An intercessor for all who would defend life

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 18:19

During the brutally hot summer of 2003, thousands of French vacationers remained on holiday rather than returning home to bury their recently deceased parents, who had died from the extraordinary heat and were being stashed in air-conditioned storage lockers. Those acts of filial impiety cast into sharp relief the October canonization of Jeanne Jugan, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Born during the virulently anti-Catholic French Revolution, Jeanne Jugan learned early in her life that fidelity to Christ and his Church could be costly. A history of the period of her childhood sums things up neatly: “In spite of the persecution, the people of Cancale kept the faith. During dark nights, in an attic or a barn, or even in the middle of the countryside, the faithful gathered together, and there in the silence of the night, the priest would offer the Eucharist and baptize the children. But this happiness was rare. There were so many dangers.”

Jeanne Jugan knew poverty as well as persecution, and developed a marked sensitivity to the humiliation that those who have fallen through the cracks of society’s net of solidarity can feel. She declined an offer of marriage because, as she put it, “God...is keeping me for a work which is not yet known, for a work which is not yet founded.” That work came into clear focus when, at age 47, she met an elderly, blind and sick woman, whom she took into her care; from that seemingly random encounter was born a tremendous work of charity. The congregation of women religious she founded dedicated itself to the care of the poor and elderly—and supported itself by begging, with the foundress, Jeanne Jugan, as chief beggar. The Little Sisters of the Poor spread rapidly throughout Europe, America and Africa, but the going was never easy for Jeanne Jugan.

In 1843, Jeanne Jugan’s re-election as superior was quashed by the community’s priest-advisor, Father Augustin Marie Le Pailleur. Refusing to contest what others would have deemed an injustice (but which she thought to be the will of God), Jeanne Jugan accepted this curious decision and went on the road, supporting her sisters by begging. For the last 27 years of her life, she lived at the order’s motherhouse in retirement, again according to the orders of Father Le Pailleur; her role as foundress was never acknowledged during her lifetime. Yet the novelist Charles Dickens could write, after meeting Jeanne Jugan, that “there is in this woman something so calm, and so holy, that in seeing her I know myself to be in the presence of a superior being. Her words went straight to my heart, so that my eyes, I know not how, filled with tears.”

To enter a house of the Little Sisters of the Poor today is to recapture what Dickens experienced. Elderly men and women with no one else to care for them are given exquisite attention; the dignity of every patient is honored, no matter how difficult that dignity may be to discern amidst the trials of senility and disease. The Little Sisters of the Poor and their patients are living reminders that there are no disposable human beings; that everyone is a someone for whom the Son of God entered the world, suffered and died; and that we read others out of the human family at our moral and political peril.

Yet that is the temptation facing the United States, and every other affluent society confronting a graying population, longer life expectancies, and spiraling medical costs. Where this temptation can lead is brutally displayed in the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal for years; and as the late Father Richard John Neuhaus said of such travesties as the Dutch “death with dignity” laws, what is permitted will soon become mandatory. That is precisely what has happened in Holland and indeed wherever euthanasia is legally permitted.

St. Jeanne Jugan, Sister Marie of the Cross in her religious life, is thus a powerful—and badly needed—intercessor for all who would defend the gift of life from conception until natural death.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Irving Kristol, ‘a Jewish Catholic social ethicist’

Columns - The Catholic Difference

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 18:19

Several years ago, after Irving Kristol had had a cancerous lung removed, Father Richard John Neuhaus visited him in the hospital. After they chatted briefly, Father Neuhaus, at the door on his way out, turned back toward the bed and said, “I’ll pray for you, Irving.” To which Irving Kristol replied, “Don’t bring me to His attention!”

It was a typical Irving remark: wry, modest, indomitable. For those with ears to hear, there was also the undertone of an act of faith. For Irving, whose practice of Judaism was not strict, was nonetheless, as he might put it, “theotropic”—intuitively persuaded that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (and, as some of us would remind him, Jesus) was indeed the Master of the Universe to which his ancestors in the shtetls of eastern Europe had prayed.

Irving Kristol died on Sept. 18; it would be hard to find a man who, in our time, more vividly embodied the claim that ideas have consequences. Irving was not a conventional man of ideas, however, meaning an academic. During his tenure as editor of the Public Interest, which reshaped the domestic policy debate in America, Irving famously observed that the way to change the world was through small magazines and think-tanks: a bon mot of great comfort to those of us who published in small magazines and worked in think-tanks. In his case, though, it was indisputably true and had been since the 1950s, when he helped launch Encounter, the trans-Atlantic journal of ideas that nourished a principled anti-communism in which both conservatives (which Irving was becoming in those days) and intellectuals of the left (which he had been in his youth) could join ranks in the defense of freedom.

The obituaries dutifully described Irving Kristol as a founding father of neo-conservatism, which was true enough. But that moniker—coined by an unreconstructed leftist, Michael Harrington, by the way—tends to obscure at least as much as it illuminates. In Irving’s case, what it obscured was a combination of qualities rarely found in one man: common sense (which compelled his disentanglement from the Trotyskyism of his college days); empirical rigor (which taught him to look, hard, at facts, like the fact that Great Society welfare programs were destroying the families they were supposed to help); good humor (which Irving sometimes found lacking in older styles of American conservatism, and which he supplied in ample measure); courage (to take on the settled liberal consensus among intellectual, journalistic, and political tastemakers); and foresight (as in the creation of Encounter and the Public Interest).

