Facing Diversity: Urgent Questions of the Day for Catholicism
It has become a commonplace in Catholic circles that, while the controversies of the Patristic era were largely theological and Christological, and the controversies of the Reformation era were largely soteriological and ecclesiological, the controversies the Church faces today are primarily anthropological in character. When we make this observation, we often have specific disputed questions in mind: human sexuality, the nature of marriage, the bioethics of beginning and end of life care, for instance. What we human beings understand ourselves to be bears on all these topics, of course.
I would like to suggest that the concerns commonly raised by DEI advocacy present another domain in which these ongoing anthropological controversies unfold. What forms of human diversity are worthy of esteem or fostered, and in what ways should they be esteemed and fostered? In what respect are we fundamentally equal, or in what ways ought we to be accorded equal treatment? To what do we and should we belong, and in what should we be included? What exactly is the relationship between us particular persons and the various categories—racial, linguistic, sexual, economic, historical, the list goes on—that populate our social landscape, and what role should these categories play in the ways we approach one another? These are ways of raising some of the general questions suggested by a serious moral concern with the values standardly associated with DEI advocacy. These too are topics which fall under anthropology; getting clarity on what we human beings are will help shed light on them, and vice-versa.
DEI Advocacy & the Sanctity of the Victim
Rather than examine the nature of diversity, equity, or inclusion as such, however, I would like to consider another, more fundamental facet of the DEI outlook, one that crosscuts the three letters. Much of the moral conviction and energy behind DEI as a social movement, it seems to me, depends upon the felt sense that the victim has a special claim on our attention and moral concern.
This is all the more the case with victims of unjustly ordered institutions or social arrangements: think here of the MeToo movement or of the wave of protests that followed the death of George Floyd. As the quasi-religious imagery of Floyd vividly illustrates, we still sometimes retain, it seems, a sense that God is especially on the side of the least among us, in particular those who have been made victims of social injustice. We are still subject to what Tom Holland has recently described as “the discovery made by Christ’s earliest followers—that to be a victim might be a source of power”—moral power, a power to make legitimate and overriding claims on our attention and concern.[1]
It is a sign of hope for us that in this respect we remain, as a Nietzschean might put it, all too Christian. Yet I want to suggest that the apparent moral power—the apparent sanctity—of the victim of social injustice, which Holland has so elegantly depicted, was not something discovered so much as something accomplished. It matters, after all, under precisely what circumstances this “discovery” first was made. It was not any slave, criminal, or provincial of the Roman Empire who occasioned this insight, but one who, though he was found in “the form of a slave,” was also believed first to have been “in the form of God”—to echo the words of the earliest Christian confession to be recorded in the New Testament (Philippians 2:6ff).
Before the time of the Roman occupation of Judea, the God of Abraham had, through the Torah and the prophets, taught the Jewish people a special obligation to awanim—the lowly ones, the widow and the orphan. And in the story of Israel, neglect of this obligation and unfaithfulness to the covenant with God often arose hand in hand, to be met with divine corrections and renewals of the covenant.
But in the life and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the earliest Christians believed, something altogether without precedent had taken place. The God of Abraham had, in a manner they had scarcely begun to understand, not only championed but become the lowly one. He allowed himself to be made a victim—of ingratitude, of betrayal, of misunderstanding, of worldly-wise political maneuvering and the realpolitik of empire.
Here I hasten to add that, if the first Christians believed that in Christ, the Lord God of Israel had somehow made himself a victim for our sake, this was a way of being a victim in the fullest sense: not only of suffering injustice, but of becoming the only sacrificial offering adequate to overcome the sum of human injustices and to reconcile us to one another and to God. To this day, in the traditional Easter sequence of the Catholic Church, believers hail the Risen Christ with the words: Victimae Paschali laudes immolent Christiani—make your sacrifice of praises, O Christians, to the Paschal victim.
