On Oct. 8, the Associated Press reported that "a new combination of blood
tests and ultrasound can detect fetuses with Down syndrome sooner, and more
accurately, than standard U.S. screening tests, offering women more peace of
mind and more time to decide whether to end a pregnancy." The article quoted
one researcher as saying that, "The absolute biggest advantage is that this
allows women to make private decisions" before they're visibly pregnant.
Peace of mind and the power to decide are good things, but not if the price
tag is a human life. Children with Down syndrome are not a mistake or a
failure. Imagining them that way only reveals our own lack of humanity. A
friend of mine who's the mother of a son with a disability likes to say that
the only difference between German doctors in the 1930s and some of our own
medical establishment today is that now we have better PR firms. The
hostility to human weakness, the anger at human imperfection, is exactly the
same now, as it was then.
Children with Down syndrome are children of God. They can live happy and
fruitful lives. They give far more love back to their parents than they ever
take. And because they belong first to God, killing them can never be a
"private decision." It always has wider consequences -- beginning with the
grief of the mother. It's the woman who bears the spiritual cost of an
abortion. Not the doctor, not the researcher, and too often, not even the
father. That's the lie in sanitized language like "peace of mind" and
"private decision." The mother always bears the cost, because every mother is
always a part of her child.
I've spoken a lot, over the years, about our culture of selfishness -- the
unrest that forces us to keep feeding our appetites to prove that we control
the world around us -- but it bears repeating here, because our immaturity
and self-absorption have created four big problems.
The first problem is our inability to reason. Reasoning takes time. It needs
a vocabulary of ideas. Reasoning forces us to test and compare competing
arguments. But the America we live in today is a culture built on marketing,
and marketing works in just the opposite way. Marketing feeds our desires and
emotions, and it suppresses critical thought, because thinking gets in the
way of buying the product or the message. That's why marketing is tied so
tightly to images -- like fast cars on an empty road. Images work on our
appetites, quickly and very effectively, at the subconscious level.
Here's a second problem: our inability to remember. The historian Christopher
Lasch once said that Americans are a people stranded in the present moment.
We like nostalgia, because it's a kind of entertainment. But we really don't
like history because the past -- as it really happened -- burdens us with all
sorts of unfinished business. It's a pain in the neck. History imposes
obligations on the present, but Americans prefer to think that we invent
ourselves, and that anything is possible. The result is that Americans
usually have a very poor grasp of history, and we learn too little, too late,
from the lessons of the past.
The third problem is our inability to imagine and hope. Americans like
immediate results. We're practical. We're very good at making money, and
we're very, very good at science and technology. But technology always comes
with a price. Edward Tenner called this the "revenge of unintended
consequences." And one of the unintended consequences of our science is that
we're now the victims of our own power.
When Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua retired earlier this month, I had the
privilege of succeeding him as interim chair of the bishops' Pro-Life
Activities Committee. And one of my first jobs was reviewing a proposed
letter to congressional leaders that objected to granting patents on human
beings and embryos. Thirty years ago, "manufacturing" a human person was
unimaginable. Now it's plausible. Now it's in the neighborhood, and what's
worse, we've lost the moral vocabulary to deal with it. We've forgotten how
to talk about the soul, and why the human person is more than just another
animal or product.
Hope and imagination flow out of a belief in a higher purpose to our lives.
If we're nothing more than very intelligent carbon atoms, then hope and
imagination are just quirks of our species. They don't really mean anything.
And any talk about the "sanctity of the human person" is just a lot of
beautiful but empty words.
The fourth and final problem is our inability to live real freedom. Freedom
is more than an endless supply of choices. Choice for its own sake is just
another form of idolatry. Real freedom is the ability to see -- and the
courage to do -- what's right. But when we begin to doubt that right and
wrong exist, we also lose our ability to talk about things like freedom,
truth and the sanctity of the human person in a common vocabulary.
What we get instead of freedom is a kind of anarchy of pressure groups and
personal agendas held together by just one thing: the economy we all share
... and that's not the basis of a community or even a good conversation. In
fact our economy, more than anything else in modern life, teaches us to see
almost everything as an object to be bought or sold. This is what Jeremy
Rifkin means when he describes American culture as more and more a "paid-for
experience" based on the commodification of passion, ideals, relationships
and even time. If we want freedom, we buy it by purchasing this car or that
computer. If we want romance, we buy it by purchasing this cruise or that
hotel package.
The trouble is, the more that our advertising misuses the language of our
dreams and ideals to sell consumer goods ... the more confused our dreams and
ideals become. We trick ourselves to the point where we no longer recognize
what real love, honest work, freedom, truth, family, patriotism -- and even
life itself -- look like.
But there's a catch. There's a cost. The price tag of this kind of "equality"
too often means denying the differences between women and men. It can mean
being just as competitive and aggressive as men. It can mean putting career
first. It can mean fearing the things that make up the feminine genius -- the
acts that make women, women. That's why so much of today's secular feminism
hates fertility. That's why abortion and contraception are such important
secular icons, even though they attack human sexuality at its roots.
Fertility is seen as a weakness. Children mean taking responsibility for
somebody else. Children mean -- or should mean -- that a woman will depend on
the love of a husband. And that's frightening, because too many men today
never learned how to be men.
This kind of false "equality" doesn't work because it tries to escape who we
are. It makes us look at and interpret the world through a broken piece of
glass. Germans in the 1930s looked at everything through the lens of race.
Marx saw the world through the lens of class struggle. And now we have a
generation of new thinkers making exactly the same mistake, not with some bad
racial or economic theory as their lens, but with gender.
