Catholic Instead of What?

Alasdair MacIntyre
[Transcript of a public lecture delivered November 9, 2012 at Notre Dame, with questions and answers following.]

Let me begin with an expression of gratitude and an apology. The expression of gratitude is for being
given the opportunity to develop two lines of thought in this paper which I am still working on, one
about what it is to be committed to Catholic positions in secular culture, and the other which is what
this means specifically about justice. But of course the apology comes here: I am taking on themes that
are much too large for a single paper, and not just one, but two, so you're going to have a lot to
complain about.

Catholic Christians believe that God exists, that the Word was made flesh, that the bread and wine of
the Eucharist become Christ's body and blood, that the pope and the bishops teach with apostolic
authority. But Catholic Christians also disbelieve, and in each particular time and place, they deny just
those secular doctrines, theories, and attitudes that then and there are taken to provide grounds for
rejecting the truths of the Catholic faith. To be a reflective Catholic is always to be a Catholic rather
than something else. So, Augustine was a Catholic rather than a Manichean or a Neoplatonist; Pascal
was a Catholic rather than a skeptic or a Cartesian; Maritain was a Catholic rather than a materialist or
a Bergsonian. In what they affirm scripturally, in the creeds, and liturgically, there is that which is the
same for Catholics of every generation. But the denials that are the counterparts to those affirmations
vary with time, place, and culture. So how is it with us here now?

To be a Catholic here and now is to reject, among other things, the claims of any version of scientific
naturalism: the claims that all truths are either truths of the natural sciences or non-scientific truths that
are what they are only because the truths disclosed by the natural sciences are what they are. Scientific
naturalists are therefore atheists, since no finding of physics, chemistry, or biology provides them with
anything like a good reason for asserting that God exists. About this latter thesis, they are of course
right, and Catholics can happily agree that to study nature as physicists, chemists, and biologists study
it is already to have excluded God from the possible objects of enquiry. But on a Catholic view, there is
nonetheless that about nature which cries out for explanation. Nature is the actualization of one
particular set of possibilities among indefinitely many. And a very remarkable set it is that has been
actualized. The history of nature is a story of how where, once there were only particles and fields of
force, there came to be cabbages, spiders, and scientific naturalists. Given nature's starting point and
the range of alternative possibilities that might have developed from it, it is an astonishing set of
possibilities that have in fact been actualized.

Suppose now that some Catholic or Jewish or Islamic follower of Aristotle were to be convinced that
no set of possibilities can be actualized except by some actual agent not a member of that set. And
suppose further that such a one could not then resist the inference that nature could be what it
astonishingly has been, is, and will be only because of the act of such an agent prior to and independent
of nature, whose powers are not limited as powers of natural agents are limited; that is, God. Catholics
and many other theists should find it difficult to treat this argument as unsound, since it is a restatement
of our belief that, if God didn't exist, neither would nature exist. Yet to scientific naturalists, it turns out
to be a wholly unpersuasive argument since it presupposes a concept of explanation that they take to be
illegitimate. It's not so much that they reject the theists' answer as that they exclude the possibility of
asking the theists' question. So reflective Catholics find themselves compelled to identify their own
philosophical commitments, commitments that turn out to include a conception of human beings as
essentially questioning and self-questioning beings as by their nature posing questions about
themselves and their place in nature that, if scientific naturalism is true, are illegitimate. By so doing,
they find themselves participants in a range of philosophical controversies in which there appears to be
no prospect of resolving disagreement through rational argument. So how should they respond to this
situation?

Newman, reflecting on the debates in which he had been involved, advanced an argument about
arguments. Only in mathematics and logic, he contended, are there arguments with compelling force
just by themselves as arguments. Elsewhere, what compelling force a particular argument has depends
upon background beliefs and attitudes that individuals bring with them to the evaluation of that
argument. It's thesewhat Newman called that large outfit of existing thoughts, principles, likings,
desires, and hopes, which make me what I am [Grammar of Assent]that determine what weight a
particular individual gives to this or that type of consideration. It's differences in these that underlie
radical philosophical disagreements. So we may ask, what then are the underlying attitudes and beliefs
that distinguish someone whose understanding of human agents is compatible with the truth of the
Catholic faith and someone for whom this is not so?

The answer that I propose is this: that the key differences arise from the ways in which each
understands the narrative of her or his life. Consider how someone may ask, prospectively or
retrospectively, if that life is going well or badlyif so far it has gone well or not badlyin what part
she or he has played in making it go well or badly. There would be no story to tell if it were not the case
that at crucial points it has been, is, and will be up to the agent to determine how things go. And the
questions of how things have gone with one so far, and of how one must act if they are to go well in the
future, are among those that human agents can't avoid putting to themselves. But notice now that they
are among the questions that consistent scientific naturalists have to judge illegitimate, for even to ask
them presupposes the possibility that human goodness and human evil make a significant difference to
how the world goes; that human choices effect changes in nature, changes that can't be explained by the
interaction of fundamental particles.

