The Field Hospital Needs Doctors

Much has been said about the mercy of the late Pope Francis, as compared with the supposed rigidity of his two immediate predecessors. I will not draw comparisons here, nor will I pretend to judge these men on their merits. I wish to use the occasion to specify what work a moral teacher must do and its relation to mercy.

I like doctors who have good bedside manner. But I don’t hire a doctor for those. I want my doctor to be good at diagnosing a problem and straightforward in addressing it. I want him to give me the respect I am due by telling me exactly what is wrong, what can be done about it, with what hope for success, and with what risks.

There are various ways in which a moral teacher is like a medical doctor. Our belief in God implies a belief in objective moral truth—and not simply as theoretical and abstract. For the three-personed God created persons in His image, ineluctably social, thriving upon truth. To sin against that truth is to set yourself in contradiction against God, your fellow man, and yourself, regardless of what you fancy yourself to be doing. It is like abusing a limb or an organ, or ingesting poison, or sticking a knife in your flesh. It cannot fail to hurt.  

So far considered, the task of the moral teacher is straightforward. He must tell us what is right and wrong: what is to be honored, encouraged, permitted, condoned under specific circumstances, discouraged, or condemned. We Catholics additionally believe that certain evils—aside from factors that mitigate an individual sinner’s culpability—sever a man’s relationship with God, telling God, in effect, that we will have our way regardless of what He commands. Such sin is mortal. It is spiritual cyanide. If you swallow a cyanide capsule, you will die, and that is that. 

So, the moral teacher points out the poisons and the threats around us, the belladonna, yew berries, ravenous beasts, nitrous powder exposed to fire, high voltage wires stripped bare. It does not matter what anybody’s opinion is about such things, though we pray that God will be lenient with our stupidities. 

It also does not matter, as to truth, how the moral teacher lets us know about the threats. We hope he will be mannerly. We prefer the avuncular Marcus Welby of pleasant memory to the misanthropic Gregory House—at least when we have to talk with him. But all that is secondary. We want him to get the moral facts right. It is not merciful to play with toadstools. 

If the moral teacher had only to deal with a single person at a time, suffering in his own body and soul, his task would be greatly simplified. But whether he likes it or not, he must also do the work of an epidemiologist. Man is an imitator, and bad habits, easy to fall into and extremely difficult to get out of, are contagious. If you look the other way while Joe ruins his health with narcotics, you will soon find that John and Jim have begun to dabble in them too. While you flatter yourself for your broad-mindedness, you will be setting a snare in the path of those vulnerable to the evil you are too shy or too cowardly or too self-pleased to identify as such. It may not have been nice to call cigarettes “coffin nails,” but it would have been better if more people had done it.

And still the moral teacher has not reached the limit of his responsibilities as they regard the facts. People picked up from other people the habit of smoking, and so it became common; but even though people smoked together in rooms set aside for it, and even though it relaxed them as they chatted together, it was not social in the full sense of the word. But moral evil, if permitted generally or celebrated, attacks the social organism as such. There are no private sins, just as there is no private language. Every evil that people condone will warp the society they live in.  Moral evil, if permitted generally or celebrated, attacks the social organism as such. There are no private sins, just as there is no private language. Every evil that people condone will warp the society they live in. Tweet This

If you permit easy divorce, your permission, regardless of your mild intentions, will alter the very language of marriage that everyone must speak. Other customs having to do with marriage, or even with what boys and girls can be expected to do together without moral danger, must adjust themselves accordingly. If you celebrate the impossible, that two men or two women can marry, besides putting many a lonely and troubled teenager at risk, you will have left yourself with no way of teaching boys and girls what manliness and womanliness mean, and how each is to be oriented toward and completed by the other. Your good intentions pave their road to confusion. What kind of society you are then left with, when the fundamental relation of man and woman is denied in principle, can be seen in many a hard and childless modern city.

