Doubt, Dialogue and Demonization
by Fr. Roger Landry - May 22, 2009
Twice in the past two months, we have described why Notre Dame's decision to honor President Barack Obama by granting him an honorary doctorate of law and by inviting him to deliver its prestigious commencement address was a scandalous betrayal of the Catholic faith that the university claims to and should uphold. By shamelessly disregarding the prudent policy of the U.S. Bishops that no Catholic institution honor or give a platform to those who act in defiance of fundamental Catholic moral principles — as Obama has repeatedly done on the issue of the inviolable dignity of human life — the Notre Dame administration has shown that it would prefer to listen to the president than to the Church and to be on good terms with the successor of Washington and Adams than with the successors of the apostles.
In his commencement address on Sunday, President Obama, rather than vindicating the university's decision against its countless critics, reinforced the validity of the critics' arguments and the wisdom of the U.S. Bishops' policy. For beneath his ever genial tone, uplifting images and eloquent delivery, President Obama made several major points contrary to the Catholic faith. Packaged as they were, however, in mellifluous pseudo-Christian phrases enunciated in front of applauding Catholic priests by a man adorned with newly-bestowed doctoral garments, many failed to realize what he was doing.
The most audacious part of the address was when the President tried to change the meaning of the Christian faith and draw erroneous conclusions from the false notion. "The ultimate irony of faith," the president declared, "is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen." He seemed to be quoting from Hebrews 11:1, one of the most famous definitions of faith found in Sacred Scripture, but, whether intentional or not, he got its meaning completely wrong. The passage reads, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith is not a "belief" in things not seen — which would be tautological and nonsensical — but the "substance" or "evidence" of things not seen. Faith leads not to doubt, nor merely to subjective conviction, but to objective truth discoverable through revelation and grace.
In a challenging part of his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Pope Benedict described the real meaning of the passage the President failed to cite properly. Faith, the Pope said, is the "hypostasis, the 'substance' of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.' The concept of 'substance' is therefore modified [by the words 'proof of things not seen'] in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say 'in embryo' there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty [and] constitutes for us a 'proof' of the things that are still unseen."
So, according to the triple witness of the Letter to the Hebrews, Pope Benedict and the consistent teaching of Christianity, faith does not "necessarily admit doubt," as the President claims. In fact, true faith and doubt cannot coexist. We cannot believe in the Resurrection and at the same time doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. We cannot simultaneously believe that God is a Trinitarian communion of love and doubt his existence. This does not mean that a generally faithful person does not have occasional doubts, but these doubts are temptations against faith rather than necessary consequences or companions of faith.
Once one grasps how the President is mistaken about the connection between faith and doubt, it's easier to see how he errs in the conclusions he draws from the false premise. He spoke to the graduates at length about the "great uncertainty" of our era with its "competing claims about what is right and what is true." He warned them, "You will hear talking heads scream on cable, read blogs that claim definitive knowledge, and watch politicians pretend to know what they're talking about." He told them that no one can really know any of the most important things for sure, since "it is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us. This doubt should temper our passions and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate."
Whether by design or accident, this is nothing but relativism masquerading as religious reasoning. While because of human finitude it is impossible for us to know everything God has planned for us or asks of us, through faith and reason we can and do know much with certainty. Our faith and our rational nature should lead us, fundamentally, not just to continue a debate — which for the president would be a never-ending one about things we can never truly know — but to seek the truth, to understand the truth, and to live the truth. Rather than basing our lives on the rock of Jesus' words (Mt 7:24), Obama actually proposes the quicksand of the latest fad: instead of calibrating our culture's values to the truths discoverable by faith and reason, he astonishingly says that we need to "align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age."
This relativistic discussion about faith, doubt, and "moral and spiritual debate" contextualizes what the president said about "dialogue" in the principal part of his address. After mentioning the opposing sides of debates on the war, gay rights and embryonic stem cell research, he asked, "How do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? How do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?" He answered the questions with what sounded like a campaign slogan: "Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words." He elaborated, "When we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do, that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground."
Once the President's premise is admitted that we cannot know with certainty either by faith or reason the truth about what is right and wrong, then all that seems to be left is dialogue to try to find some subjective moral consensus. No one — especially faithful Catholics — would ever be opposed in principle to dialogue and a spirit of collaboration, but everyone should agree that in the case of some offenses dialogue is not only not enough but counterproductive. There's a reason why Martin Luther King never sought to engage in dialogue with the Ku Klux Klan, Holocaust survivors don't try to seek common ground with neo-Nazis and American law enforcement officers are not trying to engage Al-Qaeda in "moral and spiritual debate." Such dialogue would seem to put moral absolutes up for negotiation or compromise. The President doesn't call for dialogue on the merits of racism, anti-Semitism and terrorism, because he knows all are evil. He cites Martin Luther King, and not Rodney King, as a hero, because he knows that in the face of racism there's something more important than all of us just getting along.
The fundamental reason why the President called for dialogue and common ground on abortion in South Bend — and set up an elaborate pseudo-religious argument to pretend that it's all that can be achieved between the "irreconciliable" views on both sides of the abortion issue — seems to be because he seeks to draw pro-lifers, and Catholics in particular, from a position of moral absolutism about the evil of abortion to one aligned with the "demands of a new age," which wants unfettered abortion access. His call for an end to "demonizing" opponents — while itself certainly consistent with Jesus' summons to love the sinner and hate the sin — seems to be an attempt to get others to cease thinking that abortion itself is diabolical.
None of this means that we cannot work with the President to reduce the number of abortions and provide more assistance to women in crisis pregnancies. It does mean, however, that, contrary to the President's wishes, we cannot stop there. Unlike the President, we know by reason that abortion kills an innocent human being and know by certain faith that whatever we do or fail to do to that little child made in God's image and likeness, we do, or fail to do, to Christ (Mt 25:45).
That President Obama used the prestigious pulpit he was given at one of the nation's premier Catholic universities to impart a message contrary to this Gospel of Life should only bring greater shame to those who invited him.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
