The Kavanaugh Battle, the Synod, and the Vocation of Public Service These are not easy days to be an American abroad. European, African, Latin American, and Asian friends of the United States are rarely aggressive about it. But on the third or fourth turn of the conversational wheel, and in light of the vile spectacle recently conducted in the United States Senate, the question inevitably gets posed: “What is going on in the U.S.?” The answer, at bottom, involves John Paul II’s teaching that politics is downstream of culture. If the political culture is in serious trouble, then it is virtually certain that the public moral culture – the ideas, ideals, and ethical norms that shape society’s conversation and conscience – is in serious trouble. Politics is not an independent variable. Politics is like a cash register ringing up transactions previously made outside the realm of elections and legislation. That prior realm is the realm of culture. In recent years, more than a few Catholic commentators on the port side of the Barque of Peter have taken to deriding those who point out this basic fact as “culture warriors.” That derision is a form of denial, perhaps born of discomfort with proclaiming the truth about the human person in a society whose high culture now insists that human beings are mere bundles of twitching desires, the fulfilment of which defines “human rights.” But whatever the cause of that denial, to deny that the united States is engaged in an internal culture war, the center of which are deep divisions over over the definition of the human person and the meaning of human dignity, verges on the psychopathological. Or as one immensely wise, deeply patriotic native-born observer of the American scene put it to me in a recent e-mail (evidently thinking back on another moment of crisis in the United States when the definition of who counted as a rights-bearing human being was a prominent issue): “…the shooting in this un-civil war has begun in earnest, and there is and can be no Lincoln for what now ails us.” I’ll return to the Lincoln image later, in a slightly less pessimistic vein than my correspondent. For the moment, though, let’s stick with the notion of an un-civil war in America and probe it a bit more deeply than was managed by a mainstream media that ought to be in sackcloth and ashes after its performance of the past month. While very few were willing to say it publicly, the rage engendered by the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court – a rage that was fouling the political culture long before anyone outside her immediate circle had heard of Christine Blasey Ford – had to do with one thing: the abortion license first defined by Roe v. Wade in 1973 and then confirmed in a different key by Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania in 1992. Thanks to those two misbegotten decisions – the first of which was sharply criticized for its lack of constitutional ballast by honest liberal constitutional scholars – the abortion license in America was virtually unfettered for a time. Then, over decades, dedicated pro-life activists, working primarily at the state level, began to re-erect boundaries to the practice of abortion-as-ex-post-facto-birth-control in the United States; and some minimal legal protections for women in crisis pregnancies (too often consigned to chop-shops like than run by the odious Kermit Gosnell) and their unborn children began to be established. The sonogram made an immense difference here: it was impossible for the “pro-choice” world to continue talking plausibly about blobs of tissue in light of the pictures that began to appear on expectant families’ refrigerators. A vast network of crisis pregnancy centers also helped to underscore that the pro-life movement was pro-woman, by demonstrating that women caught in the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy had options other than a techo-fix that almost always left scars of one sort or another. The “pro-choice” forces never managed to answer the two key questions in this debate – “If the product of human conception is not a human being, what is it?” and “If the unborn child is, as elementary biology tells us, a human creature, what is owed it in justice – or has the first principle of justice which teaches us that innocent human life deserves the protection of the laws been repealed?” So the abortion issue migrated from the realm of biology and political philosophy to the fever swamps of ideology. A certain form of feminism, by no means exhausting the meaning of that term, insisted that the right to abort a pregnancy was essential to women’s “empowerment.” Too many sexually predatory men found this a convenient cover for their irresponsibility. And too many politicians were unwilling to engage in the debate, once the toxin of ideology had done its work. Thus the political party that had once prided itself on its commitment to civil rights became obsessed with defending the abortion license, to the point where it became impossible for a pro-life Democrat to seek that once-great party’s presidential nomination. Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose retirement opened the door to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, had a decidedly mixed record on the abortion issue, being one of the three justices who concocted the 1992 Casey decision. He did sustain some laws drawing in the boundaries of the abortion license but, to the end, he seemed committed to what Casey had called the “central finding” of Roe. Roe and Casey defenders were thus not mistaken in thinking that Kennedy’s replacement on the Court by a justice whose decision-making would be more firmly rooted in the text of the Constitution might lead to the effective dismantling of the abortion license, probably through its being radically constrained. That, after all, was what happened to another misbegotten Supreme Court decision, the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which in 1896 validated legal segregation of public facilities, which could be racially “separate,” but equal. Plessy v. Ferguson was never “reversed,” with the Court saying, “Sorry, we botched that one.” Rather, Plessy v. Ferguson was slowly hollowed out, until it was given the coup de grâce by the Court’s 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act then finished the job. And thus, with Anthony Kennedy’s retirement and Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, what my correspondent rightly called the shooting phase of “this un-civil war” came. And its First Manassas (Bull Run, to those readers above the Mason-Dixon Line) was the often-violent circus conducted in the hearing room of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary – a circus that combined irrationality with the politics of personal destruction in a no-holds-barred battle that should have caused thoughtful people more than a moment of pause. So what does this unraveling of the United States, which is beginning to display the unsavory characteristics of what used to be called “banana republics,” have to do with Synod-2018? Answering that takes us back to my correspondent’s lament that there is no Lincoln among us today. American politics is a mess because American political culture is a mess; and American political culture is a mess because America’s public moral culture is deeply conflicted on the basic question of what constitutes a rights-bearing human person. People who get the answer to that question wrong, and who are thus stuck with pseudo-arguments in defense of the indefensible, eventually become so irrational as to become violent in that defense. The first violence is rhetorical: remember Senator Edward Kennedy’s vicious and false attack on the jurisprudence of Judge Robert Bork at the later 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court. Then the violence takes aim at reputations: first, Clarence Thomas, then Brett Kavanaugh. Both irrationality and violence, some of its physical, were was on ugly display in Washington during the Kavanaugh nomination battle. And no one who knows about the condition of American political culture in the 1850s – not to mention the condition of the U.S. Senate in those days – could miss the analogy. There were many reasons why the United States managed to survive a civil war in which more than 700,000 Americans killed each other. Some of those reasons were noble, and some of them were not. Among the noble reasons why American survived its most sanguinary attempt at self-destruction – and would eventually come to realize the promise of full citizenship for all – was that Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address put the Civil War in a biblical and moral context that would, over time, prove both healing and ennobling to American democracy. There may be no Lincoln among us today, and there are real questions about whether such a biblical appeal as the fifteenth president made in March 1865 could be “heard” in the 21st-century United States. But that brings us, finally, to Synod-2018. The American culture war, which is at the root of America’s contemporary democratic discontents, can only be resolved by a new form of Great Awakening: a recommitment to the moral truths on which the Republic was founded, capable of revitalizing our political culture so that rational argument once again prevails. That Great Awakening will involve both believers and non-believers committed to the truths built into the world and into human beings – truths that can be known by both reason and revelation. Public officials, in both elected office and long-term civil service, are essential to that new Great Awakening; that they are too little in evidence among elected officials is one unavoidable take-away from the Kavanaugh battle. This crisis of public irrationality, the fundamental cause of which is a high culture that reduces the human person to the sum total of his or her passions, is not unique to the United States. You can find it, in one form of another, throughout the West. And the West is busily trying to export to the rest of the world the false anthropology – the desperately diminished idea of the human person – that is destroying western societies from within. Thus Synod-2018 might well offer the young adults who are its primary concern three challenges: first, to be evangelized; second, to seek out the public meaning of that commitment to Christ and the truths Christ teaches about our humanity; and third, to bring that understanding into public life, surely as citizens, but also as elected officials or civil servants. We hear little from the Church these days about public service as a vocation, not merely a career. The Kavanaugh battle, in which too many nominally Catholic senators disgraced themselves, stands as a cautionary tale of what happens when poorly catechized members of the Church think of their public office in careerist terms, which leads them to play to the mob. Synod-2018 would do the world Church, and struggling democracies, a great favor if it would remedy the Church’s relative silence on politics as a vocation and call young Catholics to take up the vocation of public service – after they have been deeply converted to Jesus Christ and well-catechized in the anthropology and social doctrine of the Church.