On the Catholic Church and Political Liberalism With Respect to the Fact of Cultural Diversity

Paul M. Nguyen (OMV)

Contemporary Philosophy Fr. Christopher O'Connor December 17, 2011

Nguyen 2 The phenomenon dubbed globalization has brought more cultures into contact with one another than has been seen in all of human history. Much of this contact is mediated by technological means of communication that allow messages to be conveyed between persons with varying degrees of completeness; from ancient times, written messages were carried, followed more recently by the use of the telegraph, telephone, email, and finally video calling in various forms. This increase in communication, however, does not intrinsically bridge language barriers, though, for those learning a new language, it does make conversation with native speakers more possible. Language, though mutually indicative of culture, is one important element in the globalization movement. Not only are cultures coming into contact with one another, but peoples are taking up residence in lands distant from their places of birth. These immigrants bring with them their ways of thinking and working, their customs of celebration, their values, and also their native tongues. This introduces a fundamental difficulty to existing governmental structures in the countries of the world: How does a government address the reality of a multiplicity of culture-bound conditions among its citizens? In John Rawls' Political Liberalism, he describes this reality as a plurality of religious, philosophical, moral, or comprehensive doctrines. 1 The relevant aspects of Rawls' basic thesis are that in a liberal democracy, these culture-bound conditions may be adhered to in any circumstance not affecting the public process, but that in matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials, all political participants must ignore their comprehensive doctrines and decide upon these matters using the principle of equality and difference, which is the adequate conclusion of his original position device by which representatives of such a liberal democracy derive that principle by which they can justly and fairly determine such matters. 2 Rawls' system has several important implications for a society that would live by his ideal of political

Nguyen 3 liberalism, especially with regard to citizens' cultural identities, and further suffers discord when deep-seated values of different cultures conflict on matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials. Furthermore, Rawls' system falls short of reality in limiting itself to a society in which persons enter and exit only by birth and death. 3 There has been quite a stir in various large organizations regarding what has been termed diversity. So many organizations claim to be composed of diverse members or to serve a diverse population. Prima facie, this is equivalent to John Rawls' pluralism, but it is important to distinguish between a diversity or plurality on ethnic grounds and one on religious, philosophical, and moral grounds. Rawls' plurality speaks primarily of the latter while the Catholic Church addresses both. Since the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ, in which He ministered to foreigners of disparate cultural traditions during the foundation of His Church, 4 members of His Church have taught their values and customs of celebration to members of countless cultural traditions, all the while adapting to harmoniously thrive within those communities, maintaining the pre-existent cultural identity and also not diminishing the depth of Catholic doctrine. 5 In recent times, the Church has arisen to better instruct her members to strive for this same ideal of inculturation and to be vigilant against the march of modern errors and pathological ways of thinking and working.6 The church has also advised the governments of the world concerning how they might better uphold the natural human dignity of all persons they may find within their borders, affirming their cultural identity and yet working together harmoniously for the good of all. Therefore, the question we will address is: given the fact of cultural diversity within modern societies, how are such diverse persons met and to what extent and in what manner are

Nguyen 4 they included or excluded by Rawls' political liberalism on the one hand, and the Catholic Church on the other? Let us first consider the response of political liberalism to the fact of pluralism as Rawls states it. Members of a society (citizens, simply) governed by political liberalism are at least obligated to abide by what is shared publicly as the ideal of justice, namely, the twin principles of equality of opportunity and the disposition of the greatest advantage for the most disadvantaged (i.e. the difference principle) when determining matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials. Rawls suggests that these principles will result from any composition of diverse comprehensive doctrines held by participants to his original position, which requires that these participants consider that they may emerge holding any occupation in society, or adhering to any comprehensive doctrine. Therefore, the participants will ultimately select the equality and difference principles to be the conception of justice by which they will judge future disputes over matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials, in order that none be unfairly treated, however they emerge.7 From the standpoint of diverse cultures, each is distinguished from the others by some set of characteristics, be they geographic or concerning values, customs, language, or, as Rawls puts it, priorities of right. 8 These differences, however, do not factor into the original position, given all that its participants must ignore about their own comprehensive doctrines (or cultural contexts), and so political liberalism effectively considers the diversity of cultures to be irrelevant in working toward the stability and longevity of a society. Only the consensus of the representatives has any weight. Another aspect of Rawls' theory that pertains to cultural diversity is that a citizen resides within the borders of the state governed by this liberal democracy, and new citizens come about only by generation between those already citizens. Though Rawls leaves unanswered the

