E.J. Dionne speaks on campus about role of faith in partisan politics
Appropriately falling on the Roman Catholic observance of All Saints Day, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne visited USC Tuesday Night to discuss the life and lessons of a devout priest, archbishop and local pioneer for morality in the public.
Dionne, a political analyst, former New York Times Vatican correspondent, unabashed Roman Catholic and liberal and author of “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right,” has spent the majority of his career in close proximity with moral debate and politics.
His address to an audience of approximately 200 students and faculty in the Capstone Campus room, entitled “Reweaving the Seamless Garment: Cardinal Bernardin’s Living Legacy to American Public Life,” was the 12th annual event in the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies. The lecture series was founded in honor of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, a Columbia native and former USC student who went on to become Archbishop of Chicago, head of the Catholic Conference’s Committee on War and Peace, and founder of the Common Ground Initiative, a movement to foster interfaith communication on and understanding the role of religion in politics.
Today’s cross-partisan conversations often skirt the roughest political issues, but Bernardin “was up to something very different,” Dionne said. “He was willing to be controversial, willing to stir up arguments, willing to challenge everyone on every side to take their own words seriously.”
Such controversial issues ranged from abortion to economic social justice, all of which, Dionne insisted, have moral repercussions that can neither be denied nor isolated by any party.
“I like to say that I prove that I am Catholic by asserting that the Church’s job is to make all of us feel guilty about something,” Dionne contended. “It challenges conservatives to think about the poor, about economic injustice, about our treatment of immigrants, about the death penalty. It challenges liberals to think more about the implications of abortion and assisted suicide and to see that if strong families depend on social justice, then social justice depends on strong families.”
Active devotion to social and economic justice without condescension was Bernardin’s philosophy throughout his ministry. Two years after being elevated to Cardinal, he established a task force to determine how the Archdiocese could better take care of those affected by AIDS. During his end-of-life battle with cancer, he began efforts for another ministry for those affected by the disease.
“His hallmark was his effort to reach across political and religious lines to battle moralism, which is different from morality,” Dionne said. “The moralistic person may take a position on something with a sense of superiority, but a truly moral person looks first at themselves and makes the case that this is for the common good.”
First-year advertising student Jordan Dicks appreciated Dionne’s reconciliation of Christian morality and politics.
“The media doesn’t like to portray Christians as progressive, so it’s interesting to hear from educated Catholics of more liberal subgroups,” Dicks said.
Second-year classics student Axton Crolley, however, remained skeptical of Dionne’s vague conclusion on the role of religion in political disputes.
“I think it’s just another expression of liberal feel-good ideas and over-simplification of serious issues, designed to be fuel for religious plurality,” Crolley said.