“Proposed health-reform legislation, H.R. 3200 … radically departs from the current federal government policy of not paying for elective abortion or subsidizing plans that cover abortion. None of the bills reported out of the three committees of jurisdiction have addressed our serious concerns about public funding for abortion. The version that was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, containing the Capps Amendment, actually explicitly authorizes the federal government (the Department of Health and Human Services) to directly fund elective abortions, with federal (public) funds drawn on a federal Treasury account. Widely circulated claims that these would be ‘private’ funds are misleading; they are contrary to law and the until-now universal understanding of what constitutes federal funds. The simple fact is that under the Capps language, the U.S. Treasury will be permitted to issue checks to abortion clinics to reimburse for abortion on demand for the first time in decades.

“The bill also explicitly provides for government subsidies to pay the premiums for private insurance policies that include elective abortion coverage. This, too, is a drastic break from longstanding federal policy. The Hyde Amendment has, for over 30 years, prevented programs funded by the annual Health and Human Services Appropriations bill from financing abortion. However, H.R. 3200 bypasses the annual appropriations bills and directly appropriates funding for both the public options and the affordability credits. This means the Hyde amendment will not apply to the public option or to the premium subsidy program created by H.R. 3200. In two memos … the Congressional Research Services has confirmed that these programs will not require any future appropriations. In addition, legislation of this magnitude should include permanent language to ensure that federal funds are not used to support abortion.”
The 187 members then requested the Speaker and the Rules Committee Chair to permit a clean vote, up or down, on the Stupak-Pitts amendment, which would bar all federal funding for abortion. As of late October, Pelosi, who has cut stalwart pro-life  Democrats and Republicans out of the negotiations to determine the content of the health-care reform bill that the entire House is to consider, had persistently and obstinately refused that request.
This is an outrage in terms of the comity and collegiality of the House: the Speaker is using the considerable powers of her office to coerce the consciences of her fellow members. The outrage is compounded by the fact that Nancy Pelosi regularly describes herself as an “ardent” Catholic formed by the Church’s social justice traditions. An “ardent Catholic” won’t permit fellow Members of Congress from across the political and religious spectrum an open, clean, up-or-down vote on federal funding for abortion? Where is the social justice in this?

And where is the president who promised at Notre Dame to seek “common ground” on abortion? Has he called Speaker Pelosi to urge an open vote on the Stupak-Pitts amendment? Or do both Speaker Pelosi and President Obama fear that they would lose any such vote, further aggravating their base on the lifestyle left? Do Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama care more about the rage of pro-abortion activists than they do about the consciences of the Members of the House—and the conscience of the American people?

The period between Halloween and Christmas will likely tell the tale on health-care reform. The moment to act is now. It will be a dark day in the history of Catholicism in America if the Speaker of the House of Representatives, an “ardently” Catholic woman formed by 16 years of Catholic education, willfully blocks an open vote by the people’s duly elected representatives on federal funding of abortion. Write your member of Congress, urging him or her to support a rule allowing an open, clean, up-or-down vote on the Stupak-Pitts amendment. Write Speaker Pelosi, urging her to let her House colleagues vote their consciences on this grave matter.

The astonishing announcement of the Peace Prize—which surprised the president and may have caused him a moment’s embarrassment—was a matter of the Scandinavian left projecting what it regards as its superior political morality onto the man who promised “change” and “hope” without specifying the content of either. Still, it seems reasonably clear what the Norwegians imagine that content to be.

