Intolerance and Interdependence

by Tim Kirchoff

When my grandparents moved to Minneapolis soon after getting married, my grandfather was caught off guard by his wife’s insistence that their children attend Catholic schools. More to the point, he was surprised and even a little scandalized by the fact that Catholic schools existed in the first place: they struck him as a colossal waste of resources. He did not understand why Catholics in Minneapolis had built their own schools instead of making use of the public school system that they were already supporting through their taxes.

When he discovered the history of anti-Catholicism in public schools—the ways in which the teachers and curricula of urban public schools tried to turn Catholic children against their parents’ faith—he understood why Catholic parents felt the need to build schools that would pass on their faith, and was a passionate proponent of Catholic education for the rest of his life.

His life experiences up until he moved to Minneapolis had given him no frame of reference to understand religious intolerance. He had grown up in the farmlands of the Dakotas in the middle of the Great Depression; the various farming families would often call upon each other to help in constructing or repairing buildings, assisting in a harvest, or sharing in the slaughter of a hog. He went to school alongside Methodists, Lutherans, and fellow Catholics all the way through college, and their differences in denomination had never been an obstacle to friendship or cooperation.

Rural farmers, although we stereotypically think of them as self-reliant, were tolerant of religious differences precisely because they were conscious of how dependent they were on each other. Their urban counterparts, though they lived in a society with an even more elaborate system of interdependencies, readily discriminated against Catholics. In our global society, meanwhile, we have grown even less tolerant of those with different beliefs, boycotting businesses or cutting people out of social media feeds and sometimes our lives because we find their political opinions obnoxious.

Perhaps this polarization and splintering of our society is inevitable: the ubiquity of consumeristic choice has given us the illusion of power, and with it the illusion of independence. We think that, because we can choose to have our needs met by someone else, we don’t need and can freely disparage those with whom we disagree. We believe that we can bend others to our will, even though those we try to influence are just as free to cast us off as Catholic immigrants were to abandon the public school system.

But even if this polarized struggle is unavoidable on the social level, the Church must not accept its logic. The Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic—we cannot allow our different theological or political approaches to threaten our deeper unity. St. Paul wrote in 1 Cor 15-21:

"Now if the foot should say,
'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,'
it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.
And if the ear should say,
'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,'
it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.
If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?
If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?
But in fact God has placed the parts in the body,
every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
If they were all one part, where would the body be?
As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don’t need you!'
And the head cannot say to the feet, 'I don’t need you!'"

We cannot splinter into a pro-life church and a social justice church; a church of high liturgy and a church of contemporary liturgy; a church of tradition and a church that reads the signs of the times. We must not fool ourselves into thinking that our sub-group alone represents the future of the Church: the different charisms and different vocations that God has given to us as individuals and as groups complement each other. We need each other. If we want to be able to work through our differences in order to cooperate in living out the mission of the Church, we must recognize that we are dependent on each other through Christ.