Nguyen 5 question of how diverse peoples came to populate this state, this can granted. More important is that he assumes that the citizens, at the time that their constitution is written, can write a constitution such that all possible future citizens will be protected in justice and fairness. The idea of an absolutely closed border is simply impractical in the modern world, but it seems this constraint was necessary to provide a space in which the overlapping consensus of the reasonable doctrines held by the citizens could be reached and in which such a consensus could endure. The point is further complicated in that it seems that Rawls' system encourages or at least permits conversion of citizens between reasonable doctrines that support the overlapping consensus out of which the governing principles were reached. Aggressively granting that this conversion actually does happen, all citizens of that society will ultimately resort to simply holding only those common values, to the exclusion of the traditions and beliefs they previously held non-publicly (to use Rawls' term that is less strict than to say privately). To put it more concretely, it seems that Rawls suggests a homogeneity of the comprehensive doctrine to which citizens will adhere, over successive generations; the consensus to which agnostics, atheists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists agree (for example) may, in fact, become the definitive doctrine of all citizens, defeating the pluralism Rawls originally posits. Let us now consider Rawls from an anthropological perspective, focusing on what attributes he ascribes to a citizen and which conceivable persons he excludes from his political framework, applying this to the idea of cultural diversity. Rawls grants certain few powers to citizens, a minimum for the functioning of his system, namely: a capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception of the good.9 Rawls explicitly states from the outset that a metaphysical understanding of the person is not necessary to understand political liberalism and to provide reasons for its adequate function in achieving the stability and longevity of a just society. 10 He

Nguyen 6 further posits that the only attribute of a person needed is that of freedom. He proceeds to distinguish three aspects of freedom: (1) that citizens have the moral power to have a conception of the good; (2) that they regard themselves as self-authenticating sources of valid claims, that is, they can firmly support their claims from their comprehensive doctrines; and (3) that they are capable of taking responsibility for their ends. 11 At a glance, these seem to be great qualities of a person. The flaw is not, however, in the positive, but in the negative. It is Rawls' omission that is blameworthy in excluding the intrinsic dignity of human persons as the inspiration by which a political conception of justice may be sought with which to govern a society. It is precisely because Rawls abandons metaphysical reasons that he reaches so partial a view of the powers and worth of the human citizen. Without an understanding of the spiritual and immortal soul, Rawls need not affirm citizens beyond their functional role in his system. At a glance, as well, it seems fair enough that Rawls permits citizens to practice their own customs and in various ways express those aspects of their comprehensive doctrines that are definitively outside the public sphere (thus non-public). This mentality has persisted for so long in American society that today's citizens readily accept such a separation of religious belief and natural philosophical thought from the public sphere of politics and public morality. What Rawls effectively does, however, is deny the distinctive, valuable identity of persons and cultures within his system. Certainly there is no guarantee that a dilution of cultures will necessarily follow from the long-term employment of Rawls' system, and he would argue precisely that point. However, it is easy to posit the possibility of this effect, through the implicit imperative to conform to those public ideals to the detriment of non-public traditions, families seeking to maintain friendships with families of diverse traditions may find that they would sooner forgo their own traditions in order to commune with the others and thus diminish their zeal for

Nguyen 7 maintaining their own tradition. It is quite trivial to project this trend to the point of ultimate convergence, at which the cultural identities of the several initial peoples cease to exist, having been lost in a homogeneous aggregate of liberal citizens. Let us turn now to the position of the Catholic Church with respect to persons of diverse cultural traditions. Recall that these cultures may be distinguished by any number of characteristics, including language, celebrations, religious beliefs, and moral values. Elementary in Catholic doctrine is the fact that human persons are created in the image and likeness of God, 12 and this intersection of metaphysics and faith gives rise to Catholic teaching regarding interaction of Catholics with persons of other cultures, taking into account their beliefs in a positive way. One way in which the Catholic Church has embraced cultures around the world is in bridging linguistic barriers. She translates her documents to make them available in the languages spoken and understood by the people of the world. While the Church, in maintaining her own identity, keeps an authoritative text in Latin, she also facilitates the translation of these documents into the most popular languages and also provides for more obscure linguistic traditions. Missionaries to foreign lands learn the customs and languages of the people they are to serve, often by enduring great strife through initial misunderstandings. However, the missionaries' perseverance is rooted in a firmly-held understanding of the great dignity of each human person and a desire to share with all people the faith and tradition that the missionary has come to know and love. While political liberalism only promoted a weak agreement between persons solely as political agents to provide little more than a modus vivendi, Catholic missionaries seek to empower the people of the world with that respect for human dignity that will inspire them to seek the perfection to which they are called from their very creation, and in

