Fort Wayne, Ind. — “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
It wasn’t because Barack Obama was critiquing religious conservatives that I thought of this observation from Dorothy Day. It so happened that I arrived at the University of Saint Francis here for a conference on “Dorothy Day and the Church: Past, Present, and Future.” That line from Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, is much quoted here, as if an ever-present pinging of the conscience.
Far from Fort Wayne, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., President Obama was appearing on a panel at an anti-poverty summit. Presidents don’t normally do panels, and I especially didn’t expect President Obama to be sitting alongside and engaging with Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, among others. I was intrigued. I didn’t have high expectations, but I was eager for something constructive.
And then the president accused Christians, and Catholics in particular, of being defined by “an issue like abortion,” saying that that is what Christians, and Catholics in particular, are “really going to the mat for.” He added: “That’s not across the board, but there sometimes has been that view, and certainly that’s how it’s perceived in our political circles.”
Obama didn’t, of course, mention why many Christians, and Catholics in particular, have had to go to the mat recently.
He didn’t, of course, mention why many Christians, and Catholics in particular, have had to go to the mat recently. He didn’t mention that he himself had chosen to unnecessarily pick an unprecedented fight with many of the faithful in America, trying to coerce them through his health-care law to violate their consciences. This is the president who accused Catholic bishops and others of bearing false witness, as he put it, when they opposed the inclusion of insurance coverage for abortion, contraception, and female sterilization in that law.
And commentators were rightly quick to set the record straight about the enormous good that churches and other faith-based groups do in the United States and the world today. With gratitude and reverence for what works in restoring health and dignity, his predecessor, President George W. Bush, saw this so clearly that he bolstered the work of the Catholic Church and others in Africa to combat the pandemic of AIDS, changing the face of many of the countries on that continent for the better.
But, perhaps with Dorothy Day’s comment in mind, I also find myself unable to dismiss President Obama’s comments.
Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor who famously wrote Bowling Alone, was also on that panel, and a few days before it he gave an interview to the Washington Post where he offered a similar critique of American Christians, saying: “The obvious fact is that over the last 30 years, most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for. This is the most obvious point in the world. It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.”
While I would disagree with his characterization here, couldn’t we always do more?
I had a conversation with him about this a couple of months go, on the day his new book, Our Kids, came out. He longs to see a movement to make sure that every child in America has opportunity. He knows we need churches to do much of this work of making human flourishing possible. And, as an outsider and a social scientist, he doesn’t see a people of the Beatitudes overwhelming our politics and culture with their unmistakable identity. We talked about the Sermon on the Mount. If Christian concern for the poor, the persecuted, the mourning, and the hungry were impossible to miss in the world today, many of the problems we have would not be what they are.
Now, is this a problem of media perception and selective coverage? Are there obstacles the government and the establishment put in the way to discourage or even shut down such efforts, especially if they do not pass tests of political correctness? Of course. I think especially of victims of sex trafficking who have been made to suffer on account of “reproductive health” politics.
But it is also a fact that Christians have internalized some of the secularization in the air and do not live the radical lives the Gospel mandates.
One of the speakers at the Fort Wayne conference, Ben Wilson, assistant director of the Summer Service Learning Program of the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, talked about Dorothy Day’s “genius,” explaining, “Dorothy’s unceasing effort to ever more faithfully love God and neighbor underscores the lifelong journey that becoming loving requires.”
In her book about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Dorothy Day wrote: “We want to grow in love but we do not know how. Love is a science, a knowledge, and we lack it.”
Wilson observed: “As an internationally recognized speaker and figure, Dorothy easily might have focused on her successes when promoting her work and the movement.”
“As is characteristic of many saints,” he continued, “Dorothy remained utterly convinced of God’s enduring presence in those around her as well as of her own failings to reciprocate and channel God’s love. Dorothy’s example challenges us, and in turn those we work with, to resist the allure of self-congratulation, regardless of how demanding or fruitful our work is. With Dorothy, we can echo what she felt even near the end of her extraordinary life, that we have ‘scarcely begun.’”
During an interview on Meet the Press broadcast on Easter Sunday, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan refused to get drawn into a distracting political debate with the president, who had put the persecution of Christians today side by side with the Crusades. Cardinal Dolan said: “I know there were some people that might’ve thought that his remarks were off the mark. I would simply say, as an historian and as a believer, sometimes it’s not all that bad to remind ourselves that we are not free from sin, either.”
Pope Francis is fond of pointing out that he is a sinner. It is this unworthiness that draws Christians to the need for redemption in Jesus Christ as Divine Savior. For the rest of the world to know that we are works in progress, and that we need to do more, give more, because we have been given eternity, is not a bad thing. And with Dorothy Day pinging my conscience, I might even thank Barack Obama for the reminder. I might hope, though, that he would reconsider the Little Sisters of the Poor and others whose work on behalf of the poor and suffering he has endangered.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is based on one available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.