Augustine, in his speculations on the nature and origin of human beings, at times suggested that the desire for the happy life that animates human striving was at heart an inherited memory, an echo or trace of the prelapsarian joy Adam had known in the cool breeze of Eden. Perhaps the passionate moral concern that has contributed to the success of DEI advocacy is something like that: a half-remembered echo of the New and Final Adam’s saving deeds in their immediate implications for human dignity. The sanctity of the victim thus arises not from a mere moral insight, however profound it may be, but from a divine action in history—the one by which God most intimately and irrevocably united himself to us.
Or so goes the Christian claim. If Christian solicitude for the least among us is a historical contingency and nothing more, bound to pass away in the manner of all such contingencies, then the animating compassion of the best in DEI advocacy rests, not on any tacit, partial grasp of the Christian mystery, but on one contestable moral understanding among many—and a particularly counterintuitive one, at that. But if we are willing to grant that there is a genuine insight implicit and operative in any moral regard for those who have suffered from the flaws and abuses of our social arrangements, then we should be prepared to reconsider what else we may still have to learn from the historic origins of that insight.
The Last Shall Be First: Revenge or Restoration?
Thus far we have only considered the sanctity of the victim from the point of view of its origins and warrant, but this is at most only one half of the question. A word too is in order about where the sanctity of the victim can and should lead us. Here a temptation threatens: to seek revenge or private advantage under the false guise of restorative justice. It is hardly mere cynicism to notice that the rise of DEI, as often with moral or religious movements, brought with it perverse incentives to profit from the moral and political energies unleashed by the summer of George Floyd. And it may seem as if dealing with the legacy of white supremacy would require policies which work, not simply to undo the unjust hierarchies of the past, but to reverse them—to replace them with another, countervailing set of hierarchies. After all, does restorative justice not require compensation of the victims’ losses? So, it may seem that, as one advocate recently put it, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. . . . The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”[2]
Calls like this one, that envision restorative justice by means of an equal and opposite reversal of past injustices, may suggest to the scripturally-minded another kind of reversal. The Gospels record in various forms Christ’s teaching that the advent of the kingdom of God brings with it a kind of bouleversement, an inversion of human expectations, so that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last” (Matt 20:16; cf. Mark 10:31). We can recall here too Christ’s response to the apostles’ early concerns about their own hierarchy, about who would be greatest among them, in which we find a contrast between “those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles” who “lord it over them,” on the one hand, and the mentality Christ enjoins upon the apostles: “Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43-44).
This biblical vision of reversal, I want to suggest, can deepen and strengthen our vision of the justice sought by DEI work at its best. For Christ’s “sayings of reversal” point to a fuller form of justice and peace than could ever be accomplished merely by the redistribution of temporal goods mirroring the unjust social relations of the past. True, we can find expressions of this biblical theme which focuses on wealth and poverty in a fallen social order. Think here of Mary’s Magnificat: “he has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:46-55); or of Luke’s telling of the beatitudes: “Blessed are you poor . . . blessed are you that hunger now. . . . But woe to you that are rich . . . woe to you that are full now” (Luke 6:20-26).
Yet I would argue that other biblical invocations of hierarchy can enrich our perspective on these matters, for two reasons: first, because we find the reversal of hierarchy envisioned in primarily reconciling and restorative terms; second, because of the way biblical patterns of hierarchy consistently shift focus from a self-centered focus on one’s own favored status to a self-giving focus on service to the other.
To take the first point: while the scriptural text does portray God’s condemnation of unjust social arrangements (think here of Isaiah 29:20ff, Micah 3, or Amos 2:6-8, to take only a few concrete examples), it does not envision a remedy in which human beings take matters into their own hands to impose a new putative justice by instrumentalizing one part of the community for the sake of the whole. One significant case where such instrumentalizing reasoning is on display turns out to be particularly instructive (John 11:49-52):
Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
The dramatic irony in Caiaphas’s remark as reported by John operates on several levels at once. First, and perhaps most obviously to the Christian reader, the arrest, trial, and execution of Christ is in no way just; even if Caiaphas considers the arrest expedient, the gospel text here quietly rebukes any merely consequentialist calculation that would seek to justify the unjust sacrifice of one for the sake of “the whole nation.” Yet at the same time there is another manner, beyond the political calculations of human beings, in which the sentencing of the one Christ does proceed to work unto the reconciliation of the many:
He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.