To be a Catholic, then, is to be among those who understand both their own lives and those of others in
terms of narratives whose structures can be epic, tragic, comic, or farcical, irrespective of the relations
between usthe subjects of those narrativesand the goods that we pursue or fail to pursue. One
prerequisite for achieving goods rather than evils is ruthless truthfulness in recounting the story so far.
Why is such truthfulness so difficult? It is because if our stories are told truthfully, they are stories of
our fallenness, and it is part of our fallenness to be unwilling to acknowledge our fallenness. So to be a
Catholic is to share Newman's thought that if we view this world as it is, we are bound to conclude
that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His
presence [Apologia Pro Vita Sua]. And the stories that we tell about ourselves are truthful only if they
present not only the human world in general but also our particular lives as the lives of fallen beings.

Yet now we have to note that understanding human life in these terms is not peculiar to Catholics, that
it finds extraordinary dramatic expression in the portrayal of human beings for whom God is wholly
absent that we owe to Samuel Beckett, the great tragic voice of the twentieth century. What am I to do,
what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? asks the narrator of Beckett's The
Unnamable. By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or
sooner or later? Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless.
But it is quite hopeless. So Beckett's characters live out their truthful hopelessness in a kind of
narrative atheism that puts the Catholic faith to the question, both intellectually and imaginatively. And
reflective Catholics have to acknowledge that they are Catholics rather than those for whom Beckett's
dramatic vision of the human condition has the last word. The stories that Catholics tell about their own
lives, and about those of others, are stories of fallenness but not of hopelessness, and this because those
stories presuppose the truth of the biblical narrativeare intelligible only in terms of the biblical
narrative.

The two examples that I've given so far of contemporary Catholic unbeliefour rejection of the
seductions both of scientific naturalism and of Samuel Beckett's temptingly tragic view of the world
are perhaps sufficient, even if barely so, to illustrate two more general theses. The first is that these
rejections and denials add significant content to our Catholic beliefs. To believe in God nowadays is in
part to deny the truth of scientific naturalism. To believe in our redemption is in part to deny that in
Samuel Beckett's vision which makes hope an illusion.

A second thesis is that it was out of our particular quarrels with those works of the intellect and the
imagination that the Catholic culture of the last century came to be. The philosophy that emerges from
our quarrel with scientific naturalism; the poetic storytelling that emerges from our quarrel with the
literature of despair; the philosophy, say, of a Robert Sokolowski, or of a Maritain, or of a Gabriel
Marcel; the storytelling, say, of a Flannery O'Connor, or of a Claudel, or of a Graham Greene. As I
already suggested, the alternative and rival forms of belief with which Catholics need to engage vary
from age to age, and so therefore do the quarrels which Catholics have with such beliefs. It follows that
the beliefs of reflective Catholics also vary, and that the Catholic culture that emerges from the quarrel
with one such set of alternative and rival forms of belief may be very different from that which emerges
in other contexts. There have been, and are, Catholic cultures, not Catholic culture.

But there is a force on unchanging Catholic faith, that which is, has been, and will be one and the same
in doctrine and in worship. And since it is because of their relationship to what is one and the same in
that faiththat Catholic cultures in all their variety are called Catholicmore needs to be said about
how faith informs our cultural projects. Begin from what I said about fallenness as understood by
Newman and by Beckett. Beckett's imaginative world is not open to the possibility of hope; Newman's
is. And it is so because the narrative of his life, as he recounts it in the Apologia, presupposes both the
truth of the biblical narrative and that the history of the Catholic church is continuous withis the
same history asthe history of our redemption as it is narrated in scripture.

Reconsider in this light the relationship of our quarrels with scientific naturalism to those with
Beckett's tragic vision. It shouldn't surprise us that a rational commitment to the metaphysics of theism
and an ability to understand one's life in terms of the narrative of scripture should be closely related,
since someone lacking either of these would be bound to have a defective conception of the principal
actors in that narrative: on the one hand, of God; on the other, ourselves. If we are to think of God as he
is, then we have to think of him as both Creator and first cause, omnipresent and providential sustainer
of the natural order, and as one who intervenes here and not there; who addresses Moses but not
Socrates; who spoke his definitive words to us in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, not in Irish or German;
who both ordains laws of nature and works miracles. If we are to think of ourselves as we are, then we
have to understand ourselves not only as estranged from God by our rebellious wills but also as
incompletely and inadequately human, until we are reconciled to him through the redemptive work of
God incarnate in Jesus. Our narratives are incomplete and indeed not fully intelligible until we bring
them into relationship with the gospel narrativethe narrative of scripture.