Irving Kristol lived the last two decades of his life in Washington, but he was New York Jewish to his chromosomes; so I trust I won’t offend his memory if I suggest that these qualities were, in some sense, Catholic qualities. Despite what you will read in certain Catholic journals and blogs today, Catholic social doctrine is not about the infinite expansion of state power into every sphere of public life: education, social welfare, health care. One of the core principles of Catholic social doctrine is the principle of subsidiarity, according to which decision-making ought to be left at the lowest possible level in a social hierarchy, commensurate with the common good: you don’t ask the local fire department to rout al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan; you don’t ask the federal government to run the local schools or the local doctor’s office (or at least you didn’t, once upon a time).

The Public Interest, which was chiefly responsible for brewing the ideas embodied in the welfare reform of the 1990s, was a journal in defense of subsidiarity and in opposition to what John Paul II called the “Social Assistance State.” That, one suspects, is why Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who was Catholic New York the way Irving was Jewish New York) was one of its first paladins (before Pat veered off onto a political track defined by fear of the New York Times editorial board). And that’s why it makes posthumous sense to remember Irving Kristol as a kind of Jewish Catholic social ethicist. I like to think he’d appreciate the title.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Job revisited: Notes of a diehard Orioles fan

Columns - The Catholic Difference

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 18:19

On Oct. 4, the Baltimore Orioles will take the field at Camden Yards against the Toronto Blue Jays and, win or lose, complete their 12th losing season in a row — which, for losing streaks, puts my beloved Birds in roughly the same category as the 10th century papacy under the Ottonian emperors. It was not always so; ample evidence for that admittedly counterintuitive claim is provided by a fine volume, The Orioles Encyclopedia, compiled by Mike Gesker (who works for Catholic Relief Services) and published recently by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Books like The Orioles Encyclopedia, and the love lavished on them by authors, editors, and readers, make an important theological point, to which I shall avert in a moment. First, permit a brief a trip down memory lane.

Hard as it may be to believe, after these last dozen years of futility, the Baltimore Orioles were the most successful team in the major leagues from the late 1950s through the early 1980s: more successful than the Yankees, Dodgers, or Cardinals; more successful than anyone. They played in a rough-hewn old ballpark, Memorial Stadium, the splinters from whose wooden benches will likely be found in the bottom of my coffin someday; they played for a “middle market” city that, truth to tell, was coming unglued even as the Birds won six American League titles and three World Series between 1966 and 1983; the franchise was always on the brink of financial disaster. But the Orioles scouted wisely, built from within, traded shrewdly, emphasized pitching and defense, and won more games than anyone over a quarter-century. Like Job, they enjoyed an ample share of the world’s goods, and then lost it all—or, better, threw it away by abandoning the “Oriole Way,” cheating on the farm system, and lusting for the fleshpots of the free agent market (see “Davis, Glenn” and “Belle, Albert”).

As Mr. Gesker writes in his Orioles Encyclopedia, “Looking back at the championship year of 1983 from the vantage point of 2009, it’s startling to imagine the amount of money a bettor would have won if, while the champagne was still flowing in the Birds’ clubhouse, he proposed that the Orioles would not return to the World Series before the Boston Red Sox (twice) and the Chicago White Sox were crowned World Champions, and as two, yet-to-be-conceived expansion teams (Florida Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks), and the Cleveland Indians, would appear in two World Series...You can bet the fortune gained would have made Bill Gates look like a pauper.”

Beyond the superstars — the Bradys and T.O.’s and Mosses, the Manning brothers, Big Ben, and the occasional defensive wizard like Ed Reed, Brian Urlacher, and Troy Polamalu—football is a rather anonymous game. Baseball, by contrast, is strikingly personal. The hard drive of my memory may need a good cleaning, but, in reading through Mr. Gesker’s encyclopedia, I was amazed at the hundreds of names I fondly recognized, from Jerry Adair to George Zuverink. And therein, I suggest, lies the theological lesson for the day.

Secular modernity teaches us that we can only come to know and honor universal truths by stripping ourselves of our particularities. Precisely the opposite is true, as baseball demonstrates. No one comes to know and love “baseball.” We come to know and love a particular team, composed of particular players. Through them, we come to love the game itself. That truth has applications in the spiritual life. John Paul II was frequently criticized for being “too Polish,” usually by people who thought that cherishing a particular place was an obstacle to embracing the complex worlds-within-worlds of the universal church, much less the whole world of humanity. Yet it was precisely his Polish experience that prepared Karol Wojtyla to become a universally beloved embodiment of paternity to an astonishing variety of people.

We learn to know what is abstract and universal through what is concrete and particular. We learn to love the big things through first loving the little things. There is no path to a broad empathy and sympathy that does not run through the person just in front of us.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.