The reversal of unjust hierarchy accomplished in the death and resurrection of the Christ does not aim at a condemnation of the Roman occupiers who executed him, or of the Temple leadership that handed him over, or of the apostles who abandoned him in his final hours. It aims, rather, “to bring them together and make them one”—indeed, after the pattern of the very unity by which Christ is one with his Father, as he will soon after pray on John’s telling (John 17:21). It bears remembering here that the first word that the Risen Christ pronounces to the apostles, after they have abandoned him and secluded themselves in fear, is, “Peace” (John 20:19; cf. Luke 24:36).
Turning from the first point to the second, we begin by revisiting Christ’s correction of the apostles’ own quarrels among themselves for favored status: “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43). The perspective on hierarchy and favored status articulated here fits into a wider biblical pattern: first, divine favor often expresses itself in place and in ways that overturn human expectations; second, those who are made the object of divine predilection are called to the service of others. Thus (to name a few examples) Abraham is chosen in his old age to become the bearer of God’s covenantal promises; Israel is chosen and called precisely to serve as a light to the nations, illuminating the ways of right worship and relation to the God of Jacob; even Gentile conquerors like Namaan the Syrian and Cyrus the Great are chosen to witness to God’s healing and deliverance. In the Gospels we find further illustrations of how God’s predilective love shines in unexpected quarters: think here of the Syrophoenician woman, whose faith wins a healing before the time of the Gentiles has arrived (Matthew 1:22-28); the Roman centurion, whose faith prompts Christ to marvel, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Luke 7:9); or the Samaritan woman Christ meets at the well, whose personal encounter with the Lord moves her to bring many of her fellow Samaritans to faith (John 4:1-42). In each case, the person chosen for divine favor comes from an unexpected place, but at the same time it is clear that this favor is not meant as an occasion for self-regard but for self-gift.
The paradigm of this attitude, on the telling of the Pauline epistles, comes into view in the whole arc of Christ’s saving activity ad extra, in his incarnation, life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension: thus Philippians commends its hearers to “have the same mind in yourselves that was in Christ Jesus,” precisely insofar as Christ “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:5ff) for humanity’s sake.
The result of this self-forgetting self-gift is indeed a kind of reversal, in which the Christ who has emptied himself to the point of death on a cross is now exalted. Yet this reversal at the same time redounds to the glorification of those under Christ, since in the resurrection “the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The God who humanizes himself for our sake does indeed cross every boundary of class and status, every metaphysical interval from the highest to the lowest—not simply to rearrange the old hierarchies of oppression and dispossession, but to work something new: to restore us to friendship with one another and, more startingly, to establish friendship with us. Christ would, by the stupefying generosity of his desire to share himself, make equals of us.
In Provisional Conclusion: “To Interpret Being Human Christologically”
All of this, I would suggest, has implications for how we think about rectifying the injustices and social wounds which DEI advocacy at its best brings to our attention. But a brief sketch of theological themes that bear on these concerns is, of course, far from settling any questions. My hope is instead that reflections like this one can help illustrate how Catholics may see DEI advocacy as an opportunity both to contribute to an important public conversation and to witness to the Gospel’s power to satisfy the noblest aspirations of every age.
Commenting on the text of Gaudium et Spes §22 in 1969, then-Father Joseph Ratzinger observed that the Conciliar document sought to evangelize the unbelieving world by means of “the endeavor to interpret being human Christologically.”[3] The questions about justice and reconciliation raised by DEI advocacy bear on what it means to be and to flourish as human beings and human communities. Such questions are thereby open to that ambition of interpreting being human in terms of the Christian mystery. As in the Christological and ecclesiological controversies of past centuries, the Church’s encounter with the urgent questions of the day will help us get closer to addressing them adequately, but more than this, that encounter will help the Church bring more fully to light for all people the implications of the faith she proclaims.