Because this is so, we find ourselves at yet another point in conflict with the contemporary secularizing
mind, this time in the arenas of historical enquiry and debate. For us, much is at stake in the scholarly
arguments about biblical texts and history. Consider the remarkable contrasts between the Jesus of
whom we can know very little, of Wrede and his twentieth-century followers; the Jewish Jesus of Gza
Vermes; the egalitarian, peasant Jesus of J. D. Crossan; the scatological Jesus of Schweitzer; and the
Jesus who emerges from N. T. Wright's magisterial trilogy. In which Jesus are we to believe? Among
these contenders, only the last is recognizable as the Jesus of whom the Catholic church speaks, or
rather, the Jesus who speaks to us through the Catholic church. If that Jesus is the object of our faith, it
can't be only because of our judgment concerning the superiority of Wright's historical scholarship
crucially important as that isbut must be also, and primarily, because we take God himself to have
authorized the apostles, and the Catholic bishops as their successors, to teach the truth concerning his
self-revelation in Jesus and his saving work. Here then as elsewhere, the commitments that are part of a
reflective Catholic culturewhether philosophical, imaginative, or as in this case, historicalare
different from but also inseparable from the sacramental commitments of faith. How then are these
related?

They are related in and through the activity of prayer, both the prayer that brings our praise, our
gratitude, and our sense of our needs before God, and the prayer in which we learn to attend silently to
him, listening rather than speaking. For the only expression of both sets of commitments, cultural and
theological, is prayer. So prayer is integral to the activities that constitute any Catholic culture. How we
pray is how we are.

Three aspects of prayer are peculiarly relevant. The first finds expression in John Chrysostom's gloss
on Paul's injunction to pray constantly: It's possible to offer fervent prayer even while walking in
public, or strolling along, or seated in your shop while buying or selling, or even while cooking.
Indeed, our everyday activities can be a form of prayer, something that Benedict teaches us with respect
to manual labor, and Dominic with respect to study. Secondly, prayerconversation with Goddoesn't
always take the forms of conventional piety. Abraham engaged in dialectical argument with God
designed to convince him that he was in danger of acting unjustly. Job cursed God, upsetting those
proto-theologians, Job's comforters, not upsetting God in the slightest. Teresa of Avila, on a particularly
bad day, remarked to God that if this was how he treated his friends, it was small wonder that he had so
few. Finally, we learn from both John of the Cross and Dorothy Day that progress in the discipline of
prayer is evidenced not by the vagaries of mystical experience but by growth in charity, a charity that is
more, but never less, than justice. A would-be Catholic culture fails in Catholicity if it doesn't take this
thought seriously.

(So this, as it were, lays the ground for asking what it is to think as a Catholic about secular topics.
What I do now is to give an example, an example from the past.)

Let me illustrate these thoughts by turning to an instructive example of a Catholic mind at work in the
world of culture, in another time and place: that of Charles Pguy in France, between the years of 1908,
when he returned to the faith of his Catholic childhood, and 1914, when he died on the battlefield. Born
at Orlans in 1873, Pguy found himself in adult life, like his contemporaries of the Third Republic,
morally, politically, and religiously defined by a single line of division between a right-wing
establishmenta Catholic, clerical, and conservative upper-class bourgeoisie, defenders of the
economic order of capitalismand a secularizing, anti-clerical, radical or socialist left-wing
establishment, each of the two with its own partisan version of French history. Pguy as an atheist and
socialist identified with the latter, seeing in the right-wing establishment the enemies of the harmonious
city that he aspired to restore. But when he became a Catholic, although he had by then learned to
distrust the factionalism and bureaucracy of the Socialist Party, he remained as much at odds with the
right as before, for he now defined himself as Catholic rather than someone definable by the antithesis
between Catholic, conservative, and secular socialist. And he gave expression to this self-definition
both through metaphysics, through poetic narrative; through a retelling of the French Catholic story as
at once Catholic and monarchical and socialist and republican.

His metaphysics he took from Bergson. Bergson, had he believed, had identified the errors of the
French materialism of the late nineteenth century, that earlier version of scientific naturalism, by
showing that there is that in human beings which can only be understood in moral and religious terms.
But he also valued in Bergson's critique of analytical reason his capacity to disquiet those too much in
love with their own beliefs, whatever they happen to be. A great philosophy, he wrote, is not that
which passes final judgments []; it is that which introduces uneasiness. The French of his age,
whether Catholic conservatives or secularizing socialists, needed to be disquieted and disturbed. What
France had come to lack was, on Pguy's view, a shared sense of the mystery of things, a sense
formerly communicated through the traditions of the common people, a sense that had been displaced
by a politics of conflicting slogans and programs. It's not that a politics of programs was not needed
modern societies have inflicted deprivation and destitution on the poor, and from these the poor have to
be rescued by a politics of justice rooted in charitybut they, and others too, have to be rescued from
impoverished notions of what it is to be French and Catholic, of what it is that errs both of Jeanne d'Arc
and of the Revolution of 1789.

