Holy Mother the State

We Catholics look to Holy Mother the Church for nurture, nourishment, protection and Life itself. She provides these in superabundance because of her bridal union with Christ: more than a social institution, she is the Communion of Saints, an eternal personality; even as a historical reality, she is a living, supernatural organism.

A theological liberal may be understood as someone unable to understand and cherish the conjugal, feminine, receptive and maternal essence of the Church (and of Creation itself) who therefore defaults to an ontological model based on the supremacy of the individual: isolated, autonomous, atomic, and homogeneous. (Therefore, woman priests, contraception, and so forth.)

A political liberal may be understood as one who distrusts the Church and looks to the State for redemption, who expects superabundant nurture, protection and Life from the federal government. Within a post-Protestant America dislodged from the Marian/Sacramental/Apostolic Church, the liberal finds his inverse image in the political/fiscal conservative who places his security and trust in unregulated, low-taxed, free markets.

Last night Raymond Arollo interviewed Father Sirico of the Acton Institute on the Obama economic plan. I listened with interest but was disappointed that Arollo and EWTN with their centrist, populist instincts would endorse such extreme, right wing economic views. Father Sirico defended the moral validity of market economics, locating moral goodness/evil in the personal decisions of individuals, thereby shielding capitalism from systematic critique. In this he implicitly ignores or denies the strong papal critique of structural or systemic injustice consistently echoed by our popes and applied to the USA with lucidity and brilliance by David Schindler and his colleagues in the Communio School of theology. Nevertheless, as a Catholic corrective to Obama adulation, Father Sirico was helpful with his comments on subsidiarity, the effect of tax increases upon charitable giving and the non-profit sector, and the expansion of government as a threat to other social actors.

The Obama economic plan has good intentions: stimulate the economy, restore infrastructure, provide adequate health coverage, redistribute wealth back to the poor and working classes, increase federal spending for education, and correct the climate and energy problems. He promises to do all of this by taxing the rich and bringing our troops home and still cut taxes on the middle class. Do you really believe our government will be able to do all of this? If so, you have a most credulous, and possibly delusional, trust in Holy Mother the State.

Aside from the unreality of the vision, consider that this administration is already pouring millions of our dollars (with the backing of “pro-life Catholic" Democrat Bob Casey) into contraception and abortion for poor women overseas; that he has promised to sign FOCA which absolutizes a woman’s right to abortion and would coerce participation in such; that “faith based initiatives” receiving federal funds will have to deny their faith convictions and collaborate with his secular, anti-life agenda. The liberal fantasy of a nurturing Mother State will turn into a smothering, voracious, and destructive Monster: depriving her children of liberties and even of life itself.

The more I read of Obama’s plans, the more eager I am to cling to our true mother, the Church. As Catholic, I look to neither government nor free markets for security and hope; I walk a middle path of subsidiarity and moderation; and I am free of delusional, idolatrous and destructive economic ideologies sanctified by names like Obama or Reagan.

See you in the Eucharist!