The world of the Norwegian Nobel Committee is one which conflict is born from misunderstanding rather than from a clash of interests; thus diplomacy is a therapeutic exercise in which soothing words make for peace. The notion that “peace” might have something to do with creating structures by which conflict is resolved politically—which informed the award of the Peace Prize to George C. Marshall, Nelson Mandela, and Frederik Willem de Klerk—is missing from the Norwegians’ view of the world these days (unless, that is, they’re giving their award to a failed multilateral institution like the International Atomic Energy Agency). Once upon a time, the Norwegian Nobel Committee also understood the linkage between human rights and peace; hence the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to heroes like Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa, who resisted the communist colossus with the power of moral truth. But that commitment to human rights seems to have become a thing of the past, too. Did the Norwegians know that, a few days before this year’s prize was announced, their 2009 awardee had stiffed their 1989 awardee, the Dalai Lama, declining to receive the nonviolent Tibetan leader at the White House for fear of aggravating a Chinese government that proclaims “human rights” a western imperialist imposition? Would it have mattered if they did?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee imagines that the president shares its worldview and, as one of its members said, it wanted to encourage Obama on his chosen path. But what if the path of “hope” and “change” turns out to be a snare and a delusion, because those to be appeased are unappeasable? Suppose the path the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes the president to follow leads to a revival of al-Qaeda terrorism and a nuclear-armed Iran? What if diplomacy-as-therapy leads, not only to a nuclear armed Iran, but to a nuclear-armed Egypt, a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Gulf states—and a devastating nuclear war in the Middle East? Is that the path of moral rectitude and political wisdom? What will the Norwegian Nobel Committee see when it looks in the mirror the day after Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, or Tehran, or Mecca, or Cairo, or Riyadh (or all of the above) is a smoldering, radioactive ruin?

The president has a golden opportunity to do something about this dangerous and willful Euro-naivete when he accepts the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in December. He could accept it in the name of a United States committed to global leadership of the sort that saved Europe from its follies three times in the 20th century. He could use the global bully pulpit to tell President Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran that their vicious regime will not be permitted to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. He could call on the Chinese government, and tinpot dictators like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to recognize that there is no peace without human rights.

If he does, the Norwegian Nobel Committee may well faint en masse; but the president will have taken a giant step toward earning his Peace Prize.

It was a typical Irving remark: wry, modest, indomitable. For those with ears to hear, there was also the undertone of an act of faith. For Irving, whose practice of Judaism was not strict, was nonetheless, as he might put it, “theotropic”—intuitively persuaded that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (and, as some of us would remind him, Jesus) was indeed the Master of the Universe to which his ancestors in the shtetls of eastern Europe had prayed.

Irving Kristol died on Sept. 18; it would be hard to find a man who, in our time, more vividly embodied the claim that ideas have consequences. Irving was not a conventional man of ideas, however, meaning an academic. During his tenure as editor of the Public Interest, which reshaped the domestic policy debate in America, Irving famously observed that the way to change the world was through small magazines and think-tanks: a bon mot of great comfort to those of us who published in small magazines and worked in think-tanks. In his case, though, it was indisputably true and had been since the 1950s, when he helped launch Encounter, the trans-Atlantic journal of ideas that nourished a principled anti-communism in which both conservatives (which Irving was becoming in those days) and intellectuals of the left (which he had been in his youth) could join ranks in the defense of freedom.

The obituaries dutifully described Irving Kristol as a founding father of neo-conservatism, which was true enough. But that moniker—coined by an unreconstructed leftist, Michael Harrington, by the way—tends to obscure at least as much as it illuminates. In Irving’s case, what it obscured was a combination of qualities rarely found in one man: common sense (which compelled his disentanglement from the Trotyskyism of his college days); empirical rigor (which taught him to look, hard, at facts, like the fact that Great Society welfare programs were destroying the families they were supposed to help); good humor (which Irving sometimes found lacking in older styles of American conservatism, and which he supplied in ample measure); courage (to take on the settled liberal consensus among intellectual, journalistic, and political tastemakers); and foresight (as in the creation of Encounter and the Public Interest).