So Pguy took on a task at once political and historical and poetic, one that would allow the French to
understand that by failing to live as Christians, they had failed to be French, and that God was now
calling them through the French-speaking voices that speak in Pguy's poetry, the voices of Jeanne
d'Arc, and of Our Lady, and of God himself: to become once again Christian and once again French.
Even the thought that God may be French is as likely to be as disconcerting to contemporary
Americans as the thought that God is Jewish is to Catholic anti-semites of Pguy's day. What is likely
to be disconcerting to all of us here and nowjust as there and thenis Pguy's thought that a
necessary prelude to an adequate politics may be on the one hand metaphysics, on the other a poetry
that is a form of prayer, poetry and prayer well-designed as an antidote to the corruption of political
speech. This was a thought that found extraordinary creative expression not only in Pguy's poetry but
also in the Catholic culture that it helped to generate: the culture of Marcel and Claudel, of Bernanos
and Mauriac, of Mounier and Maritain, of Poulenc, and strikingly, of de Gaulle. Is it perhaps a thought
for us too? And what would it be for us to find application for this thought in contemporary terms?

We, like Pguy, inhabit a politically polarized culture, albeit one very different from his. Ours is one in
which the idioms of a vulgarized liberalism and a vulgarized conservatism, idioms that are the
offspring of an alliance between public intellectuals and advertising agencies, have combined to create
political speech and corrupt political action. It's perhaps an unexpected thought that a Catholic response
to this political condition has to begin from reflection not on politics itselfat least as we commonly
understand itbut on metaphysics, on narrative, on poetry, and on prayer. Yet it may be that this is a
thought that we here now should be taking very seriously. So what would it be to entertain this thought?

Begin with the metaphysics. To whom do we owe justice? Catholics rightly affirm that we owe it to the
unborn child, asserting an identity of that child with a child after birth. The child grows up. But if so,
we owe it to the child throughout its life, the child with an animal and more than animal identity. We
are then committed to a strong metaphysical conception of human identity, of what this child is and has
it in her or him by reason of her or his nature to become. What we owe to each child in justice are the
resources that will enable this child to become what she or he has it in her or him to become. The
agents who primarily owe this child justice are its parents and later its teachers. What justice requires of
the rest of us is that we make it possible for them to acquire the resources that will allow parents to
construct and sustain a flourishing family life and teachers to construct and sustain flourishing schools.
So one of the first things that we know about a just economy is that it must provide employment for
parents and teachers that is sufficiently well paid for them to be able to achieve genuine excellence as
parents and as teachers.

But at this point someone will rightly complain that I'm moving through the arguments much too fast.
Just what then are these metaphysical commitments concerning identity of which I am speaking? And
just why and how are they bound up with radical commitments to justice? They are, first of allall of
themcontroversial commitments. The conception of human identity from which we begin is at odds
with a number of currently influential philosophical accounts: with Derek Parfit's view; with liberal
accounts of human personhood whereby the newborn infant, let alone the fetus, is not yet a person;
with conceptions of human identity as no more than animal identity. So we have to take a distinctive
stance in a range of contemporary philosophical debates, drawing upon the resources provided by the
Thomistic philosophy of the human agent but addressing questions that Aquinas never had occasion to
address. Here is a programme of philosophical work, most of which is yet to be done. But we don't
need to have carried that work forward very far to recognize that our metaphysical commitments
involve moral and political commitmentsindeed that our metaphysical enquiries will themselves go
astray if we don't take into account some of the moral and political dimensions of human individuals
and their relationships.

To be a human individual is to have the potentialities of a rational animal. The history of any particular
individual can be told as the story of how her or his potentialities were or were not actualized. But since
those potentialities are for the most part actualized in and through that individual's relationships with
othersfamily members, teachers, friends, antagonists, members of the same theater company, fellow
citizensthose potentialities in that history have to be understood in social terms. Consider for
example one distinctively human characteristic, accountability to others. Good parents and teachers call
us to account early on for what we do and what we say. And characteristically and generally, it is by
learning that they are accountable, and by becoming accountable, that children first become aware of
the ineliminable part that conceptions of justice and fairness are going to play in their lives. But what
we are all of us accountable for is, in key part, acting justly and fairly: in the school and in the
playground, in quarrels as in friendships, in our closest relationships as in our relationships to the wider
community.

What we're grasping here are, on a Catholic view, the requirements of the natural law. And it is insofar
as they grasp these requirements that Catholics and non-Catholics alike understand what adults owe to
children, all the children for whom they are accountable as members of the same political society. The
primary responsibility, as I noticed a moment ago, belongs to parents. But I also noticed that parents
can give their children what they owe to them only if they have economic means that enable them to
house, clothe, and feed those children; have the time and energy to play with those children and to tell
them stories. Children deprived of such homes find it often difficult and sometimes impossible to learn
from their teachers in school, no matter how good those teachers. The children who don't learn are
unable to become educated citizens, and a society with a significant portion of badly educated or
uneducated citizens is always a defective society, one in which it becomes difficult or even impossible
to arrive at rational agreement about common goods and, therefore, about the requirements of justice
and how they are to be achieved.

So we arrive at something close to a paradox. In order to carry forward those public debates and
enquiries through which alone we can justly determine what it would be for our society to be justly
ordered, especially with regard to the educational needs of children, we need the politics of a widely-
educated public. But to have this kind of public and this kind of politics, we need already not only to
have determined what justice requires with respect to the distribution of educational opportunity but to
some large degree to have satisfied those requirements. And in this the United States as a political
society has clearly failed in recent decades, and this in two ways.

