On not dividing the seamless garment: why we Catholics don't fit in
Some
Reflections from Gregory Moses, April 2021
Mention of “the seamless garment” is a reference to
the Crucifixion scene in the Gospels, the seamless garment of
Jesus which the soldiers didn't want to divide and for which
they therefore cast lots. In this context I am talking of the
seamless garment of Christian ethics as understood within the
Catholic tradition and possibly elsewhere as well. The reference
to a seamless garment is appropriate enough in so far as the
Crucifixion constitutes part of the grounding for what is at the
heart of all our human related ethics, namely the dignity of
each and every human being across all boundaries and barriers
and distinctions from the first moment of their existence to the
last moment and every moment in between, made in the image and
likeness of God, one of those for whom the Christ was prepared
to lay down his life.
I would like to illustrate this seamless garment with two fairly long quotes.
The first is from A Message from the Catholic Chaplain at Yale Fr. Ryan Lerner to the Saint Thomas More Community at Yale, New Haven, CT, on the occasion of the annual March for Life in Washington D.C. 2021, by email on January 28th 2021:
Dear STM Community,
For the past three years, Saint Thomas More, the Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale, has accompanied students to the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C...
Because this year's March for Life will be primarily virtual, we will not be travelling with students. Nevertheless, we acknowledge and celebrate the truth that God has breathed each of us into existence. We pause to meditate on this mystery: that all of us were made for life. We remember that all human rights, justice and liberty, rest on the foundational right of being born, and created in the image and likeness of God. We passionately advocate that prolife means creating a world in which all life can flourish with equal opportunity, where all people have access to adequate nutrition, a clean and healthy environment in which to live, education, health care, family and community support. We do not excuse any violence against life – such as through abortion, crimes against human dignity in the form of racist bigotry, exploitation and expressions of hatred against marginalized persons, human trafficking, abuse of refugees and immigrants, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide or the death penalty.
On this day we pray for the grace of conversion of heart for all to respect life from its earliest stages, to natural death and every moment in between. We remember the words that Reverend Sylvester Beaman prayed in the final Benediction at the recent Presidential Inauguration: that “we will become a beacon of life to the world”. May we join in his prayer and in the prayers of the Archdiocese of Hartford for God to grant us this grace...
Fr. Ryan Lerner, Chaplain
The second is from Andrew Hamilton, S.J., in Eureka Street, an Australian Jesuit sponsored publication, in an article entitled “Making space for conversation”, 4th February 2021. It is about the peculiar difficulties of sponsoring a Catholic publication in the present social and political context. In the first five paragraphs he talks about the present context, making for a narrowing of the possibilities of serious conversation. The quote starts after this:
This narrowing has made it difficult for any publication sponsored by a faith-based organization to sustain conversation that encourages public reflection on all salient relationships involved in public issues. On the one hand it must move outside the specific language and conceptuality of the tribe to engage its participants in a public language. On the other had it must work from the moral centre that lies at the heart of its faith tradition.
In the Catholic tradition, that centre is the claim that each human being has an inalienable dignity that forbids anyone to be treated as a means to other goals, whether profit, security or unity. Furthermore no human is an isolated individual, but each must be seen in relationship to other people and to the larger world...
The difficulty facing Catholic sponsored magazines in the public conversation arise from the fact that some conclusions Catholics have drawn from the dignity of each human being are widely seen [in the society at large] as incompatible with one another. The inalienable dignity of each human being underlies not only the received Catholic accounts of inequality, respect for the environment, slavery and racial discrimination. It also underlies the accounts of gender relationships, abortion and euthanasia. [See above, Message from Ryan Lerner.] In public conversation [out there in the wider world] these are seen to belong to different and opposed packages.
The challenge that this polarisation poses lies in the pressure that it exerts on magazines to yield to a programmatic, oversimplified and partisan understanding of conversation...
By now you probably understand what
I mean by the “Seamless Garment”. It is as if so-called
Left and so-called Right have ripped up the seamless garment
and divided it between them, with each taking about half.
Meanwhile, except in so far as we are affected by the same
social and political forces as everyone else, we don't fit
comfortably in either camp. What to do about it I don't
know. Hang in there, do the best we can in the
circumstances, deciding ourselves who to side with on this and
that particular issue. Work within the parties to try
to sew the garment back together. Whatever, there is no
reason why we should allow other people to force us personally
into taking sides. We have a powerful, perfectly
consistent, fairly comprehensive interpersonal, social and
ecological ethic, as good as that of anyone else, a
'seamless garment' relating to and coming out of an amazing
grounding narrative about an
unaccountable Love beyond all boundaries,
in respect of which we have a cognitive right and for some of
us maybe a cognitive obligation. Which is not to say
that we actually live up to our ethic, or sometimes even
come close: to do even that requires the continuing work in us
and among us of that selfsame Love.
In
any event, the least we can do is to try not to add to the
confusion. Whatever our passion, it is probably a good
idea regularly to remind ourselves that this is part of
the one seamless garment, and sometimes to make this
explicit. Pope Francis gives us some good models
for this, for example in his recent book Let us dream:
the path to a better future (Simon and Schuster, London,
December 2020), where he treats of abortion and refugees
in the same paragraph and employs parallel arguments in
respect of each (see p. 115), or in his speech to the US
Congress in September of 2015, where he does something
similar with capital punishment. Francis' notion of
Integral Ecology so far as I understand it goes a
step further, seeming to integrate also the ecological
dimension into the same seamless story (Laudate Si,
also in Let us dream, see especially pp.
34-35). While in this short paper I haven't gone
quite that far, this obviously would be even better.
But in case some people might think Francis too 'liberal', the classic text at least for human related ethics is probably in Veritatis Splendor (John Paul II, 1993). Once again I quote at length, from Paragraph 80, talking about intrinsic evil, where it is not licit to do evil that good may come of it:
… Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object”. The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator”. (G&S, 27)
There you have it, almost the whole of the seamless garment all in the one paragraph! And in language which could hardly be stronger, all of them listed as examples of intrinsic evil not to be justified by circumstances or convenience.