Irving Kristol lived the last two decades of his life in Washington, but he was New York Jewish to his chromosomes; so I trust I won’t offend his memory if I suggest that these qualities were, in some sense, Catholic qualities. Despite what you will read in certain Catholic journals and blogs today, Catholic social doctrine is not about the infinite expansion of state power into every sphere of public life: education, social welfare, health care. One of the core principles of Catholic social doctrine is the principle of subsidiarity, according to which decision-making ought to be left at the lowest possible level in a social hierarchy, commensurate with the common good: you don’t ask the local fire department to rout al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan; you don’t ask the federal government to run the local schools or the local doctor’s office (or at least you didn’t, once upon a time).

The Public Interest, which was chiefly responsible for brewing the ideas embodied in the welfare reform of the 1990s, was a journal in defense of subsidiarity and in opposition to what John Paul II called the “Social Assistance State.” That, one suspects, is why Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who was Catholic New York the way Irving was Jewish New York) was one of its first paladins (before Pat veered off onto a political track defined by fear of the New York Times editorial board). And that’s why it makes posthumous sense to remember Irving Kristol as a kind of Jewish Catholic social ethicist. I like to think he’d appreciate the title.

The pen wouldn’t work. Gorbachev had to borrow a replacement from a CNN crew covering the story.

The Cold War was officially over, which was a very good thing. Yet as we prepare to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—the symbolic centerpiece of the Revolution of 1989, which made the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 virtually inevitable—there seems to be a remarkable lack of interest in a struggle that dominated world politics for 43 years, threatening nuclear ruin to North America, Europe and the USSR, devastating Korea and Southeast Asia, and embroiling the Third World in proxy wars from which many developing countries have never really recovered. Something that large and consequential, you would think, would merit considerable and ongoing attention. Yet, to take but one example, modern history classes in Polish schools today stop at 1939 (or, in some cases 1945). Things are not much better in the United States, I fear.

Americans are traditionally good winners who don’t hold grudges. There was no gloating over the collapse of the USSR. There were no equivalents of the Nuremberg Trials, or the Allied military tribunals in post-war Japan, to bring the murderers of the KGB to book. There wasn’t even a VC Day—Victory Over Communism Day—to parallel VE Day and VJ Day in 1945. Perhaps many Americans thought it would have been unsporting to declare victory. We quickly put the Cold War behind us.

Worse than today’s lack of interest, however, are those interpretations of the Cold War that suggest it was all a terrible misunderstanding, or that Stalin was “provoked” into hostility toward the West, or that the West could have come to terms with the Soviet Union long before 1989. With an eye toward the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down, let me propose a few truths about the Cold War and its ending, with special reference to the Catholic Church and its roles under, and against, communism:

Moral equivalence is moral idiocy. The United States and its western allies during the Cold War were imperfect democracies that sometimes did wicked things. Throughout the Cold War (and long before), the Soviet Union was a pluperfect tyranny that did terrible things as a matter of course, murdering millions of innocent people in cold blood. Any suggestion that the U.S. and the USSR were “two scorpions in a bottle” (as one Carter administration nominee famously put it) reflects a fundamental moral obtuseness about the situation.

The Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI did not ease the situation of the Catholic Church behind the iron curtain. Pope Paul’s openness to dialogue with communist regimes can claim one genuine (if unintended) accomplishment: it created openings that a Polish pope (who viewed his predecessor’s Ostpolitik with considerable skepticism) could exploit (often against the counsel of Vatican diplomats). On the ground, the Ostpolitik of Paul VI was a disaster in Hungary (where most bishops from the mid-1960s on collaborated with the regime), in Czechoslovakia (where the underground Church felt betrayed), and even in Rome, where Soviet bloc intelligence agencies used the new diplomatic contacts necessitated by the Ostpolitik to penetrate the Vatican in a quite striking way.

Moral power was the key to success. Communism might have collapsed of its own economic incompetence, but why did it collapse in 1989 rather than 1999 or 2009 or 2019? And why did it collapse without violence (Romania excepted)? Our premier Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, has the answer: the moral revolution launched by John Paul II during his first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979 was the key to all the rest.

There were winners and losers in this epic contest. Be grateful that we won. Be grateful for all those who sacrificed blood and treasure for the victory.

