American Catholics and Public Policy
by Rev Bryan Hehir, Secretary, Dept. of Social Development and World Peace, U. S. Catholic Conference.

A talk given at the 7th Annual Chicago Call to Action Conference, Nov 17, 1984, at Mother Guerin H. S.

 

I knew if I came here, I would have two problems. One, I would be introduced by Jack Egan, whom I count as one of my dearest, oldest and most respected friends. And I knew that the eloquence of the introduction would overwhelm the eloquence of the speech and that is not a very appealing proposition. Having found my initial premonitions to be true, I'm not going to try to respond to that introduction.

Second, I was coming to Chicago to speak. Now, if you were in the seminary when I was in the seminary, which was the early '60s, and if you happened to have the professors I had, who were really steeped in the history of many of the movements of the church - liturgy, social action, the role of the laity, the kinds of things that led to Vatican II, well then all through your formative years, you heard about Chicago. Chicago represented the place where the movements that created the council in the worldwide church were rooted and grounded in the American church. Chicago was the place of the Hillenbrands, Higgins, Egan and Cantwell. Chicago was the place where they celebrated liturgy like Vatican II before Vatican II. Chicago was the place where the laity knew they were the church before we said they were. Chicago was the place where they joined faith and vision, action and commitment. And so I come to Chicago, and I have come often, but I come to this meeting because this meeting symbolizes many of those same themes. And therefore I come here with a certain sense that it is a major task to be asked to address you.

Having stated my problem, let me tell you what I'm going to do with it. I've been asked to examine the resources and possibilities and problems of relating the vision and structure of Catholic faith to the American public policy debate. I want to proceed to do that in three steps. And my three steps are first to look at the American context for the policy debate; second, to look at the Catholic conscience in the policy debate in the 1980s; and thirdly, to look at the American Catholic contribution to the public debate.

My style will be Catholic, that is to say, a mix of memory and hope, a mix of tradition and experience. And my key resources are two sources in our tradition. From the universal church I will recall often and explicitly from the theology of Vatican 11, 20 years after Vatican II. From the American and Catholic experience, I will draw from the political philosophy of John Courtney Murray.

Now before I proceed to the talk, let me just say something about ourselves on both sides of the lectern tonight. For if we try to think about the American Catholic experience in the 1980s - all of us in this audience are old enough to have lived through three stages of the life of Catholicism in a very short time. Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the calling of the Second Vatican Council by John XXIII. And in those 25 years, I submit that we can distinguish three distinct phases in the life of the church. We have lived through those three phases, which is a very rapid journey.

There was the Conciliar Period from 1960 to 1965. That had its own life, its own dynamic. Everything was pointed toward Rome and what was happening there. Only 20 times in 2,000 years had the church gathered in that way, to think through the meaning of the faith. As Karl Rahner said, just before he died, "It was only that time, out of the 20 times, that we really had a worldwide council." So those five years had their own dynamic, their own excitement, their own complexity. We knew something was happening, but for most of us it was one step away: something happening to the bishops.

The day the council closed, we began the Post-Conciliar Experience. And that had its own dynamic too. It is easier to start a revolution than to live through it. It is easier to plan change, than to conduct it. It is easier to be told about the council than to experience it. The Post-Conciliar Era began the day the council ended and, I submit, it ended the day Paul VI died. So from 1965 to 1978 we lived through the Post-Conciliar Period where the whole purpose and dynamic of the life of the church was to try to take the vision of the council and try to do something with it. And I say it ended in 1978. What I mean by that is that I think analytically it is possible to say that Paul VI's pontificate was totally absorbed in trying to carry out implementation with all of us in the church.

Then, beginning the day after he died, we moved into a new phase. We don't walk away from the council. We've all been shaped by the Post-Conciliar Experience, but I submit we are in a different period and will be in that period the rest of the century. It is hard to name the period. It is the product of both the conciliar vision and the Post-Conciliar Experience. But it is also the product of all the things that have happened to us as citizens and Catholics in the world in these years. The interplay between the conciliar and the post-conciliar and the world make up the resources that we bring to this third period. So as we talk about the American Catholic debate, the American Catholic experience, all of this is there as resource.

