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One of the many myths surrounding “The Inquisition” is that the Catholic Church was brutally executing scores of innocent people by drowning them or burning them at the stake.
In the symposium titled “The Inquisition: What Really Happened?” (April 20) cosponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute and the Medieval Studies Workshop, scholars Hannah Marcus (Stanford University), Daniele Macuglia (University of Chicago), and Ada Palmer (University of Chicago) sought to clarify the numerous misconceptions surrounding the infamous period.
For one, “the Church itself is never executing,” remarked Palmer, Assistant Professor of History, Associate Faculty of Classics, and Member of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. “There is no Inquisitor tying people’s feet and then dropping them in the canal.”
On the contrary, the most common sentences meted out by the Inquisition were that heretics recite Hail Marys or sit through really boring lectures. “There were very few burnings and drownings,” said Palmer. Furthermore, the Church didn’t have the authority to execute anyone. That was the prerogative of the state. They would recommend that a heretic be executed and then local government authorities would carry out the sentence.
Local governments, for their part, were concerned with political dissenters, primarily those who committed treason against the state. The reason that executions were rare is because they were so costly. Unless a heretic was also a political threat, local officials wouldn’t ordinarily get entangled in the Church’s problems.
Nonetheless, even a mild sentence seems outlandish for modern democratic societies accustomed to freedom of thought.
But in Medieval Europe, ideas mattered. One’s eternal soul could be imperiled by adherence to heretical doctrine. It was rare that heretics were executed. For the most part, they were given every chance to renounce their ill-informed or dangerous beliefs, as in the case of a young man who allegedly sold his soul to the devil in order to sleep with his boss’s wife. He was merely chastised and told to recite prayers, which he did with seeming remorse.
What has come to be regarded as the Catholic form of the Inquisition was an ecclesiastical tribunal established in twelfth-century France for the suppression of heresy. The Inquisition therefore dealt with ideas, news, information, and the dissemination of knowledge—striving to defend people from wayward doctrine by ensuring its purity and veracity.
The Church itself is never executing…There is no Inquisitor tying people’s feet and then dropping them in the canal.
To give even greater context to the topic, Marcus, a PhD student in History at Stanford University, drew upon the work of historian Edward Peters who distinguishes between three types of inquisition. There is the “inquisition,” which was a legal practice that originated in Ancient Rome. Then there is the “Inquisition,” which usually comes with a modifier before it. That’s because there were Inquisitions in many parts of the Catholic world, including Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, Mexico, and even in Goa, a state located in western India. Each of these Inquisitions had different concerns. Even Naples had a different inquisition from the one in Rome. Finally, there is “The Inquisition,” a stubborn myth whose origins can be traced to the “Black Legend” and the Protestant polemicists from the Netherlands in the 16th century who spread it. What was their sinister tale? “That Catholic Spain (which controlled the Netherlands at the time) is the worst and destroys everything,” said Marcus, mimicking the legend’s exaggerated tone.
The propaganda started against Spain, but then spread to Italy and other parts of Europe. “It’s an enduring legend,” she added, explaining that it makes historical scholarship difficult.
There are numerous myths to rebuff.
One is that the Church was opposed to science and reason, and that the victims suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty clerics were intellectuals or saintly visionaries like Joan of Arc.
Macuglia, a PhD student at The University of Chicago’s Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, confessed to being surprised that the Church actually helped disseminate new discoveries and ideas. “Some of the major contributions to the spread of Newtonianism came from within the Church,” he said, adding that many mathematicians and natural philosophers were able to advance their scholarship through the Church’s inquisitorial networks.
In fact, quite a few academies and centers of learning were established and funded by the Church—especially in Rome. While they helped promote knowledge, their primary purpose may have been more Machiavellian, i.e., to assist the Inquisition in determining whether the latest scientific theories were true or not.
With the invention of the printing press in 1450, the Church was overwhelmed with the scope of their project. Ideas—both good and bad— could circulate with astonishing speed. For example, news of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was able to reach London within 17 days. If Luther had lived several hundred years earlier, only the inhabitants of Nuremberg would probably have known about his complaints.
“Suddenly and newly in the 1500s, scary ideas – from the perspective of a nervous, conservative, self-identified Orthodox theologian – are jumping all over Europe with incredible speed and multiplying themselves into a hundred or a thousand copies,” said Palmer.
