The crisis is at our door. Two children shot dead at Annunciation Catholic School, and two state representatives murdered in Minneapolis among the 408 mass shootings last year. Increasing numbers of American citizens detained without due process in militarized raids with chemical weapons and warrantless arrests. 73,000 predominantly Latino Catholics (including parents and infants) without criminal records, Somalis, and Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees in I.C.E. detention centers with deadly conditions. A gruesome culture of death witnessed largely through AI-mediated screens, depending on your algorithm.
How did we get here? Three observations stand out:
A generation of American Catholics spiritually blackmailed by a single-issue “pro-life” position that reduces all other social concerns to “prudential” preferences has bought our silence in the face of political impunity. We were told that one intrinsic evil rendered every other concern optional. The cognitive dissonance of defending life while excusing violence in life’s name is the logical outcome of these partisan fictions, laying bare the uncomfortable reality that we have been manipulated by power. As Pope Leo observed, “Someone who says I'm against abortion but is in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don't know if that's pro-life." And yet, how many of us will continue to excuse the latter in the name of the former?
The reduction of politics — the art of living together (Aristotle) — to rivalry. As Pope Benedict affirmed, compromise is the essence of civic life. Similarly Pope Francis invited our Movement to transcend conflict in the face of change. Yet we find ourselves swept into a logic of total victory: “owning” our enemies, embracing isolationism, bandwagoning the “anti” movements (anti-woke, anti-/post-liberalism, etc.), doing the very opposite of building a presence. These actions weaken our ability to respond to external threats and leave our own communities increasingly insular.
The manipulation of judgment through algorithmic social media platforms that monetize engagement at the expense of the social fabric have turned disagreement into literal bloodsport. As digital literacy unravels through AI-generated media blurring truth from fiction, algorithmic information bubbles trained on personalized interests displace any exposure to shared realities. Political and commercial actors seizing this moment to “flood the zone” of the American attention span have effectively overwhelmed us to moral exhaustion. As Fr. Giussani warned at Assago in 1987, when power’s sole aim becomes its own preservation, it must systematically reduce human desires and manipulate conscience through mass media.
At pivotal moments in history, our Movement has offered public witness through written flyers that offer an original judgment. In the United States, we have spoken boldly about the HHS Contraception Mandate, the 2008 and 2012 elections, the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero, and the Colorado theater shooting. And yet, on the twilight of “Operation Metro Surge” in which DHS deployed thousands of agents to the Twin Cities, killing two American Christians with multiple bullets, and arresting 100 clergy members, we have been silent. As violence escalates in one of our Movement’s fastest growing, and seemingly vibrant communities, we have no judgement to offer.
Politics does not save; Christ alone does. But each of us must ask to what degree this phrase reflects an honest experience or, instead, an indulgent post-rationalization for what we actually hold most dear: existential fear, partisan attachments, victim-status, and the soft allure of the bourgeois status quo. Too often, this original position has become a safe pretext for complacency, a self-absolution from complicity, and a high-minded defense against actual engagement with difficult circumstances. Is Christianity merely a comfortable idea served with a heaping plate of pasta? Have we lost our capacity to be salt in this time (Matthew 5:13) only, in due course, to be spit out? (Revelation 3:15-16)
Instead what we are witnessing is the collapse of Giussani’s method: the evaporation of an original position in the Church, the reduction of our communion to the performance of Giussani. No risk. No presence. CL as quietism.
We call on the Movement of Communion and Liberation in the United States to be provoked by this current crisis into a deeper self-examination, and to recommit to an education in its historical charism in order to offer an original proposal to American society — one that makes explicit the content of an encounter. We stand with the U.S. Bishops in solidarity with vulnerable migrant populations. Politics does not save, yes. But unexamined, and reduced to conflict, it annihilates. We invite each member to, in his or her own circumstances, look Christ in the face, as we resist the reduction of faith to a culture war that dehumanizes our people, our civic tradition, and our nation.
— Current and former members of Communion & Liberation in the United States
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