Ted Kennedy’s death does, however, mark the end of an era, and in several ways.

It marks—or should mark—the end of an era in which Catholics in the United States identity “concern for the poor” with big-government-funded and big-government-managed welfare programs. That the well-intentioned initiatives of the Great Society, which Ted Kennedy supported, ended up destroying urban neighborhoods and families while creating massive welfare dependency was acknowledged by many, including liberals, during the welfare reform debates of the mid-1990s—but not by the senior senator from Massachusetts, who was, to put it gently, nowhere near the forefront of the reform movement.

John Paul II’s critique of welfare dependency in the 1991 encyclical, “Centesimus Annus ,” and the late Pope’s proposal that true care for the poor means the empowerment of poor people through their incorporation into networks of productivity and exchange, never made much of a dent on Ted Kennedy, who was not very helpful in helping poor children to obtain vouchers that allowed them to attend Catholic schools that worked rather than public schools that didn’t. In the aftermath of Kennedy’s death, many of those critical of the late senator’s record on the life issues nevertheless praised him as an advocate for the poor. Surely, though, it’s past time to consider just what advocacy for the poor means, in a Catholic context. No one does the urban poor a favor by supporting programs that maintain the welfare plantation.

Ted Kennedy’s death also marks the symbolic end of an era of tribal Irish Catholicism in America, although perhaps not in the way some eulogists imagined. Kennedy was said by one commentator to have been the pivotal figure in transforming rote Catholic obedience to hierarchical authority into critical Catholic discernment of one’s moral obligations, especially in terms of contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. It’s arguably much more faithful to the truth of that transformation, however, to describe it as one from a culturally-transmitted Catholicism, in which the teaching authority of the Church was given the benefit of the doubt, to a do-it-yourself Catholicism in which claims of conscience, however ill-formed, trump all. Ted Kennedy was no theologian, but the role played by dissident theologians like Robert Drinan and Charles Curran in Kennedy’s becoming the public embodiment of the latter Catholic style will bear close examination by historians of theology in late-20th century America.

Finally, the death of Senator Kennedy ought to end the infatuation of many American Catholics (and others) with the Kennedy family. Camelot’s last living major figure has died. The successor generation is simply not of the same heft as Jack, Bobby, and Ted. From Jack Kennedy’s election to the House of Representatives in 1946 until Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009 was a 63-year run—13 years longer than that of the Virginia dynasty among the founders (figured from Washington’s taking command of the Continental Army in 1775 to Monroe’s leaving the presidency in 1825). It’s over. We would do the next generation of Kennedys a favor by acknowledging that.

In Hawthorne’s tale, Aylmer, a scientist, has married an exceptionally beautiful woman named Georgiana, whose face is marred (in Aylmer’s view) by a birthmark. Eventually convinced by Aylmer that the birthmark should be removed, Georgiana submits to a procedure, designed by Aylmer, that is supposed to eliminate what her husband regards as a blemish on her beauty. The birthmark disappears but Georgiana dies. Aylmer’s quest to make his wife perfect, as he understands perfection, has killed the women he sought to perfect.

I’d known about Kass’s striking assignment to the Bioethics Council for years. But it was only recently that his effort to get America thinking seriously about the moral and human costs of striving for physical perfection brought to mind another member of the Hawthorne clan—Rose Hawthorne, the author’s youngest child, whose cause for beatification is now underway.

Born in Lenox, Mass., in 1851, Rose Hawthorne spent her childhood years in Liverpool, England (where her father was U.S. consul), and Italy before coming home to Concord, Mass., in 1860. At age 20, Rose married George Parsons Lathrop and the couple eventually settled in Boston, where Lathrop worked at the Atlantic Monthly and Rose established her own reputation as a writer, publishing short stories and poems. After five years of marriage, a son, Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, was born; but the lad succumbed to diphtheria when just 5 years old. Rose and George Lathrop were both received into the Catholic Church in 1891, 10 years after their son’s death. But their marriage became impossible; George Lathrop had problems with “intemperance” (as the New Catholic Encyclopedia delicately puts it), which led to his inability to keep a job. With her confessor’s permission, Rose began to live alone and, after taking appropriate training, started work with patients suffering from incurable cancer—a heart-breaking ministry of charity to which she devoted the rest of her life.