Nguyen 8 so striving, to come to accept the Catholic faith as ultimately true in their lives and also take part in that same work of evangelization. 13 When the Church encounters a new cultural tradition, she affirms the people who constitute it, embraces them as persons capable of living a grace-animated life, and encourages culturally-significant expressions of the one true faith. The church recognizes that there is already present within her a tremendous diversity and she holds that there is in Christ and in the Church no inequality on the basis of race or nationality, social condition or sex . 14 In the same breath, she teaches that human dignity is an invitation to union with Christ as members of His Body, and that the achievement of this union certainly excludes any kind of prejudice against particular cultures. She does not mean, however, that she willingly and encouragingly permits membership to adherents of heretical doctrines. On the contrary, recognizing that dignity common to every human being, she draws people to Christ, so that they may believe in Him, turn their lives toward them in their various ways, and so complement the present diversity of the Church.15 They should soon discover the necessity of abandoning ways of thinking and acting that violate what the Church teaches. The Church also looks for a holistic and pervasive expression of faith from her diverse members. She wishes that the faithful let the power of the Gospel shine forth in their daily social and family life, and that they courageously join to their profession of faith a life springing from faith.16 In this way, the Church declares that believers should not be bound to the constraint of public reason of which Rawls posits an obligation. Rather, a life truly inspired by a life of faith satisfies Rawls' implicit desire for the respect of other citizens several times over in that it genuinely desires the salvation and communion of those not yet fully joined to the Body of Christ, thus fulfilling their natural end. But Rawls' neglect of a metaphysics that would validate

Nguyen 9 this principle holds him to his point and its obvious deficiencies. What is meant by a holistic approach is that in evaluating what is believed by various diverse peoples is taken as such: what aligns with the teaching of the Church is affirmed (perhaps clarified) and what does not is charitably worked out, not so that the Church compromises her own integrity, but so that the dignity of those holding the contrary opinion are maintained in their dignity as they grow in understanding of the truth. So the Catholic Church indeed welcomes diversity, but does so in a way that compromises the integrity of neither party. It seems that Rawls leaves little room for the Catholic approach within his system, that he would demand restraint of this dynamic of reaching out, leaving Catholics to practice their faith only non-publicly. In Christopher Eberle's answer to Rawls, he takes the principles and desires of liberalism and essentially makes room for religion. Where Rawls only posits implicitly a respect-for-dignity motivation for giving only public reasons in the public square, Eberle takes the time to reason through an argument that establishes the natural desire for respect and a natural obligation to respect one another for simply who they are, not just, as Rawls would limit it, their political utility. 17 Eberle reasons that Rawls' requirement to give a public reason is, in fact, too strong, and that the more reasonable requirement would be simply that citizens pursue a public reason justifying their political action (e.g. voting), but that if their comprehensive doctrine provides a convincing reason for them to act a certain way (particularly a religious reason), then even if they cannot provide a public reason for the action, they still have satisfied that doctrine of pursuit and thereby respected the dignity of their fellow citizens. 18 To put it more bluntly, Eberle says that citizens are permitted to fail in giving public reasons. Eberle follows this foundational discussion with his notion of the Ideal of Conscientious Engagement. Beyond the foundational requirement of pursuing rational justification (Rawls' public reasons) for political

