Catholic Absolutism as the Middle Ground

I love to identify extremes and discover morally, virtuously rich middle grounds. This can be a hard exercise today when so many voices, personalities, bloggers, and op-ed'ers are yelling so loud that you start to block it out or else mistake moderation for extremism because of the exhaustion.

In attempting to teach ethics and morality to teenagers, and in conversing regularly with friends and family in the same realm, I find the trends of relativism that Benedict XVI sought so fiercely to articulate and discredit are strong and real.

Here's an attempt to describe the apparent extremes I've seen, even if they're not the technical, philosophical endpoints. On the one hand, there are rigid absolutists, seeking to describe universal moral principles and militaristically hold all people to certain behavioral expectations. Conversely, there are relativists who believe that every one can make their own morality to govern behavior, which ought to be subject to little or no accountability from any one or any thing.

What's the middle ground? I would posit that true Catholic morality - absolutism coupled with Christian compassion - sets the standard.

Using a bit of extremism myself, I walked students through the example of honor killings in SE Asia. If a woman commits adultery with a man and thus brings dishonor to her family and the only way the family believes honor can be restored is by killing her, shouldn't they be allowed to do it? Obviously not. The students rightly identified that regardless of their culture, they can't murder someone, except maybe for a capital crime. They can have some unique cultural practices, but they can't murder.

I tried to show them that relativism doesn't hold because even relativists usually admit some basic universal moral standards; in this case, murder is always wrong. I think they tend to want moral requirements to be minimal and for us to be patient, slow to act upon holding others to the standard, or even stand aside altogether. They also don't want to be judged when in reality, the best teachers, parents, and even friends are the ones who hold you, me, and them accountable.

Ultimately, they know deep within that there are behavioral rules that everyone should follow; that certain things are just plain wrong; for example, most people would acknowledge the truth of the 10 Commandments.

Where's the disconnect then? They don't like how expansive the rules apparently are, and they don't like the idea of having to tell someone they're wrong or to be told by another that they themselves are wrong. Amid ESPN's coverage of Ryan Braun, Rick Sutcliffe said Braun lied to his face in an interview, adding, "If he was guilty, he could just say so, and I'd look the other way."

As our yearlong course unfolded, I aimed to show them that, yes, the Church can and often will respond to just about any ethical, moral, social issue, but that the Church doesn't necessarily have explicit, flowerly-languaged teachings printed on gilded parchment for each of the issues. We are simply responding to the example of Christ as we understand it through our Scripture and Tradition. Our faith provides us a thorough, consistent, and coherent message that can and does respond readily to our moral dilemmas.

And most importantly, the example of Christ - loaded as it is with serious moral demands and a strong call to choose good - is one of compassion. The best morality is one that is both absolute and compassionate. We must follow Augustine's call to love the sinner and hate their sin. This requires us to identify selfish, hurtful, loveless actions when others do them, yet to do so in a way that is caring and oriented toward love, toward, Heaven, toward the Kingdom.

The temptation many of us face in an attempt to be loving is to let sin and evil occur unchecked. That is easier but wrong. We have to engage a person for their goodness and dignity as a created child of God and call out how they've ignored or damaged this quality about them. At the same time, we must scrutinize ourselves in the same way, including allowing others to point us toward God and good.

The way forward may be to acknowledge the pairing of right and righter within our behavior, to recognize the vestiges of goodness within our intentions and actions that is coopted by evil and darkness.

Maybe my temptations toward pornography vaguely represent my recognition of the beauty of people and my sexual desire to marry and procreate, but it is being perverted by self-serving tendencies and my propensity to objectify people.

Maybe our temptations toward heavy drinking and drugs indicate our desire to enjoy our lives and world and creation and build community with others, but those pursuits are clouded and diluted by self-mutilation and failure to treat our bodies as the temples-of-the-spirit that they are.

Maybe our temptations toward lying express our desire to reach our full potential and be the best versions of ourselves but get wrongly detoured into deception, fueled by hidden insecurities, or encouraged by laziness.

The best morality corrects relativism's contradictions with recognition of universal morality and tempers the rigidity of absolutism with loving compassion. We cannot lapse into an anarchic live-and-let-live attitude or become robotically itinerant and detach from humanity by obsessing over a certain code.

We must enflesh the call to goodness and God by holding ourselves and one another to a standard of choosing right through the love modeled by Christ.