I. The American Context

Let me begin to look at the American context of the public policy debate. Essentially, my theme here is the need to remember and to recast John Courtney Murray. We have just lived through an election that has been filled with the themes of religion and politics. Twenty-four years ago, Murray wrote "We Hold These Truths", in another election which was also filled with religion and politics. If you can pick up "We Hold These Truths" today and read it, there are still truths to be found in that book, but there are also some gaps. Not that Murray is responsible for these gaps. The gaps are the gaps of our present experience, which is not quite the same as the truths we held in 1960. The American context for the public policy debate has both a Constitutional setting and a theological setting. I want to remember Murray and recast Murray in terms of that Constitutional and theological setting.

First the Constitutional setting. All I'm really doing here is stating the obvious. But if one looks at some of the confused ways that religion and politics have been talked about in the last eight months, it may be useful to state the obvious.

The American discussion of church and state always begins with the separation clause. The separation clause of the First Amendment is a good place to begin. It is not a good place to end the discussion of church and state, religion and politics. If one remembers John Courtney Murray well, we will think clearly about the separation clause. Murray's script always was that there is a limited, crucial, but very specific and limited role of the separation clause. The purpose of the First Amendment is not to define the precise role of the institutional church or any religion and the precise role of the institution of the state. It is not the purpose of the First Amendment to separate the church from society, nor to separate religious values and vision from the public life of the country. The separation clause, Murray always held, was designed to foster freedom, the freedom of the church to be church without any help from the government and the freedom of the state to be the state without any undue intrusion from the church. In that mix of freedom, we expect to find vision and wisdom in our society.

The hope of the First Amendment is not to purchase religious freedom at the price of expelling the religious vision from our public life. Murray put it this way: "We should always hold for the separation of church and state. We should never hold for the separation of the church from society." And, in our Constitutional setting, we don't need to hold for the separation of the church from society. Churches are voluntary associations with their own distinct place in society. You cannot preserve a democratic society if you do not have voluntary association, organizations, groups of people, who gather precisely to shape and influence the public life of society. In our Constitutional setting churches are voluntary organizations with the specific capacity to articulate a religious, moral vision and appeal to the conscience of the citizenry and the policy of the society. If we remember Murray, we'll keep the First Amendment straight.

II. An Activist Church

There is also a theological side in the understanding of how the church, we as the church, fit in the public policy debate. The church-state question, as I have said, in Murray's mind was always a very limited question. As you know, he expended his life on it. But, even as he pushed and pulled the universal church to finally sign the "Declaration on Religious Liberty", the most important thing he said to the church was that the church-state debate was the 19th Century question. It was not the 20th Century question. His view of the importance of the document on religious liberty of Vatican II was that it cleared up an old argument for Catholicism. It said clearly to the world, "We don't need the state to be the church." Murray's view was that the 20th Century question was not church and state, but church and society. The question was not the institutional question of the rights and privileges of the church, but the pastoral question: how the church, as a community can contribute to the life of the society.

The church-society question was taken up at Vatican II, not in the "Declaration on Religious Liberty", but in the "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World." Once we're clear about the Constitutional setting, what we then must concentrate on is the theological mission that should guide our life as a church. The message of the Pastoral Constitution is that it set the theological basis for an activist church. It said that the social is central to what it means to be Catholic, that the protection of the dignity of the person, that the pursuit of justice and that the work for peace are religiously informed, religiously significant objectives. And it said that the method of the church is the method of dialogue. In one of the great sentences of the document it said: "The church manifests the love of Christ for the world in its willingness to dialogue with the world on a whole range of issues that touch the welfare of the human person."

Murray was right. The church-state question had been cleared up in the 19th Century argument. If one looks at the last 20 years since the council, it is not the church-state issue that has been significant. It is the document on the church in the world, the role of the church in society. From this document then comes the discussion of political theology. From this document has come the theology of liberation themes. From this document has come an activist social ministry. And you can see its effects in the life of the church in the United States, --in this place.

You can see it being worked out at different levels in the life of the Church. Take the bishops. We debated the war and peace documents for two years. We've debated Central America and the confrontation of the bishops with their government for four years, and we are now in the midst of the debate on the economy. What is fascinating is not that the bishops disagree on specific points. What is fascinating is that in meeting after meeting no one takes the floor and says, "How did we ever get into this?" No one takes the floor and says, "Why, as bishops, are we talking about these issues?" That question is almost illegitimate. The consensus on "Gaudium Et Spes", the Church in the World, is so strong that the debate is only about tactics, strategy, and specific applications, not about where the church should be.

Now the bishops have had a very confined, structured, detailed atmosphere in which to reach their consensus. It is harder when one moves to the larger church, for there the debate is not so structured. The pluralism is greater and, I submit that what we see going on when these documents of the bishops hit the light of the larger church and we sort of splinter into different groups -- total support, some support and lots of opposition -- is that the consensus about the role of the church in the world is being worked out in the larger church. For, if no one in the '80s in the bishops' conference would say, "Why are we doing this?", there were lots of folk in the '60s who would have said it -- in that same conference of bishops. You would have had to go back to first premises on every issue. And so what we see at work in the Catholic press, as The Wanderer crosses swords with the National Catholic Reporter and as The Catholic Register moves someplace back and forth, what we see is people trying to get clear about what the consensus is. By that I would not want to give equal standing to The Wanderer and others, but I'm trying to be fair. As we see Catholic organizations (whether they be support groups for Central America or justice and peace groups or whether they be the American Catholic Committee) take shape in the church around these issues, it's important not to look only at the issue, but at what is going on underneath the issue. There is a struggle for whether the Pastoral Constitution will really set the consensus about what it means to be Catholic. That's what's at stake. It took the bishops a long time to come to some consensus about it. The life of the larger church struggles with that consensus.

Now we have a Constitutional setting that says we are free to be the church. We have a theology that says we ought to be an activist church. And in that context, there is one last point. It is not enough simply to remember Murray. One would have to recast Murray to understand the present context of the American religion and politics debate. Murray's great virtue was to define the challenge of religious pluralism. He said that because of America's religious pluralism, we have constructed a society based on the premise that we disagree about ultimate issues as a country. But we've got to find enough common agreement to deal with daily issues. For a religiously pluralist society is by definition one that disagrees on the ultimate issues of life and yet must construct some viable consensus on the daily issues of life. And to fail to do that is to risk being downtown Beirut. That's what happens in a religiously pluralistic society when the daily issues get translated into ultimate terms. Now Murray saw the challenge of creating that consensus in a religiously pluralistic society as a never ending challenge and an extraordinarily complicated and delicate task. But if one reads Murray today, you have to recast him because there are new issues and new actors that are here with us that were not with him.

III. New Issues, New Actors

First of all, new issues. There is an amazing centrality to the moral questions today on the public policy agenda. What I mean by that is that it is almost impossible to talk about the central issues facing American society if you fail to talk about the moral questions. If you fail to talk about the moral questions, you will fail to define the issue well ... from in vitro fertilization to death and dying, to nuclear war, to capital punishment, to human rights and foreign policy. None of the issues is purely technical. None of them can be described in purely empirical terms. You can't decide what you want to say either as a person or a society if you think you can discuss those issues in neutral technical terms. They are shot through with moral dimension. The edge of the moral question is sharper in the public debate today than it was in Murray's life.

Secondly, there are not only new issues, there are new actors in the debate. Murray's view of Protestants was well mannered Episcopalians and Presbyterians. He never met Jerry Falwell. The religious right as a theological entity and a political force adds something different to the public policy debate today. It has a very specific scriptural vision and an extraordinary idea of what is the rightful role of religion in public life.
Murray taught us to always speak for the rights of the church in the public role but he also spoke of the limits of the church in the public role. The religious right has a very strong sense of rights and very little sense of limits.

And finally there's a new place for the Catholic Church in the dialogue. Twenty-five years ago is a long time in contemporary Catholic history.
We stand in a different position. Our understanding of who we are has undergone substantial change. We keep reminding ourselves that we are, or were, the immigrant church because it's hard to remember that -- except that the new immigrants are among us.

I think that it would be an interesting experience, for example, to sit down and read, during the last six months, the speeches by Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy, Henry Hyde, and Pat Moynihan on religion and politics: a political range that cuts across the spectrum from left to right, but really a very respectable body of reflection on the role of religion and politics. Different as many of them are on specific questions, there is a remarkable combination of both faith and politics in all of those speeches. I suppose, depending on where you start in your political vision, you are surprised that either this one or that really said it intelligently. But they all did and they said it well, and not a bishop among them! That's the context we're in, a Constitutional context that gives us freedom, and a theological context that drives us into the debate and a new setting for us and for others.

IV. The Catholic Content

Now the Catholic content. What do we bring to the debate? This is a question of what vision do we use, who speaks, and how we articulate the vision. First of all what vision will we take into the public policy debate? Again I use the bishops as a case study. I have already remarked about the amazing degree of consensus among them on the theological foundations of the church's public role. That unity does not extend to strategy and tactics. They have an honest debate though about single issue versus multi-issue perspective. In Chicago, it is not our place to try to adjudicate this in terms of the Bernardin initiative. You can't understand the critical role or the seamless garment unless you go back to an earlier point I made: the surprising significance of the moral quality of so many of our public policy issues today. You can't make wise policy unless you are concerned about the right and the good, when issues do not yield to purely empirical analysis. So everyone, church and state, secular and sacral, religious and non-religious vision, everyone is searching for how you join the moral and the technical.

So what vision will we take into this search? The argument of the seamless garment is not an attempt to find a slogan, it is not an attempt to find an easy unity among several issues. It grows, I submit, out of the very nature of Catholic moral theology. And it is an attempt to take something from our tradition and offer it to the wider society. Now what is it in the Catholic theological vision that is helpful to the range of issues in the public debate? First of all, Catholic theological vision is by definition a systematic vision. We feel very 20th Century when we talk about systems analysis. And we equate it with computers and PPBS programs. But Aquinas was a systems analyst. The Summa is a systematic moral theological vision. For him how you dealt with one question always had to be seen in light of how you dealt with other questions. That is a systematic approach. In the face of a range of public issues with serious moral content, it is no small contribution to say, we ought not to treat them ad hoc. The Catholic vision is systematic.

Another Chicagoan, David Tracy, has said that the Catholic vision is not only systematic, its genius is that it sees things as an analogy. An analogy is two things that are somewhat the same, but totally different. So when two things are analogous, you learn how to compare them, find what is similar between them and then know that they are not identical, that there are some differences between them too. The purpose of the seamless garment is to say that the range of issues we have today is analogous. There are some common themes and there are some great differences between medical ethics, nuclear war and the quality of life upon earth and we will learn something about each of them if we keep analyzing each one in its own right and comparing one to the other. I submit, it is this multi-issue, systematic, moral vision that gives us something distinctive to say in the public debate.

It gives us something to say because it is a very challenging proposal. For it says to everyone, "Don't propose a moral vision unless it is comprehensive in scope and consistent in structure." Comprehensive in scope. If you're concerned about the moral quality of the issues in the country, tell me first what counts as moral. How many of the issues before us count as moral? This relates to how we see things. It is hard to see the hungry in Ethiopia, but when we do see them, we know that they are a moral challenge. And despite our deficits, our budget deficits and our personal deficits, when we see them, we respond. It is hard to see the unborn, because they're not visible and so someone has to help us to see them or we'll forget they lay a moral claim on us. Comprehensive in scope: what does our society see as moral?

Secondly, consistent in structure. Consistency means that we say to one another, "How we decide this question may well influence how we decide that question." I was in graduate school in the '70s. I knew people who were passionately concerned about the bombing of the Vietnamese and thought the abortion question was a medical problem, and I knew people who were passionately concerned about the fetus and thought the bombing of Vietnam was a political problem. But running through the bombing question and the care of the fetus, there is the principle that direct attack on innocent life is wrong. How we see things governs how we describe what is wrong. The purpose of a multi-issue moral vision is to stretch our attention and to test the inner fiber of our moral analysis. It is an unfinished business, always, always. When Cardinal Bernardin spoke at Georgetown someone got up and said I appreciate your concern for preventing war and stopping abortion, but you didn't talk about the women's issue and that's moral. And he said, I think quite honestly, "That's right, I didn't, but I also plan to talk about it another time." The vision is not finished, but it must be comprehensive in scope and consistent in structure or it won't hold together as a vision.

V. Who Speaks For The Vision

Now who speaks for this vision? I said earlier that I thought we were trying to work out the "Gaudium et Spes" consensus in the life of the larger church. But we can't work out the question of the church in the world without working out the larger ecclesial vision of the council. And some people today state this question of our social presence, our place in the public policy debate by making a radical distinction between the bishops and the laity: that it is the lay role to be in the world and the bishops are somehow usurping that. I think it is the wrong statement of the problem. But the statement arises out of a real problem. It arises out of the question, 20 years after the council, of the relationship of our theology of the laity and the place of the laity, the actual place of the laity in the church. With Jack Egan, I sat through the Call to Action hearings around the country. One of the most frightening memories I have of the hundreds of hours of testimony is when Joe Cunneen, the editor of Cross Currents an authentically lay journal for these many years, came before the bishops at the hearing on the laity in Sacramento and literally took me off my feet when he said, "You know, I knew my place better in the pre-conciliar church than the post-conciliar church. There's all these organizations of priests and nuns and bishops and I don't seem to have any place." And there was a man who knew the role of the laity all his life. Now what's the problem here? Let's return to Murray. At the end of Vatican II Murray said, "In the Post Conciliar Period, the problem we will face is the gap between renewal and reform. He said all the way through the council we discussed what we were doing in terms of renewal and reform as if they went together. But, he said, they're really very different.

Renewal is a term of the intellect. Renewal has a quality about it of the library, where we sit down and think out what we want to do, design the grand plan. It's filled with ideas. Reform is not about ideas. It's about institutions. Reform has about it the quality not of the library but of the political arena. You have to build institutions. We have a real problem, the theological basis of the role of the laity, after Vatican II, is in better shape than it may ever have been in the history of the whole church. Certainly it's in better shape than since the Reformation, at least in its theological grounding. But the equally essential organizational structure is not good. Your group is an exception. You've come together, support one another, have a visibility and a place. I'm sure it's not all you want it to be, but you're light years ahead of where we are right now in the church as a whole in the nation. We have a theology of the laity and no adequate way to build that theology into the ongoing life of the church yet. Renewal is ahead of reform.

And so I think it is wrong to say that we ought to divide the functions between the bishops and the laity in absolute terms, like some belong here and others don't. We need several different voices in the public policy debate to project the vision that we have to offer. I wouldn't define it as one against the other, but I would say that 20 years after the council one of the places we have not come to reform, to match the vision of renewal, is precisely this question.

How do we articulate it? The vision, taking us right where we are? Well, one of the reasons I don't like to define the question as this against that, the bishops against the laity, is because the unique strength of the Catholic presence in society is the way we join an institution with a community. This is what Bishop Malone said to the bishops on Monday. "In a large complex society like ours, if you want to try to shape the society, you've got to have some institutional presence. You can't project if you don't." But the church is always more than an institution. Ultimately it is a community. So the strength of our presence in a society like this is maximizing the resources of the institution represented by the hierarchy, and the community, that is the rest of us. Now if the strength of Catholic presence is the mix of institution and community, we also have to understand that is also the source of Catholic tension. The authority of the institution versus the freedom of the community.

How do we project into the life of the society? There are different ways to think out this relationship of institution and community. Let me offer you different ones, some of which I obviously disagree with.

There is currently the approach called "The Catholic Answer", which is to say that the institution speaks for all and represents all. That doesn't fit, if it ever did. Today "The Catholic Answer" does not fit our theology or the issues we face at this point in our history. I want to say, after a long experience of working in the public arena, that I am sure that Catholics agree on three things: there are three persons in the Trinity, seven sacraments of the church and two collections on Sunday. After that it is open season.

The second model is leadership by Gallup Poll. This is to say the institution can't speak unless the majority agrees with them. And so you have to poll the folks every time you're going to say something at the institutional level. I don't think that fits our theology either. Nor does it fit the issues we face. So what do we do about this dynamic of institution and community? How do we articulate the vision?

I'm for an activist institution and a pluralist community. That is to say I want to maximize the freedom on both sides of the equation. The freedom of the institution to speak often, as long as it speaks well. And the freedom of the community to react and respond and speak on its own. I think if we don't encourage an activist role on the part of the hierarchy, there will be all sorts of issues that will go by. And when you're a major institution, the way we are, not to speak is to speak. Leadership by Gallup Poll will convict us of silence. So let's press for an activist hierarchy, whether it be war and peace or social justice or the life of the unborn. Let them press ahead. But then, the speaking must be into the community. An activist hierarchy must come back to the community with what it says and test it out. Not everything the hierarchy says is necessarily on the same level or demands the same degree of assent. Take the Peace Pastoral, for example. The document says direct attack on innocent life, on civilians in cities, is never right. There are no exceptions and anyone asked to do that is expected to refuse orders. I don't think we can say that the bombing of cities is consistent with our vision. But in the next paragraph the bishops say, "And we as bishops think that the first use of nuclear weapons would always be wrong under all circumstances." There is room for debate here. There are those who can give you some very strong arguments that the threat to use nuclear weapons may keep the peace in Europe.

The bishops said that and said it well. There is room for disagreement.

If it is wrong to kill the innocent in the cities, I don't think we can kill the innocent in the womb either, but that doesn't mean we've all got the same idea about how we ought to protect the innocent in the womb, legally, in this society. Mario Cuomo and Henry Hyde, I think, both want to protect the innocent in the womb, but they have different ideas about how to do it. But that fits in a structured moralism.

Now the delicate question is, if you are for structured moralism, how do you shape the structure, the framework of the debate? Here we run up against the fact that there are some givens. At times we'll feel the pressure of those givens. There is no discipline if discipleship doesn't chafe at times, doesn't force us to re-think our instincts, to rein in our first reactions. There are some givens, but there is lots of space for agreement even in shaping the structure. I think we can maximize freedom for the institution and the community and still keep the debate a structured, pluralist debate.

VI. Creating Space For The Moral Argument.

That brings me to the American Catholic contribution: the move from reality to politics. Let me first limit my topic here. I think we have something to offer in our style of family life, in the growing body of literature we are now producing, in what our education system can offer, and even in the way we worship in this hall, in the sensitivity of this group. There's a lot of space for those kinds of contributions. But I'm not the person to tell you about it. The contribution I speak of is in the area of policy and politics. Fundamentally, the key thing we have to offer there is to create space for moral vision in the life of the whole society. To create space for moral vision in the way we debate, define and decide the major issues of our country. There are some real strengths in this system we call Catholic. When we are at our best, we have something to offer to the wider public debate. There is the Catholic concern for the system as a whole. When we talk about the economy, we want to talk about the whole economy and everywhere. The option for the poor is within the context of concern for everyone and so we talk about the common good. And in a society where many things are becoming scarce, from budget resources to clean air, a concern for the whole is important. Match the Catholic concern for the whole with Catholic sensitivity to the secular. At our best we've always felt that a religious contribution to a pluralistic society somehow had to be translated into terms that others would find intelligible and appealing. Our style is not to hit people over the head with the Bible. And in an age where there is some of that around, there is something to be said for demonstrating how a religious vision can appeal in non-religious terms.

Finally, there's a certain Catholic respect for reason, even in the light of faith. John Courtney Murray used to write reason with a capital R. That helps one to be sensitive to the complexity of issues even while we do not want to become paralyzed religiously and morally by complexity. But a respect for complexity today will be necessary if we're to make a contribution to this public debate. And so the key thing I think we have to offer is making space for the moral vision.

In The New York Times this week, Leonard Silk, the economics editor, said the key contribution of the economics letter, in his view, is that it will shift the structure of the debate. If we shift the structure of the debate, making space in explicit terms for the whole, it is better than having one single brilliant answer to any specific problem. It is the same in the nuclear debate. I am at least as interested and maybe more interested in having the pastoral letter on war and peace read in the universities than I am in having it read in Congress, because I know the nuclear question is always an intellectual question before it is a political question. Politicians decide the nuclear future of the country, but they never define the questions they decide. They inherit them from somewhere else.

If we can help shape the structure of the debate, we'll make space for the moral argument. Where will that happen? Let me give you two cases to watch the arena in which key decisions will be made. The first is the budget as a moral document. The second is the laboratory as a political arena.

When Congress comes back in January they will immediately receive a budget and they'll start to debate the budget. The budget is a highly technical document. The budget is also a moral document. In the midst of those technical tradeoffs, moral decisions are made again and again. And the battle ground of the budget will be the deficit. For the deficit tells us that we are up against the margins of our choices. There are no reserves or contingency funds. There is no flexibility in the middle. We're in a zero sum game in the budget. Now faced with that, if we don't find a way to cut the defense budget, then the least among us, in this country and in other places that need our resources, will bear the burden of the nuclear age. It is that simple. If the deficit is $200 billion and no matter what you do on taxes, you have to cut, and if the defense budget can be insulated from those cuts, you know who will pay the cost. And so the budget becomes the intellectual and political ground on which we will talk about the war and peace letter and the economics letter.

The key thing for the church is the way it deals with public opinion and public policy. In a complex democracy, public opinion does not dictate specific policy choices; but in a complex democracy, public opinion sets the framework within which we will choose. There is a surprising constituency today that says our direction in the nuclear arena is all wrong. There is no reflection of that constituency in our public policy at the moment. It is questionable whether there is a constituency at the moment for an explicit place for the poor in the budgetary decisions. How do we as a church touch public opinion? And here we need the institution and the community. Both shape the arena in which the budget as a moral document will be shaped.

Finally, the laboratory as a political arena. There is a way in which today the medical moral agenda from the beginning of life to the end of life has become a social issue. It is social because it touches each of us. These esoteric debates about in vitro fertilization and amniocentesis and how we care for the dying all of a sudden come home to the individual. How will I choose on this or that? And the medical moral arena highlights one of the significant questions that runs through the public policy debate again: the relationship of politics, ethics and technology. Will our technology direct our politics or our politics direct and control our technology? We are in a society where we can do almost anything. What we still have to learn as a society is how ought we to use it. The public choices on what we do are both social and deeply personal. The justice and peace agenda is there in the budget. The medical-moral agenda I also highlight as formed and shaped by political considerations.

I have talked a lot about reason, a good deal about vision and somewhat about faith. There is one other factor we ought to consider. It is hope. In our age hope is a needed public commodity. People of faith know something about hope. Hope is where we go when the problems are larger than life. We don't need hope for small problems. Hope is what gives courage, constancy, and conviction when the problems are larger than life.

I've hardly exhausted the public agenda. There is much I didn't talk about - women and race and immigration. All that is part of what I talked about. These problems are larger than life. When people come to understand that the problems are larger than life, they often get frightened, but fear paralyzes people. We cannot move with fear. One of the continuing things that a religious community should offer is the capacity to hope. For hope is not to run away from the facts, fearful as they are. Hope is the ability to look facts in the eye and not be overwhelmed by them. Hope is to know down deep that we live in a world that is open, not closed, and that if the issues are larger than life, they are not larger than the God we worship. Hope is nourished every time we go to Eucharist and find the bread of life and the word of life that gives life to our community. The best thing the church can be in the public debate is this: a sign of hope for ourselves and for others.