For a few days at the end of May, Catholics from across the United States came to Steubenville, Ohio, for New Polity’s annual conference. New Polity is a Catholic think tank that seeks to articulate a concrete path for achieving Christian societies in the modern world against the tyranny of liberalism. New Polity aims to rethink the categories of politics, economics, and culture in an effort to affirm and make incarnate the truth that Christ’s redemption has real, flesh-and-blood consequences for how people should go about their daily existence. The theme of this year’s conference was “Our Kind of People,” and the conference addressed various topics related to the idea of a people.
In the opening address, Marc Barnes attempted to highlight different kinds of characteristics that make people people, universal qualities that human communities at all times and all places are defined by. Barnes offered a robust Catholic anthropology, insisting that physical phenomena, like language, appearance, and the need to reproduce, indicate a more fundamental sameness that unites human beings and rejects ideologies that prioritize the individual and deny meaning not determined by subjective whim. All people are and do the same essential things, and this ought to be welcome news.
Delving deeper into the concept of peoples and engaging broader political discourse, Andrew Willard Jones explored the Church’s growing body of social teaching to rediscover the essential Christian aspects of peoplehood in his lecture “Is Christianity Nationalist?” The Church recognizes two natural societies: the family and the nation. As Pope St. John Paul II asserted in his 1980 address to UNESCO,
The Nation is, in fact, the great community of men who are united by various ties, but above all, precisely by culture. The Nation exists “through” culture and “for” culture, and it is therefore the great educator of men in order that they may “be more” in the community. It is this community which possesses a history that goes beyond the history of the individual and the family. It is also in this community, with respect to which every family educates, that the family begins its work of education with what is the most simple thing, language, thus enabling man who is at the very beginning to learn to speak in order to become a member of the community of his family and of his Nation.
Taking this inspiration from John Paul II, Jones maintained that Catholic social teaching affirms national integrity and identity as a common good that nations ought to pursue for themselves, irrespective, to a certain extent, of the interests of other nations.
However, a nation is equally obliged to live in harmony with other nations, taking care to pursue what Pope Francis called “social friendship.” The borders between nations provide not only boundaries but conceptual horizons, through which a people, solid in their integrity, nevertheless maintain an openness toward growth and development in relation to other peoples. Openness aids a community toward living in true faith and disposes them toward love of other communities. Just as a person cannot give himself in love without understanding himself in the context of others, so a nation cannot give itself in love without understanding itself in the context of other nations. This cycle of givenness and gift between self and other is complete when self-gift perfects self-understanding, as Gaudium et Spes declares: “Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24).
Arriving at a fullness of humanity, in a society of ever-diminishing humanity, cannot happen except through the one person in history who was full of grace.
Later that day, Nicholas Healy explored Dignitatis Humanae—the Vatican II declaration on religious freedom—and the role of the laity in advancing the social kingship of Christ. Healy explained that the secular character of the Church’s mission in the world is proper and specific to the laity; those who are de facto in the world are directly called to evangelize and sanctify the world according to their position and gifts. This sacred work comprises the identity of the lay faithful, through which the Church extends the reality of divine communion into the world. The nature of the lay vocation implies, among other things, that the political order is properly lay and hence that any attempt to totally separate Church and state would leave Christ out of the temporal order. A nuanced approach to Church-state relations is necessary in order that the laity can fulfill their particular role in the Church.
The roots of the lay vocation can be found in the Marian dimension of the Church, which includes and transcends other dimensions such as the Petrine. Mary, a laywoman, was chosen to be the Mother of God and was chosen by Christ at his Crucifixion to be Mother of the Church. Her basic and fundamental posture of faith, exemplified in the fiat she gave at the Annunciation, is the Church’s posture of faith, and thus the posture of faith to be adopted by every Catholic. To be Catholic, therefore, is to be Marian, and to be a lay Catholic is to be especially Marian. Catholic identity cannot be complete without the presence and domain of Our Lady.