First, the United States has in these decades become a society not of diminishing but of sharply
increasing inequality. The inequalities most often remarked on are those of income and wealth, but
quite as important are the inequalities in education. Consider just one remarkable fact, one rough-and-
ready true generalization: that in any large urban area, the districts in which the children are most in
need are those where expenditures per school student are likely to be the lowest, and vice versa. Add to
that that when economic pressures on federal, state, and local governments require cuts in budgets,
those cuts extend to those whose educational needs are already unmet. I'm not one of those who believe
that educational problems can be solved byyou've probably heard this foolish phrase quite often
throwing money at them. What I do know is that only massive changes in the distribution of our
financial and other resources could remedy this particular injustice.

So why is the need for such a massive redistribution something so rarely if even hinted at in political
debates? It is, I want to suggest, in part because of our weakened and still weakening sense of political
community, a weakened sense in successive generations of what it is to be an American, with
responsibilities to other Americans, of what it is to be informed by and share in the common history of
the particular political society that is the United States. This loss of historical memory has three
aspects.

First, Americans used to be much more aware than they are nowadays of the pasts of their own
families, an awareness that resulted from the passing on from parents to children and more importantly
from grandparents to grandchildren of stories, stories that often related the past that made them what
they were to the past that had made their country what it was. This changes, of course, only one
consequence in the decline of family conversation as a folk art.

Secondly, contemporary Americans are much less apt to remember what they owe to the dead and to
remember by celebrating that debt: whether it is to those who died at Valley Forge; to the black
Americans of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment who died in the assault on Fort Wagner in 1863; to the
Japanese Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team who died in Italy and the Ardennes in
1943 to 1944; or to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, killed by their fellow
Americans in Mississippi, martyred for the cause of civil rights in 1964. The history of these dead
Americans is central to that larger history of which each family history is a part. It is central, too, to the
history of American struggles for justice.

Thirdly, Americans by and large no longer have the habit of poetry. When I speak of poetry, I mean
memorable, or if you like, memorizable, speech. When I speak of the habit of poetry, I mean a
disposition to express shared memory and shared sentiment in such speech. When, in 1876, Emerson
wanted to celebrate the dead and the living of 1776, he wrote a poem. Nothing surprising about that,
you may say; just one of Emerson's works. But what matters is that generation after generation of
American school children learned that poem by heart and expected their children to learn it, too, as they
did. But at a certain point in time, they stopped learning it, and not only it. Or take the case of Walt
Whitman. I grew up in another country, taught by my schoolmasters that to be an American was to read
Whitman. When I immigrated forty-two years ago, I tested their claim by asking students in my classes
classes often of a hundred or more studentshow many of them had read Whitman in high school.
For the first fifteen years or so, the answer was always way above eighty percent, and then it began to
decline until from 2007 onwards it was zero. Of what is this change a symptom?

Whitman is so importantly American first because he is the poet of many voices, all speaking, some
shouting, some singing through him, but most of them in fact not his; voices from the dead and from
the future; voices that contend for a hearing; voices that invite countervoices; voices that don't silence
much quieter and more disturbing American voices, such as Emily Dickinson's. To become American
from the late nineteenth century onwards was to have to find one's own voice in and through the
multiplicity of voices, while valuing the multiplicity, the discordance, the variety as much as, or
sometimes even more than, one's own songs and speeches and rants. America was an extraordinary
experiment in poetic disagreement, in agreement to value poetic disagreement, but alas an experiment
that has failed for some decades. What disturbingly large numbers of Americans now most want is for
other people, beginning with other Americans, to agree with them, and to agree with them speaking in
the same tones of voice, in self-righteously condemning those who don't agree with them. The so-called
culture wars were the beginning of the symptoms of the loss of a culture.

There is, of course, a political story to be told about the United States in these same decades, a story
which in part concerns the politics of a period of economic and financial expansion, that was also a
story of irresponsible risk taking, of that grotesque and growing inequality to which I have already
referred, of blatant expansion of credit and infliction of debt followed by economic and financial partial
collapse. That political story is also a story of wars undertaken without any adequate calculation of
either the financial cost or the human cost. It is a story in which the rhetoric of politics has become
increasingly inadequate to represent the realities with which it ostensibly deals. In politics, as in their
shared culture more generally, Americans have to rediscover how to speak to each other.

How, then, should American Catholics respond to this situation in which urgent issues of charity and
justice confront them? How can they tell this story so that it doesn't have a tragic ending? How can they
bring their metaphysics and their narrative to bear on the issues that confront them? I can pose this
question to you, but I can't answer it, and not just because I happen to know of no good answer to it; for
even if I did, I couldn't answer it because I'm not an American, and only Americans can rethink and
poetically imagine what it is to be an American and what it would be to have an adequate politics.

