Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) lost little time in releasing an initial response to the slew of executive orders flying off the president’s desk. Having witnessed the knee-jerk modus operandi of the Roman Curia from the inside, my impression is that the Church’s perceived need to issue speedy, timely statements on every current event is distracting at best and risky at worst. If nothing else, it establishes the precedent that ecclesiastical authorities are obliged to say a little about everything rather than much about something of extreme importance.
In the case of the recent executive orders, that something of extreme importance is the human family—and, more directly, the “biological reality” upon which the family is founded. Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio’s 250-word text treats this “positive provision” only secondarily and only after emphasizing “provisions” that “will have negative consequences.” The statement reads: “Some provisions contained in the Executive Orders, such as those focused on the treatment of immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty, and the environment, are deeply troubling and will have negative consequences.”
The USCCB fortunately promises to clarify this sweeping claim with “additional information pertaining to specific Executive Orders” on its website, which we eagerly await. In the meantime, however, the seeming subordination of the positive to the negative overshadows what are arguably the most fundamental, pressing issues of our day (or so thought St. John Paul II): human sexuality, marriage, and family. The USCCB statement almost makes the president’s affirmation of two sexes sound like an afterthought: “Other provisions in the Executive Orders can be seen in a more positive light, such as recognizing the truth about each human person as male or female.”
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily
Granted, the executive order pertains to specific measures the president wants to take toward “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” In other words, the immediate purpose of the order’s recognition of the “biological reality of sex” is to prevent “intimate single-sex spaces designed for women” from being invaded by men, as well as to thwart attempts to transform “laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them.” The White House is already running up against roadblocks in implementing the order, but the point is that the bishops laud the acknowledgment of the “truth about each human person as male or female,” albeit in terms of a “provision” to be “seen in a more positive light.”
My point is that the provision symbolizes much, much more. In the words of John Paul II, the constitution of the human person as male and female,
with the specific dignity which derives from it, defines “from the beginning” the qualities of the common good of humanity, in every dimension and circumstance of life…hence one can discover, at the very origins of human society, the qualities of communion and of complementarity. (Gratissimam Sane, 6)
John Paul goes on to explain the significance of “communion” and “complementarity” both in Trinitarian terms and in terms of a just and stable society.
If nothing else, the archbishop’s statement should have stated this prominently and plainly first, before turning to the yet-to-be-fleshed-out “negative consequences” of the other executive orders. In fact, those “negative consequences” could be—and hopefully will be—formulated, at least in great part, as detrimental to the human family John Paul II nearly gave up his life—literally—to uphold. Executive orders pertaining to the “treatment of immigrants and refugees,” for example, should be evaluated according to the extent to which they either promote or undermine the integrity and well-being of families. If the statement had given precedence to the provision that acknowledges the masculinity and femininity of the human person, it would have both accentuated the “positive” and set the stage for the appropriate criteria according to which the “negative provisions” should be judged.
Looking back on the mid-nineties, I marvel at how prescient John Paul II was in alerting us to the mess we would cause as soon as we undermined the bedrock of the human family. “How far removed are some modern ideas from the profound understanding of masculinity and femininity found in Divine Revelation!” he lamented in 1994, the Year of the Family. “Revelation leads us to discover in human sexuality a treasure proper to the person, who finds true fulfilment in the family” (Gratissimam Sane, 19).
There was a glimmer of hope just two years later when President Clinton—though strongly opposed to the bill—signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defining marriage as the “union of one man and one woman.” A series of high-profile court decisions chipped away at the law’s constitutionality until President Biden—who had voted in favor of DOMA as a senator—finally repealed it by signing the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022. This not only sealed the acceptance of same-sex marriage as a given but set us on the path to the “internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts” that the president’s executive order seeks to correct.
Again, John Paul saw it all coming over three decades ago:
…various programs backed by very powerful resources nowadays seem to aim at the breakdown of the family. At times it appears that concerted efforts are being made to present as “normal” and attractive, and even to glamourize, situations which are in fact “irregular.” (Gratissimam Sane, 5)
The USCCB does not have to endorse fully or unqualifiedly any particular executive order. Archbishop Broglio’s statement makes that clear. But it should seize a golden opportunity not only to accentuate the positive over the negative but to correct the deeply mistaken impression that the Church’s social teaching is nothing more than a list of various issues she happens to take a stance on. Her social teaching is hierarchically and integrally ordered toward the building up of the civilization of love instituted by Our Savior. In doing so, she must courageously resound St. John Paul II’s conviction that the “family is the center and heart” of that “civilization of love” (Gratissimam Sane, 13).
There are no comments yet.