The Invisible Counterpoint

My qualm, right now, with the political left is that it is so taken over by sexual issues, sexual questions, that we have forgotten the traditional concern of the left was always social class and those at the bottom. And now we’re faced with a pope who is compassionate towards the poor and we want to know his position on abortion. It seems to me that at one point when Pope Francis said, “You know the church has been too preoccupied with those issues, gay marriage and abortion…” at some level the secular left has been too preoccupied with those issues. You’re saying that the church — it’s not exactly Catholics, it’s the church itself, the Vatican — has been obsessed with these questions at the same time the Anglo-American cultural left has been obsessed with these as well. To the exclusion of other important issues? Yes, particularly the very poor.  And it seems to me what the pope doesn’t say when he says we’ve been too preoccupied with these issues is: why? And that ...

So what is to be done? McElwee trots out the idea of a truce – “one originally proposed by the Catholic church and promoted by the eminent Stephen J. Gould,” that “Science, the study of the natural world, and religion, the inquiry into the meaning of life (or metaphysics, more broadly) constitute non-overlapping magisteria.” One straightaway must regard as suspect a “truce” advocated by an organization guilty of repressing scientists and opposing the scientific Weltanschauung. And one would be right to be suspicious, according to McElwee’s proposition: “Neither [science nor religion] can invalidate the theories of the other, if such theories are properly within their realm.” Just what the boundaries of those realms are and who decides them have been matters of contention since time immemorial. Just ask Galileo. McElwee next concludes that “religion (either secular or theological) does not poison all of society and science should not be feared, but rather embraced.” No one is waiti...