About American Catholics who will be able to do this, I can, however, say three things. The first is that
they will be Catholics rather than those who define themselves as liberal rather than conservative or
conservative rather than liberal. They will have learned from Pguy. They will reject not just the tired
slogans of those antitheses but the ingrained habits of thought that they express. They will confront the
particularities of local problems with deep suspicions of both the market and the state.

A second characteristic of such present and future American Catholics derives from that in the life of
the contemporary American church, which is its chief glory: the extent to which so many Catholics
have, in attempting to meet the full range of human needs in all their variety and particularity, already
taken the measure of those needs with charity and justice: the needs of the hungry and the homeless;
the needs of single mothers; the needs of migrant farmworkers; the needs of refugees and illegal
immigrants; the needs for good high schools for deprived children; the needs of the physically and the
mentally ill; the needs of those in prison and of ex-prisonersthe catalogue could go on and on. And
so could the catalogue of Catholic groups and institutions devoted to meeting those needs, sometimes
in cooperation with non-Catholics, sometimes alone: Catholic Worker houses; Dismas Houses and
other organizations that aid ex-prisoners; the St. Vincent de Paul Society; the groups of the Conference
of Catholic Bishops and individual bishops set to work for immigrants and refugees; the teachers in
Catholic schools; and the students who, through the Alliance for Catholic Education, become such
teachers; the priests and parishoners who have been and are hospitable to those in need. We generally
and rightly don't think of their activities as political, but it is their activitiesand the needs that they
identifythat provide the starting point for any adequate politics. How so?

What they provide is a measure of the variety and depth of human need, and more especially of the
needs of children: children who are hungry or homeless; children of prisoners; children whose schools
fail them; children whose parents don't have the means of caring for them. So the first political question
to be addressed, both to intellect and imagination, is what would it mean to live in a society where it
was widely felt to be intolerable that those needs should not be met in the ordinary course of life? And
the second political question to be similarly addressed is: how would life be organized in a society
where those needs were met in the ordinary course of life?

I leave you with questions and tasks. And as I said earlier, to think well about these questions, you
would do well to begin not with thinking about politics but with thinking about issues that confront us
in metaphysics, in poetry, in narrative, and particularly in that metaphysics which is our own, in that
mode of speech which is our own, in that narrative which is our own. What I do want to suggest is that
it is of some importance now to be Catholic rather than someone for whom these are not inescapable
questions.

[Sean Kelsey follows with a response, then the floor is opened for questions.]

So I thank you both for very provocative and insightful comments. My question is for Professor
MacIntyre. I'm very sympathetic to what you say about the need to take the needs of children into
account, and the need to have more just allocation of educational resources. But I was surprised that,
in talking about the ways in which our culture does not take those needs into account and the ways in
which children suffer from an unjust allocation of resources, you didn't mention the sort of deeper
injustices or the deeper sources of educational imbalance, which is the fact that children are not
receiving the sorts of education that they need in early life from their parents because of the decline of
a marriage culture. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what justice and charity
require for us as Catholics in this culture, with the needs of children very much in mind, in terms of
strengthening that marriage culture.

It's very important here that to recognize the depth of a problem doesn't mean you've taken a single step
towards solving it. One of the small remarks that I made was about how the loss of a sense of past
among Americansand this is something that I noticed very much in my own students, not only here
but in other universities over the past forty yearsthis loss of a sense of past is bound up with the loss
of the art of family conversation; with the extent to which children are brought up talking to parents
and grandparents and learning not to be bored what seemed to them often long and boring stories by
their elders. And the family, when it flourishes, is like that.

Now, let's immediately note one source of failure that nobody can do very much about and that has got
nothing much to do with morality: namely, the mobility of American life. If you want to look at one
reason why families aren't what they used to be, it is that people do not live in the same place as their
parents; that the extended family has, in many ways, ceased to exist. I have very often been heard to
saypeople find this familiarthat people nowadays don't understand how important aunts are. I very
often ask my students, "What are duties of an aunt?" And people would find this a very odd question.
But I noticedit's not only the case for mebut I noticed among many of my contemporaries
Seamus Heaney, in a memoirtalking about the crucial role that aunts played in our upbringing, and
that if it hadn't been for aunts and cousins, our relationships to our parents would not have been what
they were; that parents aloneit's very difficult for them to discharge their familial duties.

What I'm just pointing towards are the dimensions of a crucial problem. And, of course, you cannot
restore children to well-being without restoring the family to well-being, and then we see all these
difficulties in the way of restoring the family to well-being. And you then realize how irrelevant much
conventional political discussion is because it doesn't focus on these problems at all. And so how do
you begin?

Well, you begin in ways that are much further away from immediate politics than one might suppose. I
think you look at totally different things. One is you look at those areas in which families still do
flourish, and ask why; that you don't only attend to the breakdown, but you look at places where they
are sustained. The second thing you do is you look at the history of those remarkable institutions, some
of them in Chicago, whereif you use the generic name orphanage, it's very misleadingbut places
where children whose parents had deserted them, whose parents had died, whose parents are unable to
bring them up, were given an upbringing which turns out to have been in many cases a very remarkable
and positive thing. And again, you want to look at the cases where people succeed, and ask what was it
that supplied in this? Because here there were people in situations, very desperate, providing what was
needed, and they didn't begin with theories, though they often began with strange other things.

