The Church, Gdansk, And Legitimate Authority

Recent news cycles have been dominated by images and stories of illegitimate authority. A Texas mother is jailed for refusing to acknowledge that she was selfish for wanting to feed her children. A 19-year-old Canadian woman is taken to the ground at gunpoint by police for carrying a toy Star Wars blaster while dressed in a costume to promote a restaurant. Catholic philosophers have cautiously begun to take different sides on the degree to which Catholics owe deference to COVID lockdown orders, and some bishops argue that public mass should not be celebrated while such orders are in effect.

CCC Artilce 2 Section I, 1897-1894 covers the question of civil authority and its limits. As a broad moral principle,

1903 Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, "authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse.

Naturally, there are matters of degree to consider, and anecdotal situations taken out of context are never a good basis for drawing moral conclusions. Poor judgment or small-time abuse of authority by individual police officers or magistrates does not call other state powers into question. However, if such episodes are poorly handled, they can serve as flash points that do damage the moral order, and it is incumbent on civil authorities to maintain flexibility and respond to legitimate concerns by the citizenry in their wake.

(What I find puzzling about the Lethbridge incident is that, with the number of police units on the scene and at least one officer carrying a rifle, a supervisor, a sergeant and potentially a lieutenant, should have been on the scene or closely following it by radio. That person, in addition to the officers who assaulted and threatened the woman, must be held accountable. This is the sort of responsibility civil authorities owe to the moral order.)

The Church has not historically been passive in the face of illegitimate authority. An example is the Polish Solidarity movement and its resistance in the Gdansk shipyard in 1980-81.

Anna Walentynowicz was fired from the Gdańsk Shipyard on 7 August 1980, five months before she was due to retire, for participation in the illegal trade union. This management decision enraged the workers of the shipyard, who staged a strike action on 14 August defending Anna Walentynowicz and demanding her return. She and Alina Pienkowska transformed a strike over bread and butter issues into a solidarity strike in sympathy with strikes on other establishments.

According to that Wikipedia article, the Vatican, along with the US CIA, supported the Solidarity movement, which had a specific Catholic identity, to the tune of $50 million. At other times, the Church in Italy systematically protected Jewish children, taking them into Catholic schools and teaching them Catholic prayers so that if they were interrogated by German agents who suspected they weren't Catholic, they could provide evidence that they were. Pius XII took seriously his traditional role as protector of Rome's Jews.

As Edward Feser has pointed out, lockdown orders deny workers in "non-essential" jobs the natural right to earn a living. Many of them, waiters, bartenders, taxi drivers, barbers, cosmeticians, small business proprietors, and so forth, aren't eligible for unemployment payments. These are the poor, who are hurt hardest, when the politicians, "experts", medical elites, and others maintain their jobs and lifestyles. Regarding the Church's "preferential option for the poor",

the principle behind the phrase was articulated earlier by the Catholic Bishops at the Second Vatican Council, when in their Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes they spoke of the poor from the very first line, repeating the word nine times and concluding: "The council, considering the immensity of the hardships which still afflict the greater part of mankind today, regards it as most opportune that an organism of the universal Church be set up in order that both the justice and love of Christ toward the poor might be developed everywhere."

There can be little question that the rationale behind indefinite stay-at-home orders hasn't been consistently or convincingly articulated, especially when in most areas of the US, death tolls have not exceeded normal seasonal expectations, and in fact evidence is accumulating that the population has rapidly been acquiring immunity. Catholic bishops have varied widely in their policies over resuming public masses as the reasons for indefinite lockdowns become less clear. For instance,

Georgia’s bishops advised Catholics in the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah that they were “not authorizing the return to congregating at churches or making our churches available for devotions. This determination extends through the month of May.” The announcement came the same week Georgia’s governor allowed gyms, hair salons, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys to open their doors.

While other dioceses, like those in Texas, are reopening in politically more friendly environments, I continue to be impressed with Abp Sample of Portland, OR, who is reopening public masses in the face of a continued indefinite stay-at-home order by the governor. This is a gentle but not subtle move in favor of the poor. So far, it doesn't appear that he's been forced to walk the policy back, and I pray for him and his diocese.

I also pray for Bp Lopes in his indisposition.