And yet there is still more. Once again, an analogy with the body is suggestive. For the moral laws themselves are related to one another organically. The Ten Commandments are not a list. They are a body. We may pretend we can have a pleasure-seeking society of people who are kind to the poor. Think again. The poor are often grubby, cantankerous, self-indulgent, and ill-educated; so, their posh supporters will ensure that they are well out of their sight and will favor measures to encourage the poor to make fewer of themselves. 

We may pretend we can have a society of agnostics or atheists who celebrate what is honorable and who have holidays filled with solemnity and joy. Think again. They turn from God, then they lose the Sabbath, forgetting what it was for; then the best they can manage for uniting people is a football game—the unity not of a choir but of sheer numbers, not singing but shouting. 

Hence, the moral teacher cannot be a Carry Nation, a single-minded crusader against drinking or swearing or fornicating or greed or ambition or apostasy. Evils of the brain are evils of the heart, and evils of the heart are evils of the brain. If the foot is infected, the liver and the kidneys know it. 

And now we get to manners. The problem with moral evil, as opposed to physical evil, is that we can pretend all our lives that there is no hurt. If I smash my knee, I will feel it, and other people will see me hobbling. But sin often comes along with its own disguises and its superficial palliatives. This man is a yawning chasm of greed? Look at the mansion he lives in! This woman has divorced her husband because she grew bored with him? Look at the pictures from her trip to Cancun!

That means that the moral teacher must be clearer about right and wrong than the medical doctor is about disease. That, in turn, will often require patient and careful explanation. It is relatively easy to explain to somebody who is overweight that he is putting stress on his heart and his lungs. He himself will feel shortness of breath.  It is hard to explain to a sinner that what makes him feel good is wrong, and why it is wrong, and what its further implications are for himself and for his society. 

To explain, for example, why fornication is wrong, you have to hold in your mind what a human being is, and what a child is, and why the child therefore should be born in the haven of what is permanent; and what the child-making act is, both physically and anthropologically, and what is founded upon the union of man and woman; and what far-reaching effects ensue when these things are denied. The teacher will have to do this even though most people will not want to hear a word of it.

Then there are the excuses born of comparison. This man who squeezes all the sweat out of his employees is faithful to his wife. That man who is unfaithful to his wife is a fair and generous employer. Each one justifies himself by comparison with the other. For there will always be some way for people to shrug off their sins, saying that at least they are not as bad as the person beside them, whose sins are quite different. The moral teacher then must remind people that most of our avoidance of evil is attributable not to our virtue but to the fact that we happen not to be tempted that way, or that we lack the capacity for committing the evil.  

Young men commit most of the violent crimes in any society, and much of that is due to the plain fact that they can do so. Older men may or may not be wiser; they surely are feebler. In any case, granting that one kind of evil may not be as dreadful as another, the moral teacher must remind his charges that dead is dead, regardless of the disease that got you there. Double pneumonia is not as grave as a bullet in the brain. Cold comfort for you if die of it.

What methods work? We cannot prescribe them in the abstract, except to say that they must be motivated by love—which may sometimes appear kindly and sometimes severe; that depends on the persons and the circumstances. What works with one sex may fail with the other. What cheers someone at the point of despair may harden someone already obdurate and smug. What you say about an evil in general may not determine how you treat the individual person who suffers it.

There is no such thing as mercy for sin, no more than there is falsehood in the cause of truth. Mercy is for persons. Jesus, meek and humble of heart, called the Pharisees a brood of vipers, which was exactly what they needed to hear. Do we really know that none of them were saved by hearing it?

The moral teacher will always be attacked for inconsistency, selfish motives, severity, and hypocrisy. That goes with the territory. And here he must do what no medical doctor needs to do. He must keep his own house in order, and he must pray, pray always, for wisdom to see what is true, the courage to preach it, and the grace to know what a frail instrument he is. For if it were not for that grace of God, he himself would be a walking corpse, exhaling corruption.

I wish I could be sure that all the bishops in our Church believed what I say here. The alternative is a practical atheism, and we have altogether too much of that around us. To conclude with the medical analogy, the alternative is to let people die—and smile while they do it.