I closely followed Pope Francis’ historic and memorable trip to the Holy Land, as I was participating in academic conferences and meetings in Rome and Venice as it unfolded. (I missed the Holy Father’s unannounced private visit to Santa Maria Maggiore by hours, as I had been there for Mass in the morning and he popped in that afternoon when the church was still full of tourists to dedicate his trip to the patronage of Mary.) Since our discussions at these events were focused on assessing the church’s role on the global, national and local political stage and in engaging our modern polycentric and pluralistic world in general, Pope Francis’ then-ongoing initiatives in the Middle East loomed large in our discussions.
J. Bryan Hehir, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has defended the church’s right and competency to speak to public policy and international relations debates, denying movements toward both a laïcité approach which would exclude religious worldviews from the public square entirely, and toward a theocratic one where politics and a single interpretation of a particular religion become inextricably entangled. Building on the insights of people like Yves Congar, Paul Tillich and John Courtney Murray, Hehir describes three models which can aid in our reflection on not whether church and politics ought to interact, but rather how they ought to do so: (1) the educational-cultural model, (2) the legislative-policy model, and (3) the prophetic-witness model.
The debate exists as to how Catholicism ought to propel further the unambiguous and social teaching of the church on the common good and the dignity of every human person and what relationship that teaching should have to specific political questions. Should it, as the first model proposes, seek to transform the long-term cultural views on migrants, the unborn, finance and consumerism, etc., remaining principled but in a sense “above the fray” on legal and socio-economic debates about the matters at hand? Or should it seek to enter into the public arena more concretely via direct advocacy efforts to fulfill its teaching and social ministry with explicit content that can influence specific law and policy discourse, as the second model proposes?
How can the third model, one indebted to Stanley Hauerwas and posing ecclesial life as an alternative to and not transformative of existing social structures, serve in some sense as a corrective to the other two?
These are complicated questions, but ones that embody the major currents of thinking about contemporary American and global political theology. Each has strengths, and as with so many elements of theological thinking and paradigms, the models need not and should not be seen as mutually exclusive.
As Hehir puts it, “The different answers produced by the three models should not be superficially reconciled or collapsed into a soft consensus position…. The tension in the ecclesial debate sharpens strategic thinking and deepens theological reflection.”
Though perhaps raising, rather than answering, many questions, I find the tension between these models of thinking about political Catholicism to be an informative and helpful asset in framing the conversation, especially when taking into account the pope’s specific steps toward seeking peace both between Catholics and other Christians, and between Israelis and Palestinians.
Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., of Collingswood, is a Research Associate at Durham University’s Centre for Catholic Studies in Northeast England.
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