The Pope and the President: From Notre Dame to Vatican City and Back

In her New York Times article of July 10, one day prior to the now-historic visit between President Obama and Pope Benedict XVI, Laurie Goodstein compared the reaction of the U.S. bishops to President Obama with that of the Vatican, quoting various Catholics, one of whom was Bishop William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., who mentioned how, although the bishops were “looking to work with him [President Obama]… we need to be clear when his proposals run counter to what we as Catholics teach” (would anyone suspect that Obama doesn’t know what the Church teaches?).

What seems to lie beneath the surface of the whole controversy that began with the Notre Dame award and continued up through the President’s personal encounter with Pope Benedict is something Benedict himself stressed beginning from the period of Vatican II: that to claim that the Catholic Church is merely a bearer of morals or ethics in society, i.e., “teachings,” is to lessen what it is. And it is here that Bishop Murphy’s statement tends to exemplify a reductive mentality and outlook regarding the Church that is prevalent both among Catholics (bishops, clergy and laity included) and non-Catholics alike.

An example of this can be seen in a story by Jacqueline Salmon that appeared in the Washington Post on Wednesday, July 8, prior to the visit when, in reference to George Weigel’s speculation regarding drafts of Caritas in Veritate perused by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Salmon described Weigel as saying, “…two drafts of the document prepared by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace had been rejected by the pope and that it was possible that the encyclical's stress on wealth distribution, rather than wealth creation, was a conciliatory gesture toward more left-leaning members of the Vatican bureaucracy” (note the “it was possible” here). One notices the subtlety of how well Weigel posits his speculation on one side of the ideological spectrum and presumes to align even the Pope with his side of things (as if to imply that the Holy Father is against wealth distribution and that this can only be of a socialist nature).

This is highly similar to what occurred during the pontificate of John Paul II if we recall how when John Paul II warned George Bush not to go into Iraq, many conservative Catholics deemed the Pope’s opinion as irrelevant since it did not have to do with either faith or morals, while in reality, what the so-called “conservative” Pope had done was dare to conflict with U.S. “conservative” Republican interests. The Catholic Church’s highly audacious claim—that it is mysteriously the actual continuation of the presence of Jesus Christ on earth, and not simply an arbiter of morals or ethics—brings some far subtler distinctions to bear on the politics of our time, and it is easier for everyone to renege on the mystical implications of this and go to battle with one another on ideological grounds: pro-life versus pro-choice, pro-free market versus pro-government control, pro-Israel versus pro-Palestine.

Yet the Church’s claim—that it is the bearer of Christ Himself in the world despite many of the highly glaring flaws of its adherents, both clergy and laity alike, as well as despite its historical mistakes—is what was really at stake the day its leader, a human being whose task is to witness Christ and not to evaluate another human being according to ethical guidelines, met the first African American man to lead the free world. One would hope that many Catholics, starting from the bishops themselves, would understand that Christianity means a human encounter in which Christ makes Himself known through the very presence of the baptized believer—something the Holy Father exemplified for us in his encounter with Barack Obama—an encounter that cannot be reduced to either side’s “positions” on a variety of topics. One would hope that Catholics—conservative and liberal alike—take their cue from this and stop reducing their faith to a set of easily apprehended ethical tenets when the true ontology of faith is unpredictable, because it has to do with the mystery of how God takes on human flesh in the present—something that can potentially throw back any believer, liberal and conservative alike, because it removes faith from the realm of one’s own intellectual pretensions and transcends any facile reductions of what a human being actually is to what he or she thinks or believes.