After George Lathrop’s death in 1898, Rose Hawthorne became a Dominican sister, establishing the Dominican Congregation of St. Rose of Lima, also known as the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. A center for cancer patients was established in Hawthorne, New York, where Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P., as Rose was known in religion, spent out her years, dying there in 1926.

As Father Gabriel O’Donnell, O.P., the postulator for her beatification, once wrote, “service to Christ’s poor did not simply mean that this lady of culture, education, and social status would put on an apron and offer gifts from her abundance. She decided to live among the poor, to beg for them as they did for themselves, and to establish a home where they could live in dignity, cleanliness, and ease as they faced their final days on earth. …There was to be no class system, no ‘upstairs/downstairs’ for her residents. She and her religious sisters would be the servants. The residents would be the object of all their care and concern.” Rose Hawthorne saw in disfigured men and women suffering from horrible cancers what Aylmer could not see in the near-perfection of the beautiful Georgiana in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story: the face of Christ.

The Rose Hawthorne Guild (600 Linda Ave., Hawthorne, NY 10532) promotes the cause of Rose Hawthorne; a prayer asking cures and other favors through her intercession is available at here. It would not be misplaced to add a prayer for any future President’s Council on Bioethics in such intercessions.

In his August 2008 letter, he sent an account of his homecoming and asked whether I thought it could be published somewhere, because he wanted to “thank the American public.” I couldn’t find an outlet for him, but on re-reading his letter, it occurred to me that I could help him say “thanks” by reprinting parts of it here.

So…

“We were slowly coming together in a mass formation, rather numbly, in a dark parking lot. The usual chit-chat and murmur of side-bar conversations was conspicuously absent. We had just spent the last couple of days in a series of hangars and airfields and airplanes traveling back from the Middle East and it was now almost 2 a.m.; that was certainly one of the reasons for our numbness.

“All several hundred of us seemed to know where to go and what to do without being told. Nobody was saying anything. It was silent, except for the dull roar coming from the large building in front of us. We had rejoiced when we heard them say that our date of departure from the theater of operations was finally known, and now our feet were standing once again on beloved American soil.

“The first row of soldiers started moving once the buses were empty and the bags were all put in a certain place. I was further to the back. Someone had apparently told the first row to face to the left and start walking. The rows behind them were following suit as the walking turned into a jog. It appeared that all of us were going to run single-file into the gym…

“As we ran through the main doors, through the smoke from the smoke machine and out onto the gym floor, we were plunged into sensory overload. Bright lights, booming music, mobs of people cheering and shouting and waving at somebody. Homemade signs, welcome home banners, and red, white and blue bunting were everywhere. Someone was on the microphone stirring up our families and loved ones even more. And we just stood there in the middle of it—not knowing quite what to do or where to look or what to think. And it went on and on and on. Then I saw the American flag…

“I remember everything about the Welcome Home ceremony very clearly until the national anthem began, at which point the details of the festivities and sequence of events turned into a watery blur. For a thousand reasons I could no longer look at that flag while hearing that song unemotionally, partially because I was raised an American patriot who loves his country dearly, but mainly because of what our band of brothers had experienced over the past year. I didn’t know why I was tearing up. Was I happy or sad? It was all jumbled up together: the good, the bad and the ugly.

“So thank you for supporting us, praying for us, and welcoming us home. It makes a difference.”

In the cover letter accompanying his thank-you note to America, my correspondent wrote that he had recently “gotten an education in how to put down tile and will soon be learning how to refinish wood floors. I love the fact that we do all our own maintenance, cooking and cleaning. We get to know each other in a different light.”

