How do you speak the language of morality in an age of militant secularism?

Catholics and Postmodernity 

By George Weigel

Let me begin by thanking my friend Judge Bill Griesbach for describing me here in Titletown U.S.A. as “the Aaron Rodgers of Catholic public intellectuals.” As a native of Baltimore with a long memory, I’ll be happy to accept that accolade if the good people of Green Bay will finally admit that Don Chandler shanked that field goal in the 1965 Colts/Packers playoff game.

Tonight, I want to violate the canons of after-dinner remarks, skip the requisite joke-every-two-paragraphs, and get right down to the business at hand: to drill beneath the surface of American public life in order to explore what’s going on down there; to examine how what’s going on down there shapes the controversies and arguments of the day; and to suggest how that bears on Catholics and other men and women whose consciences are formed by Great Tradition Christianity in these United States in the early 21st century.

But as an introduction to that heavy lifting, I’d like to begin on more familiar terrain, with the hymn we sang at the end of Mass this evening. Why? Because one of the less frequently sung verses of “America the Beautiful” strikes me with some force as an appropriate way to get into our topic:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

America! America!

God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

A Catholic knowledgeable about Christian history has to be struck by the irony of Catholics singing this stanza with gusto.

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• Americans once understood that God had inscribed moral truths into the world and into us, truths that could be known by reason. Today, the nation’s principal political newspaper, the Washington Post, editorially describes an appeal to those truths as an example of a new “language of racism, bias, and intolerance” — and does so in aid of the claim that government should recognize that Adam can “marry” Steve.
• Americans once understood that our “rights” had to be tethered to a higher moral law, that just government was by the consent of the governed, and that democratic decision-making should, except in very rare circumstances, be made in legislative bodies by the people’s elected representatives. Today, we are increasingly governed by unelected Supreme Court justices and unaccountable regulators, many of whom seem to take their concept of freedom and human rights from that great moral philosopher, Frank Sinatra: “I did it my way.”
• Americans once understood that the state existed to serve society, not the other way around. Today, we are governed by a federal administration that seems determined to shrink the size of civil society and vastly enlarge the sphere of state power, as it has done in the HHS contraceptive/abortifacient/sterilization mandate.
• Americans once understood that, as Father Murray put it, “only a virtuous people can be free.” Today, freedom is too often reduced to a mantra of “choice,” and the urgent moral question “Choose what?” is rarely engaged; in fact, it is assiduously avoided by the pro-choice lobby in the aftermath of the Gosnell trial, and it was simply ignored by the president of the United States in a 2013 speech to Planned Parenthood.

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