Talks > Other > The John Carroll Society 23rd Annual Dinner & Awards Ceremony

The John Carroll Society 23rd Annual Dinner & Awards CeremonyRemarks by Carl A. Anderson Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus 2009 Honoree

04/18/2009| The Four Seasons Hotel, Washington, D.C. April 18, 2009

Your Excellencies, Monsignor Vaghi, Reverend Fathers, members and friends of the John Carroll Society: Thank you for that warm welcome. It is a tremendous honor for Dorian and me to be with you tonight.


Since 1951, the John Carroll Society has been a vital part of Catholic life in our nation’s capital –witnessing to the faith in a town that sometimes doesn’t seem to understand Catholicism or religious witness very well.

You know, several weeks ago, I found myself facing a situation much like one faced by John Carroll.

Last month, many of us in Connecticut stood up to lawmakers in the “Constitution State” who were rushing to consider legislation to impose “lay trusteeism” on the Catholic Church.

This bill would have stripped bishops and pastors of their authority over many parish and diocesan decisions and put boards of “lay trustees” in charge.

This presented a problem Catholics in the United States hadn’t had to deal with for about 150 years – when the Know Nothing’s passed a similar bill in New York.

But John Carroll knew about “trusteeism.” In the words of Msgr. John Tracy Ellis: “For the quarter century of John Carroll’s rule, and for years thereafter, this attempt … to usurp … the rights [of bishops] was, perhaps, the most harassing problem with which the bishops had to deal in the United States.”1

Laws – like the Know Nothing bill in 1855 or the proposed Connecticut bill today – have a drastic effect on our religious liberty as people have to consider the state’s reaction to the practice of their faith.

But non-Catholics and Catholics – bishops, priests and laymen – all stood up and stood together. After the outcry, the legislators tabled the bill.

This episode reminds us of another issue Bishop Carroll had to deal with regularly: explaining and defending one’s faith in a nation that sometimes doesn’t understand it.
In defending the practice of faith in the public square all of us have something in common with John Carroll.

Despite its founding by a variety of religious groups unwelcome in England – the Quakers, the Catholics and the Puritans – this wasn’t always – as we know – the land of First Amendment religious freedom.

John Carroll had to contend with people like John Jay – first Chief Justice of the United States – and a famous anti-Catholic. Shortly before becoming chief justice, Jay argued vociferously for a law in New York that would have excluded Catholics from public office.2

He failed in that attempt.

But in 1777, Jay was chief author of New York’s Constitution, which banned Catholic immigrants unless they renounced the pope.3

Confronted with such hostility, as patriot and priest, John Carroll was the public face of a distrusted religious minority, and he left us a shinning example of living the faith and defending religious liberty.

Today, there are fewer direct assaults on religious liberty. But the Connecticut bill reflected an astonishing ignorance of the history of religious discrimination in America.

But if direct attacks are infrequent, the subtle pressure to marginalize religious values and voices from the public square has increased.

Catholic Church history is interesting here. Historically, we have followed two cultural models. First is the Catholic nation-state, with its roots in the monarchies of Europe. We may call this model the “embrace:” with Church and state intertwined. The second model is the ghetto: a minority of Catholics, surrounded by cultural hostility of varying degrees.

Emerging from years of immigration, the ghetto long characterized the American Catholic experience. It allowed Catholics to maintain their identity in spite of cultural challenges.

It gave Catholics – as a group – a strong sense of cultural identity and a shared public morality. For the individual Catholic, it provided common first principles and the opportunity to develop a well-formed conscience.

Yet this strong identity encountered strong opposition. As late as the 1920s, Al Smith was facing the wrath – and burning crosses – of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan – simply because of his religion. Catholics responded by swelling the ranks of organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, dedicated to being both faithful Catholics and patriotic Americans.


The election of John F. Kennedy signaled the end of this ghetto experience. Yet today Catholics – and religious people in general – face a new, troubling and as yet unresolved challenge.

How do we maintain our distinct religious identity in the midst of a secular culture doing its best to decrease the influence of faith?

The French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote that one of the great accomplishments of Christianity in modern society had been what he called the “evangelization of the secular conscience.” But perhaps today the process has been reversed. And with society’s progressive de-Christianization do we not also see a de-Christianization of distinctly Catholic consciences?

In the 1980s, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger surveyed this dilemma and concluded: “In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for the Church the problem of the modern world.”4

Whether we like it or not, all of us have to engage a world that isn’t just outside anymore. It is inside our homes, on our television sets, on the internet, everywhere we turn. There is no longer a religious ghetto into which we can retreat.

In this context we might recall the words of Cardinal Ratzinger in 1997. He said the Church must “fight against being subjectivized … [it] must try to continue to speak its message publically.” To do that, he said, we need “people who are inwardly seized by Christianity, who experience it as joy and hope, who have thus become lovers, and these,” he said, “we call saints.”

In a speech in 2000, entitled The New Evangelization: Building a Civilization of Love, Cardinal Ratzinger said that “evangelizing is not merely a way of speaking but a form of living.” And to make that form of living possible, he insisted that “we must also offer a community of life, a common space for the new style of life.”

So, what is to be done? Three things.

First, our faith lives or dies in our parishes and places of worship.

So we must strengthen these as the primary place people can find spiritual nourishment and fraternal communion – where the experience of God is made truly alive and present. Then we must communicate that experience.

