The Catholic Thing

 The American bishops drew a crucial distinction in a statement on President Biden’s Inauguration Day between things on which they can cooperate and “dialogue” with the new administration and those on which they cannot. Those distinctions were absolutely necessary to avoid the impression – amounting to grave scandal – that they had no problem with a self-proclaimed “Catholic” taking steps to further abortion, homosexuality, or transgenderism, all of which have been criticized by Pope Francis as a kind of “ideological colonization” in the developing world, but also in developed nations.

So far, however, almost no one has paid attention to potential dangers in the other half of the bishops’ Inauguration Day statement, those issues on which the Biden administration is supposedly “good” – immigration, environment, racism, etc. – as if other approaches to dealing with these matters than the usual progressive pieties are “bad.”

The bishops need to pay careful attention to what they and the administration mean – and even the wisdom of entering into various controversies – when they “dialogue” about social problems in this highly polarized period. For example, they just commended Biden for promoting “racial equity” in housing and prisons.  Equity sounds like good-old American equality. But in the current lexicon of Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Theory, “equity” means something far different, and far closer to the ideological extremism of Black Lives Matter than Liberty and Justice for All.

In fact, racial “equity” is in multiple ways the antithesis of “equality.” That the bishops do not seem to be aware of this shift in meaning – or may even have advisers who are deliberately advancing this novel notion of justice, which President Biden was already pushing in his Inaugural Address – bodes ill for how they are going to enter into truthful “dialogue.”

To put this in a somewhat simplified form, according to “racial equity” wherever a group – defined by “race” – is “over-represented” or “underrepresented” in some sector, it must mean that there’s some concealed injustice because equality of opportunity has not produced “equity” in outcomes.

The slightest reflection, however, shows that this is a crude way to evaluate the complexities present in a whole society.

To take a relatively neutral example, 70 percent of the players in the Superbowl last night (and the NFL generally) are black, even though black people make up only 13 percent of the population. (Should Colin Kaepernick apologize to the NFL, since football is one of the most “progressive” sports?)