“Heresies were being imagined in the contagion sense,” said Palmer, to give an idea of the Church’s perspective on the threat. Prior to the printing press, a heresy could have been confined to a single area, to one city even. If someone came up with a crazy idea, e.g., projecting your soul out of your body to spy on your enemies, it would stay within a group of interconnected individuals. This was no longer the case.
The Protestant Reformation of 1517 dealt the Church another severe blow in its mission to stop the spread of heresy. “There are suddenly territories where everyone in that territory is officially labeled a heretic,” said Palmer. According to Church law, “you’re supposed to have no contact with them; they’re excommunicated.”
In 1559, the Roman Inquisition under Pope Paul IV issued the first papal index of prohibited books. Catholics were now expressly forbidden from reading Martin Luther or any books written by Protestants. But the Church soon realized that not all Protestant intellectual work is heretical. “Some of the books they wrote are scary theology that you don’t want around,” said Palmer, “but some of the books that they wrote are drawings of rocks.” And these drawings might prove incredibly helpful to a Catholic geologist, only he is unable to use them because they were created by a heretic. “How do you handle that? Is that allowed? Is that not allowed?” asked Palmer, showing how the Church was forced to bend its rules, to make exceptions.
Marcus elaborated on the problem by sharing that the “heretic” countries of Switzerland and Germany were particularly advanced in botany and pharmacology. A Roman physician approached the Inquisition, pleading for permission to read scholarly material published by the sixteenth-century German physician and botanist Leonhart Fuchs. “The physician said he doesn’t know how to save Catholic bodies without the works of a Protestant author.” The Church now has to contend with cases where you need a “heretic” to save a human life.
So when did this painstaking process of sifting through information to determine whether it is heresy or not come to an end?
One thing that probably surprises most people is that the “Inquisition” still is around today. However, just as in the past, it is incredibly rare for cases to go to trial. However, if they do, the body responsible for promulgating and defending Catholic doctrine is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Although it doesn’t have the universal jurisdiction it had in the past, “there still needs to be an authority that regulates what is and isn’t theologically sound within the Catholic Church,” said Marcus.
December 15: The late Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., left behind an impressive intellectual legacy for the American Catholic Church. Without exaggeration, he could even be called “the most intellectually astute prelate that we’ve ever had in the history of American Catholicism,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York. But Dolan shared another side to his friend’s personality that most people did not always hear about. “We already knew about Cardinal George’s towering intellect, but Cardinal Dolan pointed out the depth of his heart and soul,” said David Christian, principal and founder of David Christian Attorneys LLC in downtown Chicago, who attended the event in Times Square that commemorated his city’s Cardinal.
Dolan said it is only natural that we should admire George for his intellectual prowess. For he indeed inspired everyone around him with his harmonious embodiment of fides et ratio (faith and reason). Fides et ratio, it could be said, guided the pontificate of Saint John Paul II (who wrote an encyclical with that title) as well as Benedict XVI . It was not only apparent in George’s writing, but also in his spontaneous thinking that reflected a mind of remarkable depth and precision. “I have never seen a man who could write a sterling speech on the back of a cocktail napkin,” said Dolan. He could make a speech that was prepared in five minutes sound like it took him months to prepare it, he added.
While George was noted for his sharp mind, Dolan wanted to remind us of the immense tenderness of his heart and soul.
One time, after Cardinal George had visited the Pontifical North American College in Rome where Dolan was Rector, he placed a worried phone call to his friend. “I left something that was very dear to me in my room at the College,” he said, explaining that he sent one of his students to search for the item but it wasn’t there.
What could he have forgotten, Dolan wondered. Was it a breviary, a rosary?
“It’s my green laundry bag,” replied Cardinal George. “I know it sounds funny but I’m a religious. I don’t own many things.” George went on to share that the bag was given to him when he entered the Oblates of Mary Immaculate at the age of 14. “I’ve carried it to every assignment. When I was in the Missions, I used to cram it full of medicine and clothes as we visited the homes in the villages where the Oblates served. It’s been with me now my whole life. I don’t want to lose it. Could you please try to find it?”
His endearing treatment of a simple object, a mere laundry bag, reflected something incredibly profound about this man gifted with a great mind. His humble request was “a plea of simplicity from a man with a heart,” said Dolan.
Finally, as with his beloved John Paul II, Cardinal George showed everyone around him how to suffer gracefully and how to confront death with utter trust in the Lord.
