Christianity & secularism.

William D. Wood claims that Cardinal Francis George's remarks at a Chicago conference on "What Can Philosophers Learn from the Tradition?" show that George thinks the political order should be made less secular, and that this amounts to a plea for the recovery of Christendom. Wood doesn't like any of this, and especially not the idea that the "church needs Christendom in order to flourish."

Well, I don't like that last conclusion, and I don't think anything Cardinal George said at the conference suggests that he does either. I'm accurately quoted in Wood's piece as saying so: I was at the conference and am one of the founders of the Lumen Christi Institute that organized it. Still, I don't think Wood's misconstrual of the cardinal's remarks is malicious. Rather, it's prompted by a theoretical confusion that runs deep and is distressingly common, and instead of defending or explaining the cardinal, I'd like to address that confusion.

Wood confuses a desire to make the governing institutions of Europe less secular with a desire to make them explicitly Christian. Suppose, instead, that what making the governing institutions of Europe less secular really means is making them more just, more capable of and interested in defending the weakest and most vulnerable, less interested in bloodshed and the reduction of the human to an instrument of production and consumption. The saeculum (whence "secular") stands as synecdoche in Christian thought for the field of blood and exploitation and suffering and death that is human history without Christ (I commend to Wood a close reading of Augustine's City of God for an ancient depiction of this--one utterly relevant to today). The European history that Cardinal George referred to is a recent version of the secular at play, and the play is, as always, soaked from beginning to end in the blood of the innocent. Does Wood not want to have less of this--less secularism, that is? Would he not oppose, as John Paul II did and as Benedict XVI is doing and as Cardinal George consistently does, laws and actions that make possible or require the gulag, the concentration camp, the slaughter of infants in the womb, the sexual objectification of and concomitant violence against women, the sweated labor of the poor, the needless death by famine of millions, the imperialistic adventures of the new empire, the genocides of Rwanda and Dafur?

To think that the saeculum can correct itself, as Wood appears to, is culpable blindess. It cannot. It never has. The witness of the church against its follies and violence is essential, and that is what Cardinal George was providing. Does that witness involve advocating the return of the Holy Roman Empire? Not for Catholics. To see why not, I commend a close reading of Dignitatis humanae, Gaudium et spes, and Lumen gentium. Does it require advocating that the civil law be less secular? Yes, of course. Anything less is formal cooperation with evil.

PAUL J. GRIFFITHS 

Chicago, Ill.