Feature
Health of the Nation
A Deathbed Reflection on Catholic Social Teaching & Our Future Prospects
There isn't much to see on Interstate 35 on the long drive from Wichita, Kansas, through Oklahoma and on down to Austin, Texas. Once I passed the tollbooth on the outskirts of Wichita, there were only miles of flat prairie, mostly fields plowed up for the spring planting. I had plenty of time to think about what I had been doing, and what I had been reading.
Seven days earlier, I had flown to Wichita to help my wife take care of her dying sister Phyllis. By many measures of the world, Phyllis had led a fortunate life. Her husband had a well-paying job that enabled them to live in a large, comfortably furnished house and send their son to an exclusive private school. But she had known misfortune as well. After she had borne two daughters, her first marriage ended in divorce. Phyllis's first husband was the kind of Christian who gives Christianity a bad name. When she divorced him, she also divorced organized religion of any kind and never looked back.
One of her daughters was now estranged from her mother. The other daughter led a life so troubled that Phyllis and her second husband became guardians of their first grandchild a month after he was born, and later adopted him. (He was the boy who was attending private school.) A few years ago, when she was in her late forties, Phyllis was diagnosed with a precancerous blood disease, and she underwent a bone-marrow transplant. Complications from that transplant plagued her ever since. And in January 2015, she was diagnosed with bile-duct cancer, which had already spread by the time of diagnosis. After months in and out of hospitals, Phyllis was finally at home for the last time, in hospice care, lying in a hospital bed set up in the living room.
During that week, the three of us—Phyllis's husband, my wife, and I—took turns sitting up with her. On Thursday, I drew the night shift. My wife said goodnight at about eleven. After she left the living room, all I had to do was listen to the sound of the compressor connected to the air mattress under Phyllis's failing body, and press the button on her pain pump every half-hour or so, whenever it permitted more pain medication to be administered through her IV.
Pope Leo's Diagnosis
Just before coming to Wichita, I received a book I'd ordered: Anthony Esolen's Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church's True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State (Sophia Institute Press, 2014). Esolen is a Catholic professor of English who has a clear vision of the kind of spiritually healthy life that once prevailed in the United States, and of how society might recover from what appears to be a spiritual illness of several decades' duration. I ordered the book not knowing quite what to expect.
The book is a recapitulation of the writings and speeches of Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903), who is regarded by many as the founder of modern Catholic social thought. My limited impressions of Catholic social thought before reading the book agreed with the view of the author Robert Royal, who in 2012 wrote that while it is more than simply an activist, leftist political position, it often amounts to little more than that in practice.
But what Esolen depicts in his book amounts to a lot more than politics, although politics is involved. He envisions a vibrantly healthy body politic, one in which every major institution is guided by natural-law principles and all the various activities of the organs that make up a society are coordinated in accord with such principles. Esolen shows that issues of work and labor justice are only a small part of the comprehensive vision enunciated by Leo XIII; his vision also encompassed marriage, the family, and the proper role of the state in society. Most of the features of this vision are things that a Protestant of mixed background, like myself, would favor: a shrinking of the role of government in the spheres of family life, education, and commerce, and an expansion of the role of private associations and organizations in these spheres. I read the book when I wasn't sitting with Phyllis, and an analogy began to take shape in my mind.
My stay in Wichita wasn't my first experience of watching as someone lay dying. I had also been present at the deaths of my mother, one of my grandmothers, and my father-in-law. In a complex organism like the human body, health and life—and the contrasting conditions of sickness and death—are mysterious things. If you limit your view to a single body part or organ, the approach of death may not be evident until just before it occurs. Right up to the moment of death, most of the human body is still functioning more or less normally, and different parts die at different rates even after the entire person can legally be declared dead. The same is true of most illnesses—they rarely affect the entire body equally. Yet an illness that attacks only one vital organ can nevertheless threaten the entire body.
Esolen makes clear that, back in the nineteenth century, Leo XIII saw the early signs of a cultural illness that, if allowed to spread, would cause tremendous damage to Western society. Leo's primary concern at the time was with Europe, but since his time, the illness has spread beyond Europe to the United States.
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