On the final day of the conference, Michael Hanby opened the morning with a discussion of America, in a lecture titled “Virtually a People.” Hanby proposed that America is, in essence, a project of modernity, which cannot be divorced from modern principles and categories. After the discovery of America, Europeans viewed the New World with a Baconian lens: as a tabula rasa, a physical place that offers an opportunity for ontological change, a land to make and remake in one’s own image. This initial approach to exploration and settlement, Hanby argued, became the philosophical bedrock of American society. The American Revolution, which occasioned the founding of a nation based on premodern, Greco-Roman political theory, was only part and parcel of a more fundamental American identity, already established for over a century, that treated revolution as a metaphysically basic reality. The rapid expansion of the United States in its first hundred years, overtaking a land mass almost as large as Europe itself in the name of Manifest Destiny, predated the possibilities of industrialization, urbanization, and other phenomena that often serve as token accomplices of modernity and modern nation-states, proving that America was a modern project long before modernity revealed any symptoms. This invincible modernism that undergirds American identity poses a great challenge to American Catholics in the present age who need a robust sense of their own existence as a Christian people, grounded in a treasury of meaning given to them from on high and safeguarded by the Church. How is it possible to even be a Christian people when the very foundations of the society in which Christian people dwell directly oppose the idea of a Christian cosmos?
This question, far too large to tackle in the span of a single conference, nevertheless led naturally to the keynote address given by Rocco Buttiglione, whose book Modernity’s Alternative: How History Is Formed in the Depths of the Peoples provided the theme for the conference. Modernity’s Alternative articulates the “theology of the people” that developed in Latin America over the course of the twentieth century and that, according to Buttiglione, is a key element for interpreting the pontificate of Pope Francis. Similar to the principles of the Solidarność movement in Poland, the theology of the people unearthed a dynamically Christian understanding of peoples that proved instrumental in addressing the political and social tensions in Latin America in the seventies and eighties.
The beginning of America sheds light on the Christian notion of peoplehood. Buttiglione argued that the solution to the problems created by the discovery of the New World (according to Hanby’s perspective) appeared at the same time as that discovery. In the first years of Spanish settlement in Latin America, decades before the settlements of St. Augustine and Jamestown and the colonies of North America, Mary, the Mother of God, appeared to Juan Diego and the Nahuatl people. When Europeans were bringing their new vision of the real into America, the Virgin of Guadalupe claimed America for herself and her Son. In Buttiglione’s mind, it was the “true myth” of Mary appearing to Juan Diego, revealing the image of herself in his tilma, and fulfilling the incompleteness of native cosmology that brought about the radical conversion of the Latin American people in the span of one generation:
Everyone is at liberty, of course, to believe or disbelieve the story of [Guadalupe]. However, one thing is not open to doubt: at just this time, the number of indios who sought baptism began gradually to climb. In just a few years, the entire native population of Mexico had been baptized and had been integrated into a new social order. . . .
The archetype of womanhood, at once fruitful and virginal, that God spoke of in His promise in the Garden of Eden, is somehow contained in Tonantzin [the preeminent goddess of the Nahautl people] while also being disfigured. Mary, when she appears, makes use of a Mesoamerican archetype and shows us how to interpret it in view of Christ’s coming. In so doing, she purifies that archetype, reorienting its meaning. This work of hers relates to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: Mary, being the Immaculate Virgin, is made able to lead all human culture and religions to their original meanings, rendering them capable of welcoming her Son.
The historical event of Guadalupe and its radical effect on native American peoples, Buttiglione concluded, proves that all of America, North and South, is as Catholic as it is modern, at the most basic levels of existence. Alongside the project of modernity that sweeps through the history of America is the ever-deepening Christian spirit of the peoples whose cultural memory is transformed and begun again with Mary’s appearance. John Paul II affirmed this in his apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America, in which he addressed people collectively from North and South America as “Americans,” of one body and one heritage, whose Empress and Mother is Our Lady of Guadalupe:
The appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 had a decisive effect on evangelization. Its influence greatly overflows the boundaries of Mexico, spreading to the whole Continent. America, which historically has been, and still is, a melting-pot of peoples, has recognized in the mestiza face of the Virgin of Tepeyac, “in Blessed Mary of Guadalupe, an impressive example of a perfectly inculturated evangelization.” Consequently, not only in Central and South America, but in North America as well, the Virgin of Guadalupe is venerated as Queen of all America.
Mary’s apparition at the beginning of America and thus at the beginning of the modern world demonstrates the possibility of a truly Catholic modernity, in which Christians can live in the present moment, neither rejecting nor entirely embracing the categories of the modern world, with faith that the mystery of Christ continues to offer salvation to mankind.
Mary offers the interpretive key to the meaning of a Christian people. Her response to Christ and to the world is the model of the Church’s own response to Christ and the world and the very form that Christians take on when they receive the mystery of salvation, dwell within it, and share it with others. For American Catholics pondering the ways in which they can achieve a truly substantial identity against modernity’s pitfalls, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe appears to be an indispensable point of departure. Arriving at a fullness of humanity, in a society of ever-diminishing humanity, cannot happen except through the one person in history who was full of grace.