Motives of Credibility: Fruitfulness

One of the more bizarre public commentaries on the Catholic Church in recent memory was offered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the Great Racial Reckoning of 2020 that followed the death of George Floyd. Standing before a picture of the U.S. Capitol statue of Fr. Damien De Veuster (more popularly known as St. Damien of Molokai), the congresswoman (and self-professed Catholic) from New York declared, “Even when we select figures to tell the stories of colonized places, it is the colonizers and settlers whose stories are told — and virtually no one else…. This is what patriarchy and white supremacist culture looks like!”

Ocasio-Cortez’s commentary was so absurd that Bishop Robert Barron called her association of St. Damien with colonialism and white supremacy “ridiculous and insulting.” Damien was a Belgian missionary who lived in vowed poverty and eventually died of leprosy while ministering to a leper colony in Hawaii, for which the indigenous locals praised him. Indeed, Damien’s sacrificial life inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, who predicted his canonization, and Mahatma Gandhi, who observed, “The political and journalistic world can boast of very few heroes who compare with Father Damien of Molokai.”

However ignorant Ocasio-Cortez’s comments were, they underscore a pervasive historical narrative that pins on the Church the greatest of modernity’s sins. Was it not the Catholic Church that forcibly converted pagan peoples in northern Europe and the New World, promoted violent campaigns of conquest in the Crusades, policed religious dissent through torture during the Inquisition, and has perpetuated a stubborn intellectual backwardness? What better summation of this closemindedness is there than Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors” (1864), which rejected as erroneous the proposition that the pope “can and should reconcile and adapt himself to progress, liberalism, and the modern culture”?