editor's desk

Editor's Desk: The Public Square

By Michael F. Flach
Herald Editor

"Don’t be embarrassed by telling people the truth," said Father J. Augustine Di Noia. "To have an impact on public life, Catholics need to approach it with confidence in their faith. We have to come to our audiences with confidence that we have something valuable to share."

Father Di Noia, a Dominican theologian who also serves as secretary for doctrine and pastoral practices of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), spoke recently at a Washington seminar hosted by the Faith and Reason Institute.

Robert Royal, institute president, said the seminar was the first public event in a three-year, $1.5 million joint study project of the institute and the Commonweal Foundation to assess Catholic presence in U.S. public life and find how to make that presence more robust.

Royal, formerly associated with Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Institute, has written a book on Catholic martyrs of the 20th century. The book will be released in April to coincide with a major celebration in Rome. Royal has written a series of columns based on the book, which are now appearing in the Arlington Catholic HERALD.

The study of Catholicism in the public square is one of a series funded by the religion program of The Pew Charitable Trusts in an effort to strengthen the role of the various U.S. faith communities in American public life.

There are now more than 60 million Roman Catholics in the United States, making it the nation’s largest single religious group. Despite these large numbers, American Catholics, much to the dismay of Church leaders, appear to have little impact on civic life, culture and the political arena.

This wasn’t always the case. Catholic immigrants to the United States in the mid-19^th century put their stamp on neighborhood life, urban politics, the welfare state and economic activity. The institutional Church still operates an extensive network of schools, health care facilities and social service agencies.

The three-year study project hopes to find answers to the following questions:

To what extent do Church teachings about society’s obligations to the poor and unborn continue to influence increasingly independent Catholic voters?

How are Catholics to be present in an American public life that typically runs hot and cold about public religion?

Can Catholics exert public influence if the once cohesive Catholic subcultures of belief and ethnicity are dissolved and their vibrant imaginative worlds are transformed into yet undetermined forms?

In trying to address some of these questions, Father Di Noia said Catholics must consider the Trinity as the starting point.

"We're not talking here about revealing arcane truths, but about love pouring itself out so that love will be returned," he said. "The Trinity is not a puzzle, but is itself the solution to all of our puzzles. We wouldn't exist, nothing would exist, apart from this divine intention."

Father Di Noia said that if Catholics want to develop a strategy to influence American society and culture in the 21st century, they need their Catholic colleges and universities to turn out ``theologically sophisticated" Catholics to have an impact.

The people coming out of Catholic institutions do not all need to be theologians, he said. But they need to know more about their faith than what they remember from their third grade catechism.

He said it is essential for Catholic institutions of higher learning to turn out people who know something about their faith and who are capable of articulating the ways in which it relates to their field of expertise.