So what’s my pen pal, the Iraq veteran, doing now, down on those floors? He found something even tougher than the training he received in the armed forces and he’s in love with what he found, even though it took him to the hard streets of Newark.

He’s a novice in the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement.

Gooch certainly knows The Habit of Being , for he mines O’Connor’s correspondence to paint interesting portraits of her friendships with, among others, Betty Hester (known in Habit as “A”) and Maryat Lee. But of O’Connor’s efforts to explain Catholicism and its unique optic on reality and contemporary culture, he gives us very little. True, Gooch argues that critics who think Flannery O’Connor was a terrific writer despite her Catholicism are off base. But he does seem to me to miss the passion of O’Connor’s belief, as well as the keen theological insight of this self-described “hillbilly Thomist.”

For Flannery O’Connor, Catholicism was a way of seeing the world straight-on, without sentimentality. “There is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism,” she once wrote, for at the heart of Christianity is God’s merciful love, the unsentimental but cleansing love of the father who restores to his wayward, prodigal son the dignity of his sonship. Christian realism taught that good and evil are objective realities, not “opinions.” Thus Christian realism applied to fiction required a painstaking description of both good and evil, especially as they interact in typically messy human lives.

This approach to the short story and the novel did not go down well everywhere. Flannery O’Connor understood why. Once, responding to a “moronic” New Yorker review of her now-famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” she wrote Betty Hester that the review neatly demonstrated how “the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.”

Modern culture’s insecure grasp on good and evil created a situation, O’Connor believed, in which people couldn’t get a grip on the truly horrible, which is sin and its effects in our lives. As she wrote to Betty Hester, “when I see [my] stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.” And the reviewer usually got “hold of the wrong horror” because the reviewer was the product of a culture in which “evil” had been psychologized away and the Evil One was, at best, a medieval fiction.

Flannery O’Connor’s relentless, faith-driven unsentimentality extended to the Church as well as to the world: “I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it…” And this, mind you, was written in 1955—to certain Catholic minds, the high water mark of Catholic life in these United States. One can only imagine what Flannery O’Connor would say today.

O’Connor’s fiction is not to everyone’s taste. But her letters, and essays like “The Church and the Fiction Writer” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” (both available in the Library of America edition of her collected works), display her talents as an apologist of honesty and genius. Gooch’s Flannery would have been a better book had he grappled with that facet of a remarkable life and a singular talent.

Our students this year—31 men and women, generally in their mid-20s,  from the United States, Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Georgia, Slovakia and Lithuania—are among the best we’ve ever had. Yet things on that front are also different than they were when the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society began in 1992.

Virtually none of our European students have any detailed memory of life under communism. Indeed, more than one of them has asked me what to read in order to understand what the world of their parents was like. Perhaps even more surprisingly for young people of intense Catholic faith, few of them know much of the heroic narrative of the Church’s resistance to communist oppression. They don’t know the stories of the confessors of the 1950s, men like Cardinals Stefan Wyszynski, Jozsef Mindszenty, Josef Beran, Iosyf Slipyi or Alojzije Stepinac. But what was really stunning was to find intelligent Catholic young people from central and eastern Europe who didn’t know the story of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the martyr-priest of the Solidarity movement.

What these young people do know, however, is that they are coming to Catholic maturity in a Europe increasingly hostile to public manifestations of Catholic faith. When the Tertio Millennio Seminar started in 1992, our debates were about church-state law, democratic theory, and the structure of the free economy; now, they’re about the nature of marriage, the challenge of biotechnology, the life issues, Islam, and an aggressive secularism that tries to keep religiously informed moral argument out of the European public square. The Church in this part of the world has yet to find its public “voice,” 20 years after the Wall came down; one goal of the seminar is to help shape a lay leadership in these new democracies that can develop the voice of religiously informed public moral argument. The task is a huge one.