The priest in Chicago, who founded a home for boys which is still flourishing and which has a very
remarkable historythe cardinal archbishop of the day sent for him and told him that he was going to
be given this job, and he said, I will only do it if you send me to business school for a year, which the
cardinal was very surprised by. But he did send him to business school for a year. And it turned out this
was the right preparationexactly the right preparationfor what he then was able to go ahead and do,
because he learned how to hire the right kind of people. And that thinking about how you hire the right
kind of people wasn't the first thing that had come in to the cardinal's head; was, interestingly, the thing
that he learned.

Now, there's nothing like a recipe here. I'm not saying that if you want to solve the problems of
children, find the right priests and send them to business school. There is no recipe about this at all.
What there is is a great deal of reflection and of practical immersion that has to be undertaken. Again,
what Sean said is tremendously important. No good talking about this herepeople like us talking
about it to people like youthat is absolutely useless. What matters is whether there is real immersion
activity that takes place, and those transformations can happen. These rambling remarks are intended to
suggest that making rambling remarks might be an intellectual method, might be a method of going to
unexpected places to get answers.

Jeff Bishop, Saint Louis University. I guess this is a question for both of you. At the risk of
romanticizing pre-Enlightenment culture, the church was the ground and the root out of whichand the
practices of the church, prayer, charity, et ceterawere the root and the ground out of which the
practices of politics and education grew. And something happens along about the time of the
Enlightenmentmaybe with the founding of the university, I don't knowwhere the practices of the
churchprayer, liturgy, almsgivingbegin to come under the rubric of the state. So the state, or the
polity, begins to inform how the church is supposed to live out its life and how education is supposed to
be done. And so it's not to be too mean if we take the French church now, today, as an example: it's
dead. European Christianity is dying left and right; it's falling apart. We see within the American
Catholic church the same political struggles that we see in American polity. And so what we've got is
this sort ofeverything is turned upside-down, it seemsthat the politics have become the ground and
root out of whichthe house within whichthe church is supposed to play and within which the
education systems are supposed to carry out their business. Speak to that, and how do we ever get away
from that?

Let me get a little bit away from where the question was asked, to talk about something that is in a way
important. We're all of us today very concerned with how marriage is to be understood, with what an
adequate conception of marriage is. It's also very important not only how we should understand
marriage but who is to have the authority to define it, who is to have the authority to say what marriage
is. And it is the case in modern societies that this authority has been assumed by the state, and that
therefore discussions about what marriage is are discussions about how the state should define it.

And let me look at the debates that are now going on in the United Kingdom as an example of this,
where the bishops of the Church of England who have a voice in this necessarily, at least those of
whom are members of the House of Lords, have taken a quite unequivocal stand about marriage, saying
it's not that they're against gay marriage: there is no such thing. And it seems to me about this they are
completely right, and it's very interesting how at this point they are taking a stand which begins to
reverse two hundred years of history, because how did government ever get into the business of
defining marriage? And the answer is it got into it in a very good way, in a way that was, in a way,
admirable.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, members of the House of Commons became extremely
concerned about the fate of young women who were either promised marriage and then seduced under
cover of that promise and then the promise was broken, or who were taken through ceremonies that
they thought was a marriagein fact, it was entirely a fake marriageand that the seduction and
corruption of helpless young women, mainly servants in various large housesthe question was how
you should protect them. And the answer was by making sure that it was unambiguous what was, and
what was not, a marriage ceremony; that the marriage ceremony had to be public, and notice that one
was to take place had to be given in public. And so the Marriage Act of 1753 lays it down that, no
matter what your religion, no matter who is going to perform the marriage ceremony, the banns must be
called; that is, notice must be given in the local parish church, the Church of England, three times in the
preceding weeks. And various other measures are introduced. This is when it becomes possible for a
young woman who has been promised marriage and then denied it to sue the man for damages in the
courts, and to do so successfully. A whole set of rules are introduced, and institutions are introduced,
for the protection of young women. And at this point the government has done from entirely Christian
motives what the church had been unable to do. This is very important.

Now, it is very important we were talking about the transition from the church being the source of all
sorts of things, to government and the state being so. But characteristically, government assumed
responsibilities which the state, under the conditions of emerging modernity, was not discharging. But
it doesn't mean that the church was failing scandalously. It was that the church simply didn't know how
to function in a way to meet those needs. And the question for us now has to be, therefore, not so much
how do we win the political battles over the definition of marriage, but how do we bring home that the
state has no business at all in defining marriage? The state is now intervening in a sphere where it
really has no place. And it certainly wasn't the case that the British House of Commons in the
eighteenth century intended anything like this. They set on foot a process that then took root elsewhere,
which quite inadvertently produced this effect. We now take it for granted that certain questions are
questions for state and politics which should not belong in the political sphere at all. So that's a short
answer to part of what you were saying.

