The “Dazzling Catholic Intellectual Tradition” – the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer has just published a piece in the Wall Street Journal announcing the new Institute for Human Ecology (IHE) at Catholic University. She is a lawyer and the new institute’s director of strategy. The institute’s initial foray into major media was aggressive and confrontational: “Counterfeit Catholicism, Left and Right,” The Wall Street Journal, 9/23/2022.

Picciotti-Bayer adopts a pose beloved over the decades by the Catholic hierarchy, the Catholic administrative establishment and conservative Catholics in general: they declare themselves the golden mean between extremes of the left and right. On the one hand “prominent Catholic politicians” like Biden and Pelosi have “unequivocally abandoned the church is teaching on the dignity of human life.” On the right “a group of Catholic hardliners in the Academy and media have written off American institutions as hopelessly compromised.” She is referring to the integralists. According to Picciotti-Bayer, neither “offering” is distinctly Catholic. She asks: what are so-called “ordinary Catholics” to do? We need, she says, a framework for faith in public life that rejects both “secularism and sectarianism.” 

This all sounds like a revival the First Things/ National Review/ Richard Neuhaus school of conservative Catholicism going back to the 1970s. More specifically it is a subgenre of conservative Catholicism which proposes to “solve the problems” of the world in politics, economics and culture by utilizing Catholic principles. This brand of “apologetics,” of course, dates back to well before Vatican II – one thinks of distributism. Of interest is the IHE linking to a publication The Lamp which (at least initially) was also an advocate of a conservative, centrist Catholicism.

How can we even begin to respond to all this?  My basic observation is that Picciotti-Bayer’s enterprise is founded on ignoring reality. The two “extremes” within which the IHE seeks to locate itself are in no way equal. First, the adversaries on the left have controlling positions in government, the economy, the academy, the media and all other secular institutions in the United States. The enemy on the right is just a handful of intellectuals. Second, these same progressive tendencies also dominate the Catholic institutions. For have not Pope Francis and the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington gone out of their way to demonstrate their friendship with the aforementioned Pelosi and Biden?  The integralists enjoy no such positions of power in the Church. The author refers favorably to Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles, but hasn’t he been given – repeatedly – the cold shoulder by Pope Francis? Third, as a matter of principle I would not equate advocating or even imposing a regime of abortion – and all the other associated anti-Christian social policies of the West today – with the integralists’ visions of papal supremacy that exist only in some alternative universe.

There is talk in this article of “non-negotiable” positions. These seem to be not the Catholic faith as such, but the statements of Dignitatis Humanae on human freedom and various political objectives like strengthening the family. The author criticizes integralists for contending that contemporary American culture is actively corrosive to Catholic teaching, practice and virtue but is that not exactly what she herself says (quoting Archbishop Gomez) about “progressive ideologies” that are “profoundly atheistic”? And is not their (and her) assertion obviously correct? I have major differences of my own with the integralists’ proposed course of action, but not so much with their factual starting point. And I don’t think such issues of principle can be resolved by making dogmatic assertions about the values of American society. The adversarial relationship between Christianity and current American culture been not been eliminated by great victories within the existing system such the repeal of Roe v. Wade. I believe that event had a rather cool reception in the governing American establishment and in some quarters of the Church (such as the Vatican) as well.

The author writes that we must:

[R}efamiliarize ourselves with the works and voices that have helped form our nation. That includes such deep thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas. But it also includes profound Catholic witnesses who worked in healthcare…social services… and education...”

Now it is very helpful to be aware of such influences and contributions, but I think it would be a stretch to claim that the Catholic thinkers and “voices” the author lists “helped form our nation.” For in fact, for better or for worse, the United States was formed by other forces which although they may have had a remote Catholic ancestry, were, in the best case, merely indifferent to the Church. 

Continuing these reflections, we note that the author does not cite the current pronouncements and actions of the Church, except for Dignitatis Humanae and Archbishop Gomez. There is a good reason for that:  the actual practice of the Catholic Church in the last several decades has been an unending series of scandals, abuse of power, dishonesty, administrative incompetence, institutional decline and even outright criminality. All these ills have of course reached a high point under Pope Francis whose regime actively contradicts Picciotti-Bayer’s “non-negotiable” principles. The author, for example, mentions subsidiarity yet Francis has been the greatest violator of that principle. The author quotes approvingly “the Second Vatican Council’s mighty declaration on religious liberty,” that “man is obliged to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God.” Yet Pope Francis has launched a worldwide persecution of traditional Catholics (with very concrete consequences in the immediate vicinity of Catholic University). 

Thus, the current state of the “really existing’ (as they say in German) Catholic Church in no way is a “role model” for secular society.  Indeed, repeated interventions of the secular media and government (however corrupt they may be) have been necessary to straighten out the affairs of the Catholic Church – not the other way around.  Any project to educate Catholics in America about their role in public life must start from this reality and acknowledge that, in both theory and practice, the institutional Church – and the majority of the remaining Catholic faithful as well – do not agree with the IHE’s principles.

On a more profound level, I see the IHE sharing with both the integralists and the progressives – both so forecefully criticized by Picciotti-Bayer – the same fundamental defect. All are primarily advocating courses of political and legal action, seeking to arrange the affairs of the world in the manner that appears best to them.  But seems to me what the Catholic Church (and of the United States) needs is the rediscovery of the faith by the Catholic clergy and faithful. Once the faith is reborn, a political role and influence of the Church will naturally arise, because the Catholic faith is incarnational and social and necessarily has a political dimension.  That rebirth comes about not through political action, but through prayer, reawakened spirituality, and above all the liturgy. And the first steps of such a spiritual renewal must be the purification of the Church, not secular society. You cannot advocate Catholic social policy to the world if there is no Catholic faith.  Otherwise, I fear the IHE will become just one more establishment academic forum for conferences, colloquia and addresses, at peace with the World and the Church establishment but remote from the life of the faithful or of society.