For all the change, though, there are also the constants. It’s a wonderful thing to introduce young Catholic men and women to the places where Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, was a young man, asking many of the same questions about life and vocation that they ask. It’s always an eye-opener for young adults from outside Poland to come here and experience what remains, despite enormous challenges, a more intact Catholic culture than exists perhaps anywhere else in Europe. And then there is Cracow itself, a great city whose massive Market Square, the largest public space on the continent, is the physical embodiment of an ancient and honorable civic spirit of openness and dialogue among cultures and nations.

Cracow is also a city of saints, in which the history of sanctity encompasses almost a full millennium: from the martyr-bishop Stanislaus in the 11th century to the 14th-century queen Jadwiga and on to such 20th-century heroes of the faith as Faustyna Kowalska (apostle of divine mercy and first saint of the third millennium) and Albert Chmielowski (“God’s brother,” the avant-garde painter who became the servant and advocate of the destitute). We pray that their number will soon be joined by John Paul the Great and by his best lay friend, Jerzy Ciesielski, whose beatification cause is underway.

For, as our daily Mass together reminds our students, the best way to become a leader of the free and virtuous society of the future is to become the saints their Christian and human destiny calls them to be.

Thus in the days immediately following the encyclical’s July 7 release, we were treated to the amusing, if somewhat ironic, spectacle of self-consciously progressive Catholic magazines, bloggers, and free-lancers, many of whom would have preferred to eat ground glass rather than see Joseph Ratzinger as Bishop of Rome, blasting those who dared raise questions about the encyclical’s intellectual provenance and some of its formulations. Where were these stout-hearted crusaders when the going was tough – when, for example, the Pope was under fire for his Regensburg Lecture on Islam, or for attempting to reconcile four excommunicate Lefebvrist bishops to the Church?

But that was before we entered the new Messianic Age.

In any event, there is an important theme in Caritas in Veritate that, were all Catholics to take it seriously, might have a measurable impact on the American culture wars and on the U.S. Church’s internal struggle to define Catholic identity – and that is the encyclical’s insistence, repeated several times, that the life issues are social justice issues, so that Catholic social doctrine includes the Church’s defense of life from conception until natural death.

This teaching began with John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life], in which John Paul warned that democracies risk becoming “tyrant states” if moral wrongs are legally declared “rights.” Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger went a step further in his homily at the Mass for the Election of a Pope, on April 18, 2005. There, Ratzinger warned against a “dictatorship of relativism” in which coercive state power would be used to enforce the by-products of a culture skeptical about the human capacity to know the moral truth of anything: by-products such as abortion-on-demand, euthanasia, and “gay marriage.” Now, as Benedict XVI, Ratzinger has moved the discussion further still, teaching that the defense of life is crucial to building the “human ecology” necessary to sustain just economic practices and protect the natural environment.

Caritas in Veritate has now put Catholic legislators and politicians on notice: you can’t duck the life issues, or vote the wrong way on the life issues, by hiding behind an alleged commitment to the Church’s social justice agenda. Catholic social doctrine and the Church’s commitment to the right to life flow from the same source: the Catholic conviction about the inalienable dignity of every human life. A robust culture of life, the Pope proposes, is essential for economic justice and environmental protection; it is also necessary if we are to avoid the dehumanization of a brave new world of stunted and manufactured humanity, the slippery slope to which is paved with misconceived compassion and embryo-destructive stem cell research.

Caritas in Veritate thus reminds the whole Church that there is neither justice nor charity without truth. No society can claim to be promoting justice or solidarity if its law denies the truth of others’ humanity. That is what Roe v. Wade and its judicial progeny have done in the United States; that is why laws protective of life from conception until natural death are an imperative of social justice; and that is why “common ground” efforts to lower the incidence of abortion, while welcome, are inadequate from the point of view of Catholic social doctrine — the moral equivalent of saying, in 1955, “OK, let’s see if we can’t get you black folks into one or two segregated restaurants in every county.”

Catholic legislators have been forcefully reminded of all this by the new Benedictine encyclical. The results in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and our state legislators should be instructive.