Use the tools at hand to build your platform

That’s the bottom line of this interview George Weigel gave a Spanish newspaper recently about Church and state in certain democracies. Here’s the literal bottom line:

So why accept someone else’s definition of Catholics as “marginal?” Why not engage in public life with genuinely public arguments, taking advantage of all the instruments of modern communications?

Which is the best bottom line to answer all the good folks who wonder what can be done about the intolerance of religion in the public square. Or even intolerance of morally informed politicians….if they are formed by certain religious convictions.

Follow common reasoning.

How would you explain to a secularized society that the Catholic Church is a guarantor of human rights?

I don’t think it is a question of explaining but of doing — of demonstrating our Catholic convictions about human dignity and human rights. When the Church is making a public argument about abortion or euthanasia, the Church does not require anyone to accept its core theological convictions: for example, that there are three persons in one God; or that there are two natures in the one divine person of Christ; or that the episcopal structure of the Church and the primacy of the pope are of the will of Christ for his Church.

Rather, the Church makes the claim, on rational grounds accessible to anyone willing to follow a line of argument, that the right to life of the innocent is inviolable, from conception to natural death.

(emphasis added)

Moreover, the Church can point to the empirical evidence of what happens when a country arrogates to itself the “right” to declare certain groups in society outside the boundaries of legal protection: it ends up killing them. That is what happened to Europe in the mid 20th century; that is what is happening today in Holland and Belgium today thanks with the euthanasia laws. The moral truth of the inviolability of innocent human life can be understood by reason itself — and from a close-eyed look at the evidence of what happens when that truth is denied. This is not a “sectarian” truth….

The social doctrine of the Catholic Church has a much more coherent, comprehensive and progressive vision of the good society than anything the secularists have to offer. But one has to dare to propose this Catholic vision of the just society in the public sphere, and one has to do that in ways that can be engaged by those who have not been given the gift of faith.

That set up the question of ‘how did you do it in the USA?’ Here’s the answer, good to recall right now:

American Catholics did not “prove” their democratic credentials primarily by argument, but by service to the entire society. The arguments came later. The Catholic Church has been the greatest assimilator of immigrants in American history; its service to the poor, the sick, the aged, and its vast investments in American education, have all demonstrated the Catholic commitment to American society and the flourishing of American democracy.