Does the Individual Situation Nullify the Objective Order?

Situation encountered yesterday, 8 a.m., at a D.C. Metro station: two people sitting on a platform bench, a man and a woman. The man, leaning forward, radiated the impression that the woman was in his way. When she got up, he proceeded to sprawl across the slab like he intended to take a nap.

The scene caught my attention because it captured where I think some of the divisions in Catholic thought are today. My reaction was that public transportation hubs are not flophouses and that tolerating them as such degrades both society and social order. 

Then I thought there would undoubtedly be Catholics “reaching out to the peripheries” that would decide the situation was primarily society’s fault and it was “unchristian” of me to begrudge this guy his improvised bed. While I immediately disabused myself of mush masquerading as Christianity by thinking the indulgence of such behavior on a widespread scale is why our cities are increasingly unlivable and our social order crumbling, I know that many others today would hesitate. It was clear to me: What takes priority: the existential situation or the essential order?

I am going to lean toward the essential order.

Making the essential order yield to the existential situation has progressively eroded the common good and the objective moral order. One guy sleeping on a park bench one time is an exception; tolerate it long enough and tent cities become a norm some want to defend. 

One illegal immigrant jumping the border for a better life seems to be not so bad. But one illegal immigrant after another—each of whom is “not so bad”—eventually yields a crisis of 20 million illegals who render the rule of immigration law nugatory and whose recovered enforcement suddenly constitutes an “offense” against “human dignity.” 

One violation of marital fidelity or sexual ethics becomes a “limited matter” that must be “put in context” or even “accompanied.” Repeated contextualization and accompaniment turns ecclesiastical teaching into some nebulous aspiration, a “goal” that somehow never is realized (nor really expected to be) in ordinary life.  Eventually, “pastoral” concern expects the teaching to be held in abeyance in practice (“mainstream” thought) or updated by the aggiornamento of “lived experience.”

Pope Francis assured us we should not ponder whether the panhandler is really destitute or just looking for some extra money for booze. Maybe the one panhandler who passed by the papal almoner is an exception. But constant looking aside yields a society flush with frequently aggressive and potentially dangerous panhandlers with mental problems. Is the “Christian” thing then still to “turn the other cheek”?

When does the momentary indulgence become the practical norm that consumes the rule?

Catholic circles still breathe something of a Catholic atmosphere in which the “new theology” has not yet fully displaced the “old morality.” The result is that, still breathing some of the old gases, Catholics kind of posit certain guardrails against the logical conclusions to which this existential indulgence leads. 

But the secular world is less inhibited, and so it demonstrates what the reticence of Catholic thought might hesitate to admit. Having abandoned a normative moral framework within which to act, secularism then decides there is none. Morality becomes the invention of the moment.

So, the problem of teenage pregnancy or venereal disease is not a moral lapse but simply a technical dilemma: how to allow a behavior while mitigating its undesirable consequences. One cannot demand the “impossibility” of abstinence when a simple condom will do. Demanding otherwise is an “unrealistic” expectation that denies the “agency” and “dignity” of human persons!

A person is not a means. Yes, he is and always remains an end. But even the individual human person lives within an objective moral order framed by the fact he shares a common human nature (a term increasingly unheard, even in some Catholic circles). The person-as-end does not mean jettisoning a larger order of being and value in order to accommodate a person’s individual limits, foibles, fears, frustrations, or wants. 

Yet that is what a lot of contemporary ecclesiastical talk—especially of the “pastoral” kind—has resulted in: a new kind of “Catholicism” that can “accommodate” everything except the kinds of immutable moral principles that once were deemed the stuff of Catholicism. Instead, we have a “Catholicism” quite deft at making peace with the secular order while reprimanding those less willing to go into that “gentle night” as somehow not true Catholics—Catholics who are “judgmental” and “rigid” for holding to what the Church uncompromisingly held to before its contemporary “enlightenment.” 

The mystery of the individual person occurs within a common humanity. That is how the Creator established that humanity. The mystery of the individual person is not in conflict with the objective reality of the human person who shares one common human nature. Karol Wojtyła (Pope St. John Paul II) made that very clear in his writings and teachings, both before he was elected pope and after. It is the readiness to sever the relation between person and nature that is the issue here.  Doing that does not enhance the “dignity” of the “person.” It, in fact, undermines it.