Francis George, OMI, is Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, and currently President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is a thoughtful man, highly intelligent, widely and deeply read, occasionally irascible, and among the principal intellectual voices of the American Church. Earlier this year he published a book, The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture. In it he addresses many topics — liturgy, evangelism, culture, philosophy, poetry — in a single, passionately Catholic, voice. Much of what’s in the book has been published before, and most of it breaks no new ground on the particular topics it addresses. Reading the essays one after another, however, yields a very strong impression of the power of the Catholic intellectual tradition as universal and synoptic: everything can be embraced by it and transfigured by it, and there is evident in these essays a fundamental stance, one of faithfulness to Jesus and love for his Church, from which it is possible to see otherwise invisible things.
In the Cardinal’s essay on lay Catholics this transfiguring vision is very clear. Both the faith, George writes, and the ambient culture of the United States, are normative systems: that is, each of them makes complex claims to truth and instructs us in how we should live. Each of them, moreover, has an account to offer of the other. Secularized American culture tells Catholics that their Catholicism is a hobby, a matter of private preference without significant import for their lives as Americans; and the Catholic faith describes secularized American culture as simultaneously demonic and a proper object of love, to be perfected for Christ so that it can be delivered to him when he comes again in glory. We American lay Catholics have listened hard to the normative voice of American culture and learned its lessons well. We have not understood so well the lessons the Church has to offer us about our culture. The result is that American Catholics are, by and large, in babylonian captivity without understanding that we are.
Cardinal George makes these points not to lay blame or to criticize. He’s interested, rather, in the possibilities for exhortation that issue from the clarification of differences. Among the exhortations he offers in the lay catholics essay is that we, we lay Catholics, need to learn to love today’s city, our beautiful and deadly country with its strip malls, its murder, its casual violence, its ugliness, its neonlit depravity, its aspiration to world domination, its history of slavery and genocide — to love it with a disinterested love that will make it possible for us as Catholics at once to learn from it, to appreciate the trace of the Lord’s presence in it, and to evangelize it and perfect it as an offering to Christ. This is a difficult vision, at least for me, because I have a dialectically Jansenist heart that blinds me to beauty’s trace all around me (yes, even in that neonlit depravity, even in that violence and death) and urges me to turn my eyes from it toward the consecrated host. The Cardinal’s exhortation reminds me that it is my task, as it is that of all lay Catholics, to look with the eyes that Jesus has given me (“who made the eyes but I?” George Herbert has Jesus ask in ‘Love III’) not only directly at himself but also, exactly with those transfigured eyes, at what is around me.
