It has been an exhausting week for me, a week of death.
The Pope had been dying for years, Terri for two
weeks, and a colleague stepping off the volleyball court, only ten minutes. The Pope was 84, but Terri and the
father of four girls were only 41. His funeral emphasized life after death, his eternal happiness and rest.
The obituaries for the Pope tended to emphasize his accomplishments, his confrontation with a materialist empire that
relied for legitimacy on visible army divisions.
And in the ruminations on Terri, little was spoken either of her eternal rest or accomplishments,
though much was said about the culture of death that precipitated it. The father was Protestant,
the Pope and Terri were Roman Catholic.
Terri died after a feeding tube was removed, the Pope died after a feeding tube was inserted, and my friend
had no time for any tubes. The Pope died despite the best health care available in Europe, Terri died denied
health care in America, and it is doubtful whether the best care in the world could have
saved my colleague.
Death. That great equalizer. That inevitable end. That ultimate termination of all our endless "to do" lists.
"Teach us to number our days", says the Psalmist, "that we might gain a heart of wisdom." I started
counting this week. I know this somber mood won't last, but like April 15,
it is good to repeat the exercise every year, if only to see what has changed.
What has changed? The Pope presided over the biggest shift of the 20th century, the fall of the Communist block,
the defeat of aggressive Materialism, and the resurgence of the Church. He was an unusual Pope, the first
non-Italian in 430 years, the very first Slav, brought up in the hinterlands of Roman Catholicism, raised
in a country whose state religion was atheism, ground under the heel of tyranny.
Why is this significant?
I remember a proverb from an old catholic who said, "it takes seven generations to make a priest", which
might explain the long run of Italians. But this Pole, whom Richard John Neuhaus thinks has earned the
appellation "great", evidently took only one persecuted generation to become Pope.
It was a stroke of genius to
appoint an archbishop from a Communist country at the peak of the Russian hegemony to head the Roman church.
And the results are before us in countless commentaries, the defeat of the most virulent form of Materialism
spawned by the excesses of the 20th century.
Who will replace Karol Wojtlya? I will not descend into the pit of political speculation, but I would look
around the world and ask, "Who else has lived under persecution, who else has grown up under tyranny?" These
are the men with a spine of steel, these are the men who can lead the divisions Stalin could not see. Perhaps,
like Augustine, it is time to look toward Africa.
Why Africa? One only has to look at Poland. While Communism held power, the Church grew and was emboldened
against Materialism, yet Reagan's victory has emptied the Church. We could say the same for the Allied victory
over National Socialism in 1945 through force of arms, only to see Socialism reappear with wealth and stealth.
Philosophies are much harder to contain than governments. Bribery corrupts
far better than force. Where has wealth not compromised the Church, where has Materialism
not spread its dead embrace? Africa.
What has changed? The battle of the 21st century, both here at Declaration Alliance and at the college of
cardinals, is how to address the mutating plague of the 20th century, the modernist culture of death. The
good news was that statist materialism of central Europe is dead. The bad news is that it has moved here.
Now there were many supporters of National Socialism
in England and America before the 2nd war. And many of the same arguments were made
by academics then. But what sealed their fate as a philosophy for skinheads alone was the Holocaust.
Likewise there are many fine arguments from political science, economics, and philosophy that demonstrate the
inferiority of statism, of materialist government and Madison avenue motivation. We have even tried to make a
few of those arguments here. But what Terri gave us was a unique
demonstration of its moral inferiority.
Finally one last uncomfortable parallel must be made. We have many libertarian friends who have
been in total agreement with Declaration Alliance and its call to return to unalienable rights. They
have been big supporters of tax reform, of curtailing judicial arrogance, of returning freedom of speech,
even perhaps of returning the abortion debate to state control. Yet Terri drove a wedge deep within this
unity of goals, causing many from the statist camp to gleefully talk of a conservative
crack-up. How could this be?
Let us give it a name: autonomy. Self-rule. Self-law. For the opposite of statism,
the opposite of big government, is not anarchy, is not libertarian, Ayn Rand style individualism. That is
where Nietzsche and the 20th century began! Counter-intuitively, emphasizing the individual leads
inevitably to Josef Stalin's
domination over the will of millions, it leads to tyranny and an ever more oppressive forms
of statism. It leads to the Darwinian evolution of cruelty to unspeakable depths.
So we come back to the absolute necessity, the dire need for something outside ourself to
provide an anchor to the soul. We need something external to provide limits, we need a greater power than
ours to insure true liberty. All this baggage is carried in the word, "unalienable".
So Terri was a rock, a lighthouse, a graveyard of shipwrecked philosophies that ignored the
pulsating beacon of her heart. For if her breath were only hers to breathe,
then autonomy would dictate that it would also be her decision
to die. But if that heartbeat is a searchlight founded on a bigger rock, the peninsula of God's
existence projecting into the tossing sea of doubt, then there are far greater consequences to ignoring
its warning than just Terri's life.
Therefore we resolutely reject the two philosophies of death that found agreement in Terri:
the materialism that denies the meaning to an impaired life, and the autonomy that demands self-rule even
over life. Both, apparently opposite routes, take us to the same destination. Both negate the
Declaration principle of an "unalienable right". Both replace divine power with human arrogance. Both
would make us into automatons of despair.
Terri is now dead, my hope for her vindication is gone. Remember the story of King
David, who fathered a son out of wedlock, and conspired to kill the husband? When Nathan the prophet
confronted David, he cursed the son and David's family.
David fasted and lay prostrate for seven days pleading for the life of his sick son, but upon the news of
his death, rose and showered and ate. His servants marvelled, "How is it that while the child was alive
you fasted and wept, but when the child died you arose and ate?" David replied, "While the child was alive,
I fasted and wept for I said, `Who knows, the Lord may be gracious to me?' But now he has died; why
should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me."
We cannot bring Terri back. We cannot avert the shipwreck of American jurisprudence. We cannot
wash our hands and say, "I am innocent of this woman's blood." Like David, we must shoulder
the burden of our crime.