On Neutrality
Discourse, McCabe, and God.
I should start by pointing you to a piece written by my good friend, Luke LeBar, who lives in the Twin Cities and whose commentary I wholeheartedly endorse:
A note on discourse: one way that people have escaped the difficult task of thinking about our time is by constantly positioning themselves as a “reasonable” moderate. As long as one can claim to criticize and/or be criticized by “both sides” on a given issue, one no longer has to seriously defend one’s own claims and can instead just call the others extremists. So, you end up with people believing themselves extraordinarily reasonable when often, in reality, they are simply too cowardly to commit to a position that might cost them some followers, money, or respect. However, this is cowardly precisely because this is most often done in situations where true “neutrality” is impossible, and to pretend it is possible is a dangerous game, spiritually speaking. Here is a prolonged quotation from a Holy Thursday Homily by the great Irish Dominican Herbert McCabe, which I think about often, and have referenced piecemeal in various posts here:
Holy Thursday is very blatantly about unity because it is about the Church- the sacrament (or mystery) of union with God and the unity of all mankind. In this phrase from Vatican II the union with God and the unity of mankind are not meant to be two separate things. The ultimate unity of people is only to be found in God, and the real God is only to be found in unity between people. It is just because we have not reached the point of unity, just because we are still alienated from each other, that our picture of God keeps slipping into falsehood and idolatry, so that God becomes for us the God of our class, our nation, our race or our time, the tutelary deity, perhaps, of the ‘free world’. It is because we have not reached unity in God who is love that our unity is less than the unity of all mankind. Our unity is always ‘ours’ over against ‘theirs’.
I do not mean to suggest that we should pretend that this is not so. I do not think we should foster the illusion that there is a unity of mankind. To do that is to pretend that there is no sin, that the kingdom is fully established, that there already is a brotherhood of the human race. In fact the only approach we have to a real unity is the solidarity of the poor and the exploited against their oppressors: we have to recognise both that this is so and that it is not enough. It is just the nearest we can get to unity. We have to recognise that the only God we know is the God of the poor, the God who takes sides in the struggle, and that any God of consensus who is supposed to belong to both sides is an illusion and a dangerous one. Sorting out the sides is, of course, a delicate business because though God is not on both sides we are: God is a God of judgement because he is love. We do not have ‘God on our side’, and this is not because God is neutral but because we are compromised. We have to see that there is no other God to be known except the God of the oppressed, ‘The Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery...you shall have no gods’; and yet this is not yet to know God. The Church must be the Church of the poor- this is the sign that she is on the way to the kingdom; it also shows she is not there. St Thomas says that we have sacraments (that is to say, the visible sacred life of the christian cult) because of sin; and, of course, we make an ‘option for the poor’ because of sin: when we have passed from the world of sin to the kingdom all this will wither away.1
I try, in general, to avoid overtly political topics and “current events” on here because I find that it causes a certain segment of my friends and readers to either tune out or lash out, but the coward dies a thousand times. Speaking bluntly, neutrality is not possible on the question of “should Christians support the kidnapping, abuse, and internment of our brothers and sisters?” To pretend that it is, as some Catholic and other Christian figures have done, by saying “maybe the state should be a little less violent, but the real problem is the people who are upset/protesting about [for example, the kidnapping, use as bait, and subsequent trafficking across state lines of the five-year-old child of a legal asylum seeker, or the harassment of citizens of the wrong ethnicity, including police, or taking people on their way into and from church]”, is not to expertly triangulate a “neutral position”, but rather to take a side while leaving oneself the room to say you were always against it when it becomes convenient to do so. It is cowardice. I have infinitely more respect for the honesty of those who are willing to stake their flag on the claim that we need to kidnap and imprison the five-year-old children of our Ethnic Scapegoat of the Week in order to achieve “peace as the world gives it” than I do this sort of lukewarm equivocating buck-passing. They may stand for something I find abhorrent and believe to be anti-Christic, but they are at least convicted of it, and willing to argue for their point and make their position known.
To be clear, one is perfectly free to debate the best methods of opposing these sorts of acts, and it is good, in my belief, to strongly emphasize a non-violent approach, as protestors in Minnesota and elsewhere have done (not that it has been reciprocated, of course), and even speak up when we feel that those standing with the targets of this campaign fall short of that standard, but this is not neutrality on the central moral question. There are also reasonable conversations to be had about just immigration policy, but it is crucial to recognize that that is not the conversation that we are having, and that attempts to make it so are evasions from the central moral question of how we are treating people like Liam Ramos, the five-year-old who was kidnapped and used as bait, right now. Neutrality on that point is not possible, and we do no good for our souls by pretending that it is.
If you are reading this page it is likely that you both believe in God and that we, in some way or another, will answer to Him for how we behaved in life. I would like you, if you are still reading, to prayerfully consider Matthew 25:31-46 (which I have attached here in the RSV translation)
31 “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. 34 Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? 38 And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? 39 And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ 45 Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ 46 And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
We do not welcome the stranger, or even the longtime neighbor who resembles one. As Pope Leo has said and I wholeheartedly agree: this is a disqualifying fact for those of us who would like to call ourselves pro-life, and it is one we will answer for to the very person to whom our un/welcome has been extended.
Now, I recognize that there is a certain limit to what each of us is able to do, but speaking honestly about it is a minimum that can be achieved by any and all. I would commend to you as well that if you are able to, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network is very worthy of your support, as is your local Catholic Charities. I’m sure there are many local (and non-Catholic, if that’s a preference) opportunities near you, dear reader, to feed and minister to those in need and being threatened. I encourage you to look into them.
McCabe, Herbert. 1986. “A Long Sermon for Holy Week: Part 1 Holy Thursday : The Mystery of Unity.” New Blackfriars 67 (788): 56–69. (pgs. 58-59). Emphasis Mine