Hello, thank you both for being here. My name is Caitlin Deering. I am a sophomore in the Philosophy,
Politics, and Economics minor here at the University of Notre Dame. Professor MacIntyre, you discuss
the modern trend of a weakening of political community. Students who study their history like I did gain
a sense of pride in what their country has done and what it stands for. The recent election involved a
certain debate regarding the concept of American exceptionalism and what prominence this concept
should have in our national character. How would you distinguish this concept of American
exceptionalism from your concept of political community? That is, is the former more exclusionist, or
too aggressive? Thank you.

We non-Americans are very happy that Americans should think of themselves as exceptional. We
wouldn't want them to think of themselves in any other way. We hope desperately it's true. But in fact
we have this dark suspicion that it's not. And let's go back in the historyjust one or two small things
one talks about, about the great things that have happened in American historythat's perfectly alright.
But then remember that the United States as a nation is the nation that emerged from the Civil War.
And the Civil War was the most destructive war up to that date in human history. This wasn't, as it
were, the result of any moral fault or change; it was the result of the introduction of the repeating rifle
and of technology. And the question thenvery interesting questionis how do you recover as a
nation after you have been through that? How do you in fact remember the past accurately and at the
same time carry it forward?

I'm not going to answer that question. It's a question that for me has great force, because I come from
the north of Ireland, and it is only fifteen years or so since we ended a civil wara civil war of a very
different kind, but Northern Irish politics today is a question of how people work together
constructively who are in fact quite literally trying to kill each other very recently. So the question of
how political bonds emerged from conflictsconflicts both within a community and conflicts between
that society and other societiesthis then becomes a real question.

Now, I think there is one particular American example which is important here. I take it that, when the
Vietnam War ended, and it was ended in the only way that it could have been endedI very much
endorsed prudence involved in the way in which the war was endedAmericans were unable to talk to
each other about what had happened. The Vietnam War Memorial is a remarkable memorial, but what
the Vietnam War Memorial symbolizes is a kind of silence about the events that led up to it, and a
silence about what those dead died for. And I think that one of the things that has to happen in
American debate is to reopen the question of what it was that happened in the Vietnam War, and what it
was that went unresolved and continued to go unresolved because of the inability of people to come to
terms with that particular bit of the past.

So one way of thinking about political societies is: how good are they at coming to terms with their
own pasts? This is why Pguy is such an interesting person, because he made the Frenchhe made
French Catholicscome to terms with their past, and come to terms with their present, in all sorts of
ways. And this wasn't just sort of a large question debated by intellectuals. One of the really interesting
things about Charles de Gaulle is that de Gaulle grew up in a household whose parents started out as
very conventional conservative Catholics, with very conventional right-wing views, who were moved
by reflection and by moral judgment, by all sorts of ways, so that they found themselves opening up
questions that nobody around them in their circles had wanted to ask. And the way in which not only
Pguy but other people generated among French Catholics a kind of self-questioning, that led to a
questioning about what France isthis is very impressive. This is why I think we have a lot to learn
from Pguy.

My name is Angela Miceli. I'm a Ph.D. student from Louisiana State University, and my question is for
Professor MacIntyre. Towards the end of your talk, when you were sort of giving suggestions about
what American Catholics can do, one of the last things you said was you're turning to the church and
looking at these institutions that take care of the needy and the hungry, the single mothers, and you
listed some of these groups. And the thought that came to me was we have currently certain public
policies, such as the HHS mandate, that seems to make that work very difficult, and I was wondering
what your thoughts were about what we as American Catholics can do, given that constraint. Thank
you.

Well, let me say two things. The first is, simply, that it is my own view that the bishops are absolutely
right to challenge the mandate in the health care law, and that the case for doing this is a case for
religious freedom. And I think that our colleague Carter Snead has stated this case on several occasions
in very compelling form, so that I have no doubt about this. But it's very important to recognize that if
you remainthat you have to fight various political battles as they come along; there is no way of
avoiding that. But it's very important not to make your politics simply a set of responses of this kind,
because that will be very misleading. I emphasize now what I've emphasized throughout: if we are
going to think well about politics as Catholics in the United States now, there are a lot of things other
than politics that we have to begin by thinking about.

One just footnote to this: when I gave the catalogue of all the good things that happen in American
Catholic life, I mentioned as just one item among others the Alliance for Catholic Education, and the
work that Father Scully and others have done for that. I think this was a very remarkable recognition of
how need can be met in a way that benefits not only those whose needs are met but actually benefits the
people who meet the need, and that surprisingly often you will find that when you start thinking about
problems in a wider way, you discover that there are dimensions to them that haven't been adequately
thought about. I think Father Scully was an example to us all in what he not only thought but imagined
for this. And I take this to be the thinking, in wider terms than we've been used to thinking about them,
is what we have to learn to do. And so immediate political issues mustn't be allowed to focus our
attention too exclusively. Thank you.