Not one of these tools for understanding human experience works. All of them
always lead to somebody suffering. The reason is pretty simple. We can't
explain the human person without including God in the conversation. And God
has something to say to us about ourselves, both in Scripture and through his
Church.
Genesis tells us that, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God
he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). That one
simple truth about the equality of men and women flows through 4,000 years of
faith. Sometimes we've forgotten it. Many times we haven't lived it well. But
it underpins all of Catholic culture so strongly that even Christianity's
greatest enemies have seen it.
In 1665, right at the peak of Muslim conquest in Europe, a Turkish writer and
diplomat -- Evliya Celebi -- visited Vienna. In his report home he wrote:
"In this country I saw a most extraordinary spectacle. Whenever the emperor
meets a woman in the street, if he is riding, he brings his horse to a
standstill and lets her pass. If the emperor is on foot and meets a woman, he
stands in a posture of politeness. The woman greets the emperor, who then
takes his hat off his head to show respect for the woman. After the woman has
passed, the emperor continues on his way. In this country and in general in
the land of the [Christians], women have the main say. They are honored and
respected out of love for Mother Mary."
Bernard Lewis, the great Middle East scholar, once said that the status of
women is the single most profound difference between Christian and Muslim
civilization. He noted that early "Muslim visitors to Europe [spoke] with
astonishment, often with horror ... of the incredible freedom [and]
deference" shown to Western women.
Of course, that little history lesson doesn't do a lot for women experiencing
bias or mistreatment right here, right now. But it does show us two things.
First, no movement, ideology, political party or institution anywhere, in any
country, can match the Christian faith in promoting the dignity of women. And
second, women should always turn to the Church as their mother and defender,
because in her arms, in her strength, they can begin to re-humanize the
world.
People who criticize the Church for not ordaining women to the priesthood
ignore her record of promoting the dignity of women. They also misunderstand
the nature of the Church herself, the sacramental nature of the priesthood
and the Christian understanding of equality based on different but
complementary gifts from God.
Pope Paul VI once said that, "Within Christianity, more than in any other
religion and since its very beginning, women have had a special dignity." The
Closing Message of the Second Vatican Council said that, "The hour is coming,
in fact has already come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in
its fullness; the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an
effect and a power never hitherto achieved."
What that influence means and how that power is used -- those are the
questions that every woman in this audience will help answer.
"Man and woman he created them." God made men and women equal but different
for a reason -- to love each other, to help and complete and depend on each
other in the family and in the world. The genius of women is different from
the genius of men. Every few months I visit my mother in Kansas, and each
time it's a little more difficult because she's 93 now, and I know I won't
have her for much longer. But even now I can still look in her eyes, and
beneath all the age and the cares and the memories, I can still see the young
woman my father loved, and why he loved her.
Women express their genius through mercy, patience, endurance and forgiveness
-- a hunger to embrace and protect what Edith Stein described as the "living,
personal and whole." But they also have a realism that comes from the labor
of bearing new life. I think women, better than men, know what's true and
important about the world. Sigrid Undset, the great Norwegian woman writer,
once said that, "Facts may be true, but they are not truths -- just as wooden
crates or fence posts or doors or furniture are not 'wood' in the same way a
forest is, since it consists of the living and growing material from which
these things are made." Men usually understand the facts of their daily life.
But I think women more easily see the truth of the people and the
relationships hidden behind the facts.
The genius of every woman is to love; to protect and nourish the lives
entrusted to her; and to support the full development of life in others. It's
the same whether you're a mother, or a consecrated religious, or a woman who
lives the single vocation. It was true for Dorothy Day in all of her
political organizing. Day once described her radicalism as "works of mercy."
And in converting to the Catholic faith she said, "I loved, [and] like all
women in love, I wanted to be united to my love." The genius for love is
written on the heart of every woman, and it's the same whether you're a
teacher or lawyer, a scientist or secretary.
St. Teresa of Avila, one of the great doctors of the Church and the
intellectual equal of any man of her day, reminded herself and her Carmelite
sisters every morning to, "Accustom yourself continually to many acts of
love, for they enkindle and melt the soul." Teresa knew what was true and
important. Women who love well become real women. And in becoming real women,
they draw men into being true men.
When the Catholic Daughters of the Americas began 100 years ago, the world
was a very different place. As I was browsing through my copy of "A Century
in Review" -- which is a wonderful history of the Daughters, and if you don't
have a copy, I hope you can get one -- I was struck by the character I found
in so many of the faces of the women who have led and served the Daughters
over the years.
These were strong, intelligent women. They deeply loved their faith. Each of
their lives was a seed that bore fruit in service to the Church, defense of
the family, religious education, help for the poor, support for the missions
-- in other words, in almost every form of Catholic apostolic action in the
world. Their legacy now belongs to this assembly today. And believe me, the
Church needs you. Mother Church needs Catholic Daughters. And the world
urgently needs the witness of Catholic women -- because the next 100 years
will be even more challenging than the last.
For each of us, the future belongs to the plan of God. He made each of us
different to do different parts of his work, and to be saints by different
paths. Earlier today Pope John Paul II beatified another Teresa, Mother
Teresa of Calcutta, and I think in her understanding of love -- the same
unconditional love Mary had at the foot of the cross -- we can end our words
and begin our actions.
Blessed Teresa said, "Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the
sick, the suffering and the lonely right there where you are -- in your own
homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools. ...
You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see.
Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved,
uncared for, just rejected by society -- completely forgotten, completely
left alone."
So beginning here, today, right now, may God grant us the courage to be the
women and men he created us to be. May God grant us the courage to love [with agape love].
DAYSOUNDS
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