Nguyen 10 action, Eberle names several other factors that together constitute his ideal of conscientious engagement, and all of them flow from the norm of respect for persons. 19 The ideal contains much reciprocity: each citizen should pursue rational justification for his political action, including finding reasons that would convince adherents to other comprehensive doctrines, but he should also listen critically to others' critique of his own reasons, seeking a dialogue on the morality of the political issue at hand. The lynchpin for the whole system, however, is that fundamental respect for common human dignity. Eberle has provided a space in which liberal democracy, insofar as it accounts for diverse viewpoints within society and permits the people to determine the best course of action for them as a whole, may provide for the full practice of the Catholic faithful. We recall that in Rawls' political liberalism, the citizen, who is reduced to the functional political roles of having a sense of justice and a conception of the good, must provide public reasons for supporting or withholding support from decisions regarding matters of basic justice or constitutional essentials. We also recall that, in the Catholic description of the person, his ultimate dignity in the eyes of God and the faith that he has received demand that, in the face of a need for public justification for his political actions, he must not relinquish the truths of faith and moral values that he has come to love, but present them with clarity and charity. Christopher Eberle softens Rawls' requirement for public justification by introducing a naturally-evident (though ultimately supernatural) basis on which to assert that citizens are obligated to pursue public justification, but not bound to actually give public justification, should it be the case that none may be found; this basis is the norm for respect of persons.20 We have strayed a bit from the point of how receptive political liberalism and the Catholic Church are to peoples of diverse cultures. Let us now return to that question in light of

Nguyen 11 the viewpoints given above. Eberle's position gives us a unique viewpoint in a compromise between the desires of political liberalism to create and provide for the maintenance of an enduringly just and stable society, and the desires of the Catholic Church to provide for the instruction of the peoples of the world in the ways of God, as their final fulfillment. In Rawls' system, peoples of diverse cultures are invited (to put it gently) to seek those few fundamental truths and desires by which they can all affirm (though sometimes hesitatingly) a governmental structure that will sustain their society as just and stable in the long term. This immediately denies all in each cultural group that is irrelevant in the public sphere to be irrelevant in the future of that society, and in the long term, may witness the extinction of cultural differentiation altogether. Though Rawls clearly acknowledges the reality of diversity in contemporary constitutional democracies (though he prohibits entrance or exit of peoples over the life of this society), and attempts to include such diverse persons, it is clear that he does not achieve this inclusion, and only includes that in them which is common to all. On the other hand, the teaching of the Catholic Church is that, without doing violence to the identity and constitution of her own doctrines and tradition, peoples of diverse cultural traditions should be embraced and their own traditions interpreted in the light of her tradition, and that this position proceeds directly from a deep appreciation for the intrinsic dignity of every human person, created as such by God Himself. Clearly, the Church certainly acknowledges the reality of diversity in the world, and does much more than Rawls to include diverse persons within herself. The truths of revelation were given for the benefit of all men, and so the Church's position to bring all men to an understanding thereof is justified by its very nature, which is actually evidenced in the natural world, so it is not simply another variant of a doctrine in which

Nguyen 12 the good parts of persons are affirmed to the exclusion of the remainder, but rather, the Church seeks the perfection of the whole person at every moment. Rawls' system as a limited political system, in fact, becomes much more than that. Because of Rawls' lack of respect for each person as he is, he fails to affirm them, and effectively predicts the cultural and ideological homogeneity of society over successive generations. Cardinal Ratzinger identified well that the pathologies of reason may lead to the dehumanization of man himself, and that religion must also be tempered against its own pathologies of blind adherence to doctrine without demonstration of at least the rational possibility thereof. 21 It seems that Eberle's argument for the pursuit of rational justification aligns with the Church in less religious terms by providing for that fundamental respect of persons that paves the way for the personal discovery of the divine, permits cultural differentiation, and compromises nothing of our created dignity.

Nguyen 13 Notes 1. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 24. 2. Ibid., 165. 3. Ibid., 135-36. 4. John 4: 4-42 (New American Bible). 5. Lumen Gentium, no. 13. 6. Ratzinger and Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization, 77. 7. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2228. 8. Ibid., 29. 9. Ibid., 93. 10. Ibid., 29. 11. Ibid., 30-33. 12. Gen. 1:27 (New American Bible). 13. Lumen Gentium, no. 33. 14. Ibid., no. 32. 15. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 854. 16. Lumen Gentium, no. 35. 17. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics, 8488. 18. Ibid., 100101. 19. Ibid., 105. 20. Ibid., 105. 21. Ratzinger and Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization, 77.

Nguyen 14 Bibliography Eberle, Christopher J. Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Catechism of the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, and Jrgen Habermas. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. Translated by Brian McNeil, C.R.V. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium. Vatican City: Libreria Editrece Vaticana, 1964.