out of their own private judgment and that of their advisers, not with the authority of the truth-giving Church. Such Catholic political action has sometimes been cynical, usually heartfelt, but always fallible, and often wrong.
And now we come to St. Joan, as I promised above. One Catholic political mission that was not wrong, and which the pope did not call for, was St. Joan's effort to free France from English rule. This mission was initiated by private revelation and, when England would not agree to her terms, carried out by an army that answered directly to the Maiden herself, not Rome. Her mission was motivated by a deep and heartfelt compassion for the poor and oppressed in France. As Pope Benedict said, “The compassion and commitment of the young French peasant girl in face of the suffering of her people became more intense because of her mystical relationship with God.” And “one of the most original aspects of the holiness of this young girl was precisely the connection between mystical experience and political mission.”
You may ask what all this has to do with “heartless thinking” and “thoughtless love.” Well, exactly. To a purely rational mind or a totally irrational heart, the history and tradition of the Church and the best examples of sainthood within it are as uncomfortable as appeals for charity money were to Ebenezer Scrooge. Joan of Arc, like the military saints who came before her, was sensitive to the painful realities that only the heart can sense and only intelligent action can address. Unlike the cruel and calculating members of the Catholic “charity” organization, and the church-goers who give their money to them but give no thought to the real harms they cause to the poor by handing them over to the secular state, Joan was neither an emotivist nor a rationalist. Rather, her heart was moved by the real sufferings of her neighbors and, in obedience to God's commands, she did all of the difficult rational work that was required to relieve them. (For a passionate 17-year-old peasant who couldn't read or write, becoming a military strategist was surely no easy task.)
But the ecclesiastics who conducted her trial didn't know the half of her holy love, not even when she showed unmistakable intelligence in answering her interrogators. “[T]hese judges were theologians who lacked charity and the humility to see God’s action in this young woman,” says Pope Benedict XVI. “The words of Jesus, who said that God’s mysteries are revealed to those who have a child’s heart while they remain hidden to the learned and the wise who have no humility (cf. Lk 10:21), spring to mind.” These clerical politicians had political leanings against Joan and in favor of the English oppression of France, and no show of heartfelt love for the French, however intelligent, would move them. “Thus, Joan’s judges were radically incapable of understanding her or of perceiving the beauty of her soul. They did not know that they were condemning a Saint.” They were doubtless very smart men, adept in political intrigues and unimpressed with the passionate teenaged rabble rouser over whom they presided. They cared for their status and that of the local Church, they knew which way the wind blew, and they calculated Joan out of the equation of progress. In an expert show of heartless rationality, they did something profoundly stupid: they killed a saint.
Modern examples of this kind of heartlessness-turned-mindless are surprisingly similar. In the early progressive era, bighearted American Catholic bishops saw an opportunity in “the dawn of the welfare state.” With an increasingly powerful government ready and willing to intervene in society, the bishops thought to finally implement (from the top down) a social order that would be in tune with Catholic teachings about the dignity of the human person. But meanwhile, as Princeton’s Dr. Thomas C. Leonard tells us, the early 20th century secularist view of the poor and needy as “unfit” was “publicly opposed by very few.” In their eagerness to bring about a Catholic “social justice,” Catholic leaders failed to assess the political dangers of their secular climate.
In 1919, American bishops published The Bishops' Program for Social Reconstruction, in which they not only endorsed the high minimum wage, but also called for the state to “make comprehensive provision for insurance against illness, invalidity, unemployment, and old age.” The Bishops' Program therefore inadvertently bolstered not only the market legislation that had been designed to force most of the poor out of work, but also the welfare state that was meant to receive and stifle those “undesirables” out of existence. And so the cruel march of progress went on, kept in step by the deceivers and the deceived, the heartless thinkers and the thoughtless lovers of mankind. (Next week, my column will give a fuller account of this complex history, drawing heavily from the brilliant Rise and Fall of the American Family Wage by Allan Carlson.) While the original intention of American bishops may have been to make the government into a mouthpiece for true Christian justice in society, in fact they helped to build the brutally powerful secular government that knows just how to twist the language of Christian charity to anti-Christian use.
The Catholic term “social justice” should hardly be applied to today's secular tradition of ever-increasing government intervention, the perpetuation of government dependency, the use of redistributed funds to buy the poor as a voting bloc. Welfare, as it stands today, should not be called welfare, any more than the torture chambers of 1984 deserved the name “Ministry of Love.” Because of the welfare state, those of us who are more or less outside of its clutches become accustomed to the needy not being “our problem,” but the problem of “society” to be “solved” like a mathematical equation with tax dollars. The fact is, each person gives fairly little in taxes to the needy, and if the conservative case against the welfare state were merely about feeling robbed then it would be as absurd and heartless a position as our opponents claim. But the problem with welfare is not that my earnings are being taxed to feed the poor. The problem is that my tax dollars are feeding the poor not only material but spiritual food—and both are of a McDonald's quality. The problem is that the poor are being lined up for moral and physical corruption followed by bodily and spiritual death. Those who are familiar with the welfare system and yet demand that it be maintained are not caring people. They're the executioners of our time, every bit the scientific, professional applicators of lethal poison who once “took care of the unfit” in America during the progressive, eugenic era. And they have been assigned to the poor by a secularist state that, unlike Christianity, has absolutely no track record of caring for the welfare of the poor. The ghettos that are built and maintained by state bureaucracies for the poor have much more in common with a secularist concentration camp than with a Christian charity organization.
There are two kinds of uncharitable behavior that perpetuate these ghettos from outside: thoughtless charity, and heartless thinking. The thoughtlessly charitable keep the system going with all the heartfelt and noble intentions of the duped. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, these people need to learn that their love, their “gift of self,” should include the full and honest engagement of their minds—which would reveal to them whether their charitable giving and political alliances are in fact beneficial to the poor. The heartless thinker perpetuates the ghetto in full knowledge of how it oppresses those within it, because of what it does for the middle and upper classes outside—keeping the poor out of sight, leaving “us” in the cold comfort of a progressive suburbia. These folks need to revisit their Church history, their lives of the saints and, if they remain unmoved, their local government housing project.
Both the thoughtless and the heartless must seek to correct these imbalances within themselves, and not simply trust that others will make up for what they don't supply to the community. It's absurd for one kind of sinner to rely on the sins of others to offset his own. Christ said of those heartless men whom He called “blind guides,” “you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.” But St. Paul was equally harsh with those naïve Christians who were misled by smarter men than themselves: “Foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?”
Whichever form of cruelty you choose, you'll be more like a member of the oppressive English party than like St. Joan and her French followers. And, as we can learn from the story of Joan and her judges, you don't have to wait for a pope to brief you on the mission to liberate your neighbors, and having bishops on your side won't necessarily put you on the right side of history—or of the judgment seat of Christ.
Stephen Herreid is currently a Fellow at the John Jay Institute (Philadelphia) and the arts editor for Humane Pursuits. He has been a Contributing Editor to The Intercollegiate Review Online and has contributed several chapters to the latest edition of ISI’s Choosing the Right College.
