I’ve been a subscriber to The Catholic Worker for 35 years or so. The subscription cost is 25 cents a year, and it comes out seven times a year in a tabloid newspaper format. I subscribe to it because it reminds me there are exceptional, dignified people in the world who behave well.
The subscription’s downside is that I’m reminded seven times a year that I’m not an exceptional person, and that I can’t call myself a good person unless I do good things. Exceptional people are those who do good things gracefully, consistently, and in a dignified way.
These reminders are straightforward and not complex. Boiled and rendered down they mean our high-minded thoughts and bold declarations don’t mean much unless they’re congruent with how we act.
Congruence – walking the walk – is a challenge for us. Environmentalists recycle… and hang their clothes out to dry when the sun is shining. Patriots love their country and protect its Constitution, including its amendments, 1st, 2nd, … and 27th. Advocates for political change, and blowhards and quiet spoken holders of opinion alike, vote. Congruence is, as we see, a matter of degree. That’s where the words exceptional, grace, and dignity come in.
In 1945, directly following WWII, German church leaders issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. In it, they admitted cowardice, and complaisance in not opposing fascism, nationalism, and persecution of human beings who weren’t white, Christian, or deemed “normal.” They wrote, “Founded on Holy Scripture, with entire seriousness before the Church’s only Lord, we are undertaking to purify ourselves from influences alien to the faith and bring ourselves into order.”
Not everyone was compliant. One exception was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and anti-Nazi dissident who was imprisoned, sent to a concentration camp, and hanged for walking the Christian walk. In life and death, Bonhoeffer was exceptional, graceful, and dignified. He had no apologies to make.
Bonhoeffer’s best-known work, The Cost of Discipleship, is a specifically Christian tract, much honored and loved by theologians, pastors, and lots of ordinary folk. But it also provides quiet and specific guidance for how environmentalists, patriots, advocates, and Presidents ought to conduct themselves as well.