This is the cornerstone of Christian renewal – within both the Church itself and the larger society.

Associations such as the John Carroll Society and the Knights of Columbus are thus very important. They offer this “common space for the new style of life.” Our members are able then to breathe new energy into their parishes.
We must be preachers of the Word like St. Francis of Assisi, who said, “Preach, and if necessary, use words.”

Second, we must also be able to “use words.” During the past 30 years we have been blessed with two magnificent popes who have opened an extraordinary new discourse with contemporary culture. We must follow their lead and “use words” as they have, thus entering into the thinking and pastoral mission of these great popes.

A principal reason I wrote the book A Civilization of Love was to encourage people to take seriously these efforts of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Early in his pontificate, John Paul focused on the question of human dignity through the lens of human love, first during his addresses which came to be known as the Theology of Body and then in his apostolic exhortation on the family, Familiaris consortio. In this way, he developed a vision of the person based on the Christian understanding of human love.

For John Paul, the human person was created out of love, for love and with a life unintelligible if cut off from love – only the vocation of love is adequate to do justice to the dignity of every person.

This is the reason it is possible to think about our civilization in terms of love. And as Pope Benedict has suggested, the building blocks of the civilization of love are the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

To a cynic such a society might be too idealistic to be taken seriously. But then what are we to say of our Lord’s answer when asked to sum up the law and the prophets? His answer was simple and we all know it – love of God and love of neighbor. This presents the source and summit of the civilization of love. Indeed, if we are to take seriously this command of love of neighbor, what society is adequate other than a civilization of love?

This brings me to my third observation: our Christian witness cannot be separated from our charity. Many of us have long lived the faith in public at many levels. And though we do not usually think, for example, of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta or Jean Vanier as “evangelists,” their examples remind us all of our fundamental responsibility to bring Christ into our culture through personal and corporate witness.

Politics will continue to remain the “art of the possible,” but what will be possible can be determined in large part by the values of our culture and our ability to transform them. We should remember that the early Christians transformed society by their rhetoric, apologetics, and their witness.

Pope John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation Christifideles laici reminded us that charity towards one’s neighbor is a specific duty of the laity: the most immediate way Christians lift up the temporal order.

And here is where Pope Benedict has made a profound contribution in his encyclicals, Deus caritas est and Spe salvi. They offer a theological blueprint for building the civilization of love by focusing on the virtues of faith, hope and charity – virtues fundamental not only to every Christian life, but to every humane society.

A democratic society such as ours – founded largely on Enlightenment principles of autonomy and equality – has difficulty at times understanding both an apostolic Church – a Church with a hierarchy of pope, bishops and priests – and the public place of religion.

Yet in America we have a unique advantage. We have not, like so many countries – particularly in Europe – experienced the political embrace of Church and State. Such nations have now more or less accomplished a total divorce in the name of pluralism. And this divorce has resulted in a radical secularism in many European countries.

We must be both a nation of citizens, and a nation of believers. With Christianity in decline in Europe, what happens to Catholicism in America will affect the future of Catholicism around the world and that future till depend upon the integrity of the Catholic conscience of Catholic laymen and laywomen.

One year ago this week, here in Washington, the Holy Father signaled the need for a sound moral formation. He called upon us to embody an identity grounded in a uniquely faithful way of thinking.

At the White House, he praised American history, noting: “From the dawn of the Republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator.”

As people of faith we must never relinquish this fundamental conviction of American democracy. And we should ask whether the easy distinctions some make between private and public morality in the marketplace or in the public square are consistent with this conviction.

In Washington, the Holy Father asked us to resist the temptation to “subjectivize” or privatize the reality of Christianity. He said: “Only when [our] faith permeates every aspect of our lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.” And unless we ourselves are open to this transforming power how can we hope society will be?

Polling we recently conducted found that a year later, people still want to hear Pope Benedict’s message. 63% of Americans and 71% of Catholics want to hear him discuss the need to serve the less fortunate. 57% of Americans and 64% of Catholics want to hear him address the need for ethics in our social and business life.

Additionally, the Pope’s approval rating among Americans is nearly 3 to1 in favor. Approximately 60% are favorable, only 20% are not. Among Catholics, his numbers are the envy of every politician – 76% to 11%.

He has achieved this with little, and often hostile, news coverage. But people still seek the truth. And it falls to us to join him in the new evangelization, to accept the invitation of his episcopal motto, to be with him, “co-workers in the truth.”

Pope Benedict’s message – summarized by the theme of his American trip Christ Our Hope – resonates, because Americans see his preaching of the Gospel as consistent. This has opened up an opportunity for us to build new bridges among people of faith.

In reflecting on how to do this myself, I often think of these words of Benedict which in closing I share with you: “May the Holy Spirit make you creative in charity, persevering in your commitments, and brave in your initiatives, so that you will be able to offer your contribution to the building up of the ‘civilization of love’.”

May we all continue to do our part as “co-workers in the truth.”

Thank you all very much.

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1 John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism, U Chicago Press, 1956 p. 47
2 http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/annotation/march-2002/religion-founding-fathers.html
3 Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher; The New York Irish (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) p. 14
4 Principles of Catholic Theology (1982) p. 391.
5 Salt of the Earth p. 269.