I wish to take issue with two arguments making the rounds in Catholic circles at the moment. One comes from U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and a related one is from Professor Robby George of Princeton. I’m hampered by lack of the full context in Justice Scalia’s case and by lack of the text in Professor George’s case (although I attended his lecture). So, my remarks are tentative and I would be very pleased to receive documents or other materials elaborating the matters. The two remarks betray a curious consistency.

Justice Scalia’s argument comes from a speech at Villanova where he insisted that “Just as there is no ‘Catholic’ way to cook a hamburger, I am hard pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would come out differently if I were not Catholic.” The justice’s remarks raise questions not only about the role faith should play in the public square (not much, apparently) but also about reasoning itself as it relates to matters of law or policy.

Professor George’s argument offers a similar theoretical point. It was made at a May 28th conference at The Catholic University of America celebrating the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. He proposed that institutional Church should refrain from promoting public policies except when the issue at hand is a matter of intrinsic evil. George, thus, proposes a much more limited role for the bishops and similar Church officials in the public square.

Together, the two notions—Scalia’s and George’s—reflect what might be perceived as an emerging mood among American Catholics of the political right. If progressives are in charge in America, the thinking goes, then the truly faithful should withdraw from everyday political life, so as to deny any legitimacy to “immoral” opponents. Instead of cooperating where there is common ground, we should rather hunker in faithful Catholic bastions, catapulting morality at barbarians beyond the gate and firing up the inquisition for apostates found within the walls. Let’s name this mood “After Virtue Retreatism,” nodding to the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, whose 1981 book After Virtue seems in so many ways to have anticipated it.

The last paragraph of MacIntyre’s sad book tells all, invoking the hackneyed right-wing comparison of the fall of Roman civilization to our own time. The storyline here has it that Rome fell because of a decline of morality, ushering in dark ages. Rather than risking their own faith in the face of paganism and decline, MacIntyre proposes that good Christians retreated from public engagement to huddle in closed communities of virtue protected by stout monastic redoubts. Presuming now similar straits, the author recommends imitation of the example of early medieval Christians in order to sustain Christianity again from “the dark ages which are already upon us.” Here’s the silly conclusion:

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of the predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. (Alasdair MacIntrye, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1984) p. 263.)

Aside from the historical inaccuracy of such accounts of monasticism, the theoretical bent might also be at odds with the Church’s teaching, which has for centuries proscribed retreat into sects of so-called “pure” Christianity. Recent encyclicals, for example, stress the obligation for Christians to be engaged fully in the political world. Gaudium et Spes, section 43, makes this quite clear:

Since they have an active role to play in the whole life of the Church, laymen are not only bound to penetrate the world with a Christian spirit, but are also called to be witnesses to Christ in all things in the midst of human society.

Bishops, to whom is assigned the task of ruling the Church of God, should, together with their priests, so preach the news of Christ that all the earthly activities of the faithful will be bathed in the light of the Gospel. All pastors should remember too that by their daily conduct and concern they are revealing the face of the Church to the world, and men will judge the power and truth of the Christian message thereby. By their lives and speech, in union with Religious and their faithful, may they demonstrate that even now the Church by her presence alone and by all the gifts which she contains, is an unspent fountain of those virtues which the modern world needs the most.

By unremitting study they should fit themselves to do their part in establishing dialogue with the world and with men of all shades of opinion.

To the extent, then, that Justice Scalia and Professor George are proposing that faith does not (or ought not) integrate itself fully in political life then we have a problem. Now let me turn to some specific concerns about both arguments.

Regarding Justice Scalia’s contention that his faith has no role in his adjudication of law, one Catholic response comes from St. Augustine. The justice possibly imagines that reason and his legal reasoning are objectively separate from his faith or even his life experiences. Augustine would disagree. Perhaps the greatest philosophical insight of St. Augustine was that concerning how the heart precedes and directs the mind. Reason goes where the heart directs. What we come to love guides what we come to know. In the most sublime case, reason would be shaped by love of God and formed by faith. As Augustine put it, “Crede, ut intelligas!” Have faith in order to know. Quite the reverse of the justice’s understanding.

Reasoning cannot get outside our loves and interests; it reflects them. Those who do not perceive the compromise of reason by interests and by the experiences of our lives fall prey to the delusion that their reasoning is pure or “fair and balanced.” Indeed, to gloss on Augustine, if we do not realize the priority of the heart and take care to properly form what we love, then what we take to be reasoning will only be in fact only the rationalization of mere desire—the rationalizing of private or sectarian interests, mere ideology. Not to complicate things too much, but we should thus be a bit encouraged by Judge Sotomayor’s admission that her jurisprudence benefits from her special life experiences, and we should perhaps be worried that Justice Scalia imagines that even something as powerful as his Catholic faith does not influence his reasoning on the bench.

Regarding Professor George’s proposal that the Church fully involve itself only in public policies addressing intrinsic moral evils, we might again look to Augustine. Donatists and other Christian sects of Augustine’s day advocated that the Church should concern itself not with the earthly city but only the city of God. Christians, such sects contended, should have minimal engagement with pagan authority—ought not participate in the Roman army, ought not pay pagan taxes, ought not involve themselves in the corruptions of pagan political life. Instead, the focus of the Church should solely be on Christians’ private virtue, on their personal salvation, and on the New Jerusalem to come. Augustine, in contrast, maintained that private virtue, personal salvation, and all the spiritual work of the Church benefited from the political engagement of Christians in public life. Here below the perfection of political life was likely unattainable, but whatever incremental progress could be made lent itself to improved conditions for the Church’s mission.

Limiting the institutional Church’s efforts in public policy to only matters of intrinsic evil (abortion, embryonic stem cell research, etc.) narrows and constrains what might be accomplished for the broad mission of the Church in the world. The teaching authority of the institutional Church, moreover, lends a consistency and unity to policy efforts that would be lost if political engagement were abandoned to the narrow concerns of the laity.

So: no retreat from the public square. The institutional Church and all Catholics are obliged to engage fully and broadly and particularly in a consistent ethic of life that concerns everything from the embryo to the appropriate minimum wage, “establishing dialogue with the world and with men of all shades of opinion.” And, faith informs not only legal reasoning, but even frying hamburgers.