Fighