By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
K.D.A. writes to offer us a response he received when he showed a friend the January 5 edition of First Teachers. This was the column centering on whether Catholics with traditional views are being intellectually inconsistent, even hypocritical, when they criticize campus liberals who impose codes of political correctness, considering how we call for prohibitions against performances of LGBT films and The Vagina Monologues, as well as appearances by pro- abortion speakers at Catholic universities.
Couldn’t it be charged that our side opposes censorship only when it is carried out by those who disagree with us, but are fine with it when it protects our values?
In the January 5 column, a Catholic college professor wrote to offer his way of dealing with the dilemma in his classes: “I do not accept fideistic and non-rational arguments for impinging on the freedom of others, from either side. Privately, I hold views that I don’t necessarily expect other fair-minded people to accept, but I do maintain my freedom publicly to express them but without forcing others to abide by them; and I accept the same expectation from those who disagree with me.”
K.D.A.’s friend was impatient with this professor’s approach to the matter. He wrote to K.D.A., “Senseless thinking and conjecture about a senseless topic. Either we will have a society rooted in objective Catholic truth or not. If we ever have such a society one day, then it’s very easy: Anything that conflicts with Catholic doctrine and morals has no intrinsic right to public expression, though, as an optional free choice, it can be permitted in some situations if somehow some greater good — for a Catholic society — can be served by this tolerance.”
K.D.A.’s friend continues, “Once you depart from this understanding and seek to embrace some Americanist pluralist vision of everything, then anything pretty much goes. There’s no way out of the thicket, because the American environment is incoherent by its very nature, prizing procedural allowances and freedoms above truth content.”
I don’t want to put words in the mouth of K.D.A.’s friend, but it strikes me that what he is calling for is a return to the confessional state that was part of Catholic teaching in the years before Vatican II: a society in which Catholicism enjoyed a privileged relationship with the state. It is a view that resulted in prohibitions against divorce, abortion, and the sale of contraceptives in countries with predominately Catholic populations such as Spain and Ireland. Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, longtime curial head of the Holy Office, is frequently cited as a defender of this understanding of a properly ordered society. His position was summarized in the Latin motto on his coat of arms: Semper Idem (“Always the Same”), and in his contention that “error has no rights.”
I sense that many readers of The Wanderer are not unsympathetic to Ottaviani’s fear that “religious freedom” would result in moral relativism and religious indifference, resulting in what we have today: widespread acceptance of pornography, the rise of legalized abortion and same-sex marriage and state hostility toward religious believers and religious institutions, exemplified by our government’s attempt to coerce the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide coverage for contraception and abortion in their employees’ health-care packages.
But the issue at hand in the First Teachers column in question was Catholic colleges and their curricula. Even if one were to agree with Ottaviani that “error has no rights,” how far would we want our colleges to go in carrying out that dictum? Catholic colleges in the years before Vatican II taught Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Their theories are “in error” according to Church doctrine. Should they be excluded from the curriculum at a modern Catholic college? First Teachers invites responses from our readers about where to draw these lines.
On another topic: the question of whether we should stand firm against the movement away from the teaching of cursive writing in our schools, discussed in recent editions of First Teachers. Some of our readers think we should, others disagree.
M.M. of Pennsylvania adds an insight to the topic, one that I had not considered heretofore. See what you think. She writes, “I have been following the debate on cursive writing with much interest. I am a home-schooling mom and I teach cursive in my home-school. In fact, the overwhelming majority of home-schooling moms that I know also teach cursive.
“There has been an element to this debate that has been missing so far, one that speaks to why I choose to teach cursive. Cursive is objectively more beautiful than print. I don’t think many could argue otherwise. One of the goals of the home-school education of my children is to instill in them a love of what is beautiful. What is true and good is beautiful. So in some small way I hope that learning cursive will further their love of what is beautiful and consequently their love of God because all things that are true and beautiful point to Him.
“Perhaps this argument doesn’t have many practical applications in public school and I’m not so naive as to think that my children will write only in cursive the rest of their lives; that’s not even my goal. But I do think that the beauty of cursive is something that should not be lightly cast aside. We certainly have plenty of the ordinary, commonplace, and even the downright ugly surrounding our children right now. It saddens me think of one more beautiful thing being removed from children’s education.”
My first reaction was to disagree with M.M. We are not talking about calligraphy. Cursive writing is a form of communicating. Shouldn’t it be judged by how well it does that? But then I had second thoughts. We teach our students art and music appreciation because we want to introduce them to the beautiful things in life. As M.M. writes, “What is true and good is beautiful.” And what is beautiful in life reflects the glory of God. I think M.M. is on to something.
One last topic: our call for our readers to suggest books that will help our students understand traditional values in the way that books by C.S. Lewis, William F. Buckley, and Russell Kirk helped earlier generations of students.
A.M. took us up on our offer. He writes, “I believe that after reading the Bible, a very informative book to read would be Can Man Live Without God by Christian apologist Dr. Ravi Zacharias. In it he takes on the leading “antitheist” philosophers such as Nietzsche, Descartes, and others. It is a great book for group discussion and for people weak in the faith or having no faith at all.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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