Archbishop Gomez's Madrid speech

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), gave a controversial speech to a conference in Madrid.  Let's take a look at what he said and what it may indicate about our church leaders.

What happened?

Archbishop Gomez ignited a firestorm this month as a result of a virtual speech he presented to the Congress of Catholics in Public Life in Madrid.  The theme of Gomez's presentation was "the rise of new secular ideologies and movements for social change in the United States and the implications for the Church". 

Reaction, especially from liberal Catholics, was swift and negative.  Rev. Bryan Massingale of Fordham said the speech filled him with "dismay and disbelief".   Tia Noelle Pratt of Villanova called it "beyond disappointing".  Alessandra Harris of the online Black Catholic Messenger found it "out of touch and erroneous".  

What did Gomez say?  

The quotes that follow are from the text of the speech at Gomez's website.  Here are some of the main points of the speech:

1. These new social movements are secular and are unfriendly toward organized religion:

An elite leadership class ...which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values, and technocratic ideas about organizing society.

In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions. In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.

That is important to remember. In practice, as our Popes have pointed out, secularization means “de-Christianization.” For years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences...

In your society and mine, the “space” that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking. Church institutions and Christian-owned businesses are increasingly challenged and harassed. The same is true for Christians working in education, health care, government, and other sectors. Holding certain Christian beliefs is said to be a threat to the freedoms, and even to the safety, of other groups in our societies.

 2.  These social movements constitute a set of beliefs which is in rivalry with traditional Christian beliefs:

 I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.

With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.

Whatever we call these movements — “social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology” — they claim to offer what religion provides.

They provide people with an explanation for events and conditions in the world. They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a community.

3.  Social justice movements portray the world as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil:

What we might call the “woke” story goes something like this:

'We cannot know where we came from, but we are aware that we have interests in common with those who share our skin color or our position in society. We are also painfully aware that our group is suffering and alienated, through no fault of our own. The cause of our unhappiness is that we are victims of oppression by other groups in society. We are liberated and find redemption through our constant struggle against our oppressors, by waging a battle for political and cultural power in the name of creating a society of equity.'

Clearly, this is a powerful and attractive narrative for millions of people in American society and in societies across the West. In fact, many of America’s leading corporations, universities, and even public schools are actively promoting and teaching this vision.

This story draws its strength from the simplicity of its explanations — the world is divided into innocents and victims, allies and adversaries.

4.  The philosophical and theological ideas underlying these social justice movements are atheistic, Marxist and heretical.

Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society.

No doubt that we can recognize in these movements certain elements of liberation theology, they seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision. Also, these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in Church history. 

Like the early Manicheans, these movements see the world as a struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Like the Gnostics, they reject creation and the body. They seem to believe that human beings can become whatever we decide to make of ourselves.  

These movements are also Pelagian, believing that redemption can be accomplished through our own human efforts, without God.

And as a final point, I would note that these movements are Utopian. They seem to really believe that we can create a kind of “heaven on earth,” a perfectly just society, through our own political efforts.  

Some observations

An interesting point of comparison to Gomez's speech is a different controversy from earlier this year, on the occasion of President Biden's inauguration.  Putting on his USCCB president's hat, Gomez issued a statement which didn't strike the usual notes of polite diplomacy:

In a time of growing and aggressive secularism in American culture, when religious believers face many challenges, it will be refreshing to engage with a President who clearly understands, in a deep and personal way, the importance of religious faith and institutions. Mr. Biden’s piety and personal story, his moving witness to how his faith has brought him solace in times of darkness and tragedy, his longstanding commitment to the Gospel’s priority for the poor — all of this I find hopeful and inspiring.

At the same time, as pastors, the nation’s bishops are given the duty of proclaiming the Gospel in all its truth and power, in season and out of season, even when that teaching is inconvenient or when the Gospel’s truths run contrary to the directions of the wider society and culture. So, I must point out that our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender. Of deep concern is the liberty of the Church and the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences.

Here, as in the Madrid speech, we can see that, when Archbishop Gomez scans the horizon to read the signs of the times, he sees storm clouds gathering.  We find in the Madrid speech some of the same themes voiced in the inauguration statement: growing secularism, with religious believers on the defensive.  The negativity is impossible to miss.

The contrast with Pope Francis is stark.  Jack recently posted on Francis's message to the Fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements.  Francis sees social movements as good things.  He lauds their ability to envision a more just society (he greets them as "social poets"), and their willingness to undertake the work and the risks to help bring about social justice.  One recalls the Catholic social action methodology: "See / Judge / Act".  He invites activists, "Let us dream together": let us imagine a better world than the one we inhabit today.  Invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan, he refers to social activists as the "Collective Samaritan", who, in his estimation, "is no fool!"    

By contrast, Gomez sees many of today's social movements as (a) a threat to the flourishing of the church in the United States; (b) striving to bring about a world which would not be an unalloyed improvement; and (c) without God's help, trying to bring about a better world is a fool's errand.

I recently ran across an old article by David French which has some bearing on Gomez's pessimistic views of today's progressive American social movements - specifically, Black Live Matters (BLM).  French is invoked from time to time here at NewGathering.  Before becoming a pundit, he was a prominent attorney who specialized in protecting the rights of religious minorities, especially on college campuses.  He is a committed Evangelical who often writes to Evangelical audiences.

The first paragraph of the article in question (which is from 2016, i.e. after Michael Brown but before George Floyd) telegraphs French's concern: 

If Black Lives Matter were conservative, it would already be one of the most discredited and despised movements in American history. Can you imagine the elite Left’s reaction to a conservative movement built on a founding lie that has incited riots, inspired shootings of police, and correlated with an astounding and deadly increase in violent crime in America’s major cities?

The "founding lie" appears to be the claim that Michael Brown was executed in cold blood by a Ferguson, MO police officer; that claim was observable in 2016 at BLM protests and rallies as "Hands up / Don't shoot".  French adds:

#related#Black Lives Matter is one of the founding churches of the new religion of anti-racism, a secular faith that views every significant event or trend in the United States through the prism of race, and seeks to remake the nation from the ground up to purge it of its historical sins. Oddly enough, when boiled down to its essence, the new religion of anti-racism looks a lot like the older religions of Marxism and socialism, complete with hostility to capitalism and a destructive rejection of Judeo-Christian moral norms. Black Lives Matter just changes the pretext for revolution.

A number of threads of thought from this 2016 article - hostility to Christian moral norms; BLM as a new religion; secular faith; seeing everything through the prism of race; the influences of Marxism - also are found in Gomez's 2021 speech.  In fact, the ideas are so similar that one can't help wonder if this French article has influenced Gomez's thought.

But Fr. Massingale provides a different view of BLM:

[Gomez] blanketly characterizes social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter as pseudo-religions based on profoundly atheistic ideologies that are hostile to Catholic belief...

On the contrary, most Black Catholics I know advocate Black Lives Matter precisely because of our belief in the universal human dignity of all people as images of God.  We declare that Black Lives Matter precisely because of our allegiance to what the archbishop calls the Christian story...

What especially saddens me is that there is no evidence that the archbishop, as president of the nation's bishops, made any effort to use the best scholarship on contemporary social justice movements that is available in the American church.

There are many committed Catholic scholars, especially those of color, who could have provided him a more accurate perspective on contemporary events.

What we are witnessing here is a gap - a chasm - in perception between different people in the church.  It is not simply an argument between competitors for ecclesiastical power.  It is two vastly different world views.  Where one sees the promise of a better world, the other sees a threat.  It would seem to be urgent for the possessors of these two world views to engage with one another, with appropriate good faith and humility.