Cardinal George’s sister had shared that for every single day since he was 18, he had not been without intense pain. But George never allowed people to feel sorry for him. He never once complained. “He was a radiant soul in his suffering,” said Dolan. George expected the same fortitude from his fellow priests and bishops. When appointed Cardinal, he had said to the priests in the Archdiocese of Chicago, “I will take anything from you: criticism, complaints, disagreement. The only thing I can’t stand is somebody feeling sorry for himself.”
This man who never wallowed in self-pity knew how to abandon himself entirely to God’s will. “I would propose to you,” said Dolan, “that he was a model of the redemptive suffering that Pope Saint John Paul II spoke about.”
Like John Paul II, he allowed the world to watch him suffer and die. “That was perhaps one of his greatest legacies,” concluded Dolan. “That explains, I think, his great devotion to the Cross, that explains his great devotion to the woman who stood at the foot of the Cross, and that explains his great devotion to the Holy Eucharist which is a daily renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary.”
“I really believe that the programming Lumen Christi puts on is incredibly important for anyone in business. The breadth and depth they go into on the Church’s social teachings and how they engage with so many of the issues and topics that are at the forefront of our thoughts is incredible.”
What is your area of study and what is the focus of your current research?
I just graduated from Booth School of Business and I received concentrations in Finance, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management. However, Booth is famous for its flexible curriculum, and I feel I got the well-rounded business education that I needed to serve me for a long career.
How did you first hear about Lumen Christi? Which event did you first attend, and why?
I first heard about Lumen Christi through my uncle, Steven G. Rothmeier, who had been involved with Lumen Christi since its inception. Its lectures and scholarly approach to the Catholic Faith was something I had heard about long before I came to Booth in 2013. The first event I attended was “Pope Francis: First Pope from the Americas” during my first quarter at Booth. Pope Francis was still relatively new and Catholics, myself included were still getting to know him. This lecture brought together a diverse set of scholars to discuss his impact and their thoughts were incredibly enlightening.
How has your participation in Institute lectures, conferences, and seminars contributed to your growth as a scholar?
I really believe that the programming Lumen Christi puts on is incredibly important for anyone in business. The breadth and depth they go into on the Church’s social teachings and how they engage with so many of the issues and topics that are at the forefront of our thoughts is incredible. While most of the events I went to did not directly relate to my academic growth, they most certainly will have an impact on my ethical thinking as a businessman. In addition, they have many topics that I would never have learned about in business school, and they have incredibly expanded the topics that I would otherwise not have had the chance to learn.
Is there a particular event (or encounter with a scholar) that has directly impacted the development of your academic work?
Lumen Christi recently hosted a luncheon with Jim Perry in order to introduce Lumen Christi to the Booth community. While the talk didn’t have a direct impact on my academic work, it showed me, and others in the audience, that there are powerful members of the business community who take their faith seriously, and deliberately act in accordance with their belief system. Jim Perry was very deliberate in defining Catholic Social Thought, and provided concrete examples of how he chooses to stay true to his beliefs, while also providing examples of how he has seen other stray outside of what he believes is a moral way to act in business.
What do you plan to do after you have completed your degree from the University of Chicago?
I will be starting at Apple in Cupertino, CA in September after taking some time off to travel with my wife. I’ll be working in a group in Operations called Supply Demand Management that forecasts build plans for all of Apple’s products and is effectively a bridge between Operations, Sales, Finance, and other parts of the organization.
Please comment on the role you think the Institute plays on the University of Chicago campus.
Booth can be a very insular community within the University. Since the MBA program is relatively short, students can sometimes get tunnel vision and not lift their heads out of the business world to learn more about their faith and other scholarly endeavors. Lumen Christi can provide both of these to Booth students, and with the formation of the group, Catholics at Booth, this year, I hope more students can see the wealth of programming Lumen Christi has to offer and engage with Lumen Christi and the broader University.
French Professor of Religious Philosophy Rémi Brague Describes Our Age as Barbaric Because of our Inability to Communicate
Barbarism. One usually associates it with hairy ax-wielding ogres, with primitive tribes grunting around a roaring fire, not with a sophisticated, tech-savvy culture.
But Rémi Brague, Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Religious Philosophy at the Sorbonne and Romano Guardini Chair of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich, used barbarism when describing the twenty-first century. He boldly claimed that “civilization has to do with linguistic communication” but that (despite all the emails and text messages we send) we are unable to communicate.
The implications of this can be frightening.
“Civilization means conversation,” said Brague in his lecture “Conservation as Conversation” given for the Lumen Christi Institute on October 14, 2015. Without communication, violence follows, he warned.
The absurdity of this in the era of instant communication fills us, Brague says, with a certain anxiety.
My lecture has to do “with anxiety which I feel in my bones, in the marrow of the whole Western culture. It is an anxiety before a return to barbarism.”
Brague finds that the modern view of discarding the past is turning us into barbarians. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw this clearly, he says. We are objectifying the past (not seeing that it is richer and more colorful than the knowledge we can get of it in a definitive point in time) and therefore killing it.
But we are also barbarians in our stance toward nature. “Nature, the physical world, has to be looked at as meaningful in order to have a conversation.” Our vulgar interpretation of us as mere products of natural selection, as “winners that never deserved the jackpot,” has turned us into “barbarians in a barbarian world.”
What has to be ultimately salvaged, argues Brague, is the speaking animal that currently doubts its legitimacy. Only then can we acknowledge the Logos in the past and in nature, and become “the dialogue partner of a rational being whose rational will underlies the whole show.”
Jim Perry—LCI Board Member and Managing Director of Madison Dearborn Partners—Challenges Future Business Leaders to Apply Principles of Catholic Social Thought to their Decision-Making
Private equity doesn’t have a great reputation.
Business leaders in the private equity world are notorious for being ruthless. After all, they come in and “trim companies down.” They take a fledgling company and go through the books and say, “you need to fire people, cut your expenses.”
It’s hard to imagine private equity investors being compassionate and loving Christians.
However in a luncheon talk given at Gavin House on May 13th, James (“Jim”) N. Perry, Jr. Managing Director of the private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners, challenged over fifty students from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to see their work through the Christian lens by actually helping take a company from failure to success—and that whatever decisions are made during the process should be done sensitively, ethically, and with utmost respect for the human person.
“As business people, we are often confronted with choices that do implicate our faith tradition,” said Perry. In his industry, for example, investors look at a company to make it more profitable. It’s all about relationship. They have to find the right leaders—people of competence, courage, and compassion. “Our business is about putting the right jockeys on the right horses.”
In whatever decisions are being made, “Catholic Social Thought offers us a framework.”
Perry then went on to present the pillars of Catholic Social Thought that can guide aspiring private equity investors—and any business leader of character and conviction who is not afraid of elevating moral standards in the workplace.
The first pillar is respecting the human person who is created in the image and likeness of God. “What does it mean in how we respect the worker?” he prodded. The individual worker of course comes from a family, which is the next pillar. An ethical business should promote the good of the family, which includes the understanding that livelihood depends on a just wage and that high levels of stress destroy family life.
There is also within Catholic Social Thought a strong emphasis on the right to private property and its connection to human freedom. Perry expressed fascination with this “linkage between human freedom, markets and property.”
The next pillar is subsidiarity, a principle of social organization which promotes political decision-making at a local level rather than from a detached centralized authority.
And finally Catholic Social Thought encourages business leaders to work for the common good—to think about what they can do in their sphere of life to promote peace and to care for the poor. “One main idea Jim imparted is that all individuals need to take responsibility for their actions, and there is always a choice to make a values-based decision,” said Andrea Vandersall who aspires to go into private equity after she graduates from Booth. She was particularly grateful that Perry encouraged students to anchor themselves in the faith, to pay attention to their spiritual life. “Listening to Jim also reminded me that taking the time for some deeper reflection can be tremendously worthwhile. When people get busy or stressed this type of thing is pushed to the side too often, when some form of spiritual thoughtfulness, regardless of religious beliefs, could be one of the best ways to keep people grounded.”
Indeed, a deep spiritual life is essential for making a difference and being a beacon of light in the business world.
Perry concluded in quoting from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labour):
“Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.”
The Church’s Astonishing Contribution to Scientific Advancement
Stephen M. Barr (University of Delaware)
The Scientific Revolution that took place in the 17th century and gave birth to modern science did not develop in opposition to revealed religion. “In fact, most of its great figures were devout Christians,” argues Stephen M. Barr—Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware—in his lecture “Science and Religion: The Myth of Conflict” given at the University of Chicago on April 9th.
The list of scientific thinkers who were also men of faith is impressive.
“Copernicus, whose work sparked the Scientific Revolution, was an official of the Catholic Church. Johannes Kepler, famous for his three laws of planetary motion, was a devout Lutheran, who announced the discovery of one of them with the words, ‘I thank thee, Lord God our Creator, that thou hast allowed me to see the beauty in thy work of creation,’” explains Barr.
Of course, one may immediately protest that this isn’t true.
Weren’t there scientists who had a rocky relationship with religion? Wasn’t Galileo persecuted by the Church? With Descartes, didn’t we become less “religious” and more reliant on the truth revealed by the scientific method? That is a myth, argues Barr. “Galileo remained a devout Catholic throughout his life. Descartes, whose work in mathematics was foundational for modern science, believed in God and the reality of the spiritual soul.”
Indeed, the Scientific Revolution wasn’t anti-religious at all. Many scientists were in fact incredibly zealous—to an extent that might astonish us. “Blaise Pascal was not only a mathematician and physicist of genius, but a man whose life was transformed by an intense mystical experience and who wrote in defense of Christian belief and against skepticism. Robert Boyle, the first modern chemist, left a large sum of money to endow a series of lectures whose purpose was to combat the ideas of ‘notorious infidels’ (i.e. atheists). And Isaac Newton, the greatest of them all, spent as much time on theological and scriptural studies as he did on science,” says Barr.
One may wonder then why there is a cultural perception that there is an antagonism between science and religion.
That is because the real conflict is between religion and a philosophy called “scientific materialism” which “wraps itself in the mantle of science” and argues that matter is the ultimate reality, that everything that happens can be explained by the laws of physics and blind chance, explains Barr. What makes the conflict even worse is that scientific materialists adhere to an ideology that sees science as “having a saving mission, which is to free the human mind from irrationality and superstition.” Their ideology critiques religion on three levels: philosophical, historical, and scientific.
Philosophically, they condemn religion for being irrational—a combination of myth and magic. Historically, they hold that religious believers and institutions have been hostile to science, e.g. against Galileo in the past and proponents of Evolution today. Finally scientifically, they claim that the scientific findings in the last 400 years have entirely undermined core Christian beliefs.
Barr takes each of these criticisms in turn. The philosophical critique is based on “crude misunderstandings of traditional ideas about God and Creation.” Judaism and Christianity were never based on a rejection of the natural order. Moreover, “the Book of Genesis was in part a polemic against the supernaturalism and superstition of ancient pagan religions,” says Barr. The Judeo-Christian tradition views God as the Creator of the natural world, as the One who has established its laws and given things their natural powers. “The idea of God as rational lawgiver very likely helped give birth to modern science, as even some atheists at times concede.”
The historical critique of religion is also entirely untrue. “It has been completely discredited by historians of science,” says Barr. “It is a myth, pure and simple, whose roots lie in the Enlightenment, and the contempt many of its thinkers had for revealed religion.”
And finally scientifically, Barr explains that in the past one hundred years there have been several major discoveries and developments—especially in physics—that “seem more consonant with the Christian and Jewish conception of the universe and of man than the materialist’s.” The most shocking example of a scientific discovery that actually supports a religious idea is the Big Bang Theory. This central idea in modern cosmology—proposed by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaître—was initially treated with skepticism. Newtonian physics suggested that “matter, energy, space and time had always existed and always would,” says Barr. But with Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, one could now describe a universe whose space was expanding. Combining this with observations from astronomers that distant galaxies were receding from us, Lemaître proposed the notion of an absolute beginning to the universe. The Big Bang Theory proves that even scientifically there isn’t much tension between science and religion. In fact, “science now strongly supports an idea that came from biblical revelation and was dismissed by the pagans of antiquity and modern materialists and for a long time seemed contrary to science,” says Barr.
Indeed, far from condemning science or being in conflict with it, the Church has been one of its greatest advocates—with countless scientist-priests exploring the natural world and offering logical, coherent, and systematic explanations for its wonders. Men of the cloth have been involved with founding the sciences of hydraulics and geology, in making important contributions to the development of integral calculus, in discovering an innovative system of botanical classification, in making fundamental discoveries in the theory of sound and vibrations, in discovering the first asteroid, and showing that fertilization in mammals occurs through the union of sperm and egg.
This extraordinary number of Catholic priests who made important scientific discoveries led Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University, a chemist and a noted historian of science, to say, “the Catholic Church has been probably the largest single and longest-term patron of science in history.”
Cupich & Cantú Ask Economists to Consider the Challenges Facing the Modern Family
The social-political ideals of individualism have a long history and profound influence upon American culture. In short, individualism is the belief that self-reliance and independence are virtues, that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of a group. But for Catholics, the family—not the individual—has priority.
In his opening remarks to the symposium on “The Family in the Changing Economy” held in International House at the University of Chicago on April 30th, Blase J. Cupich—in his first Lumen Christi event as newly installed Archbishop of Chicago—cited the Church’s long history of fighting for economic justice on behalf of the family, starting with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum which examined the effects of industrialization on families. “Since its inception, Catholic social teaching has focused on the family as primary, not the individual,” said Cupich.
This is not to say that the Church ignores the needs of the individual. On the contrary, many elements of Catholic social teaching stress human rights, the dignity of each individual person, and the sanctity of human life. But the individual is always born into a family. The individual does not exist on its own. “The baby knows its mother before it knows itself,” remarked Bishop Oscar Cantú (Las Cruces, NM)—Chair of the USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace—in his keynote address. “It understands its independent existence only after it has experienced relationship. The smile of the mother is something that the baby responds to, long before it even knows that it is an independent being. We all understand ourselves in relation, not in isolation.”
It is difficult to have a clear idea of the importance of the family in our modern culture. Many people take it for granted; many people think of sociality as belonging to a social or political group.
But the family is prior to everything—including the State. “The family is not seen as just one of many volunteer associations that might come or go as the social order develops. Rather, the family is understood to be the central unit of all social orders,” argued Cantú.
Pope Leo XIII made this explicit in Rerum Novarum. In this encyclical, Cantú explained, “the family is treated as one of three irreplaceable institutions that are essential for human happiness. Like the Church and the State, the family is not an optional, but a necessary social institution. It also precedes the State, and is therefore not simply dependent on it.”
Cantú made several key points about the family. First, we are created for community. Before we speak about schools and clubs and political organizations, we have to address the community that we know from the moment of birth. “The community that is most basic to humans is marriage and family. Thus the family mirrors the Trinity, by way of metaphor, and so participates in reality at the deepest level,” said Cantú of the spiritual and mystical nature of family life. “We are both individuals and members of a greater whole, and each is constituent of our created nature. This understanding flies in the face of the modern individualistic attitude that pervades our culture.”
Second—we are made for self-sacrificing love, for the total donation of the self. This is what Christians mean they speak about love.
Finally, if we are made for such love, where does one most intimately experience it? “The family, with all its limitations that come from human frailty, is the place best suited for learning to give and receive this love,” said Cantú. “It is meant to be the training ground for all social relationships.”
The family, in its beauty, its frailty—from the primordial to the ancient world through today—has faced many challenges. Cantú shared that our historical moment isn’t unique. “Since the time of Christ, and even before Christ among Jewish people, in many different contexts, there has been a necessity among the People of God to work out principles of social life and order amid the changing relationships of Church and State.”
However, Cantú made clear that the Industrial Revolution transformed society to such an extent (from a rural to an urban landscape) that the Church had a duty to respond in an urgent manner. “Consideration of these principles has taken on special import during the last 200 years, particularly as the idea and the reality of a pluralistic secular state has arisen, and social philosophies and investigations have been developing into full-fledged sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and, noteworthy for this conference, economics,” he said.
Archbishop Cupich presented the problems facing families today. “There are many features of American culture in this historical moment that make genuine family life extraordinarily difficult and, at times, seemingly impossible. A pervasive materialism fuels a frantic consumerism. People are then defined—and they define themselves—in the measure that they can acquire things.” Not only do families feel pressures that drive them to unnecessary despair, “government or business policies can further strain family time and resources. Human needs and personal dignity are too often irrelevant in an economy driven by cost-cutting, stock holders’ expectations, or a bottom line that trumps the rights and well-being of workers.”
Cupich asked that they challenge the nature of the markets: “The moral vision and ethical principles of Catholic social teaching emphasize that the family cannot fit within an economy whose only value is efficiency. The market needs to be a means, not an end; the market cannot form our values. A society measuring economic success in terms of numbers injures human flourishing if people forget the dignity of human beings and basic human values. The Church affirms the dignity of all families and all members of families in a context of solidarity and justice, not the logic of profit.”
He urged economists to remember that the limiting nature of their discipline: “The Church seeks to meet families where they are and accompany them through the joys and sorrows of life, in the blessings and trials of marriage, in the opportunities and challenges presented by our culture. Human dignity must always be at the center. Solidarity is not efficient, nor is it driven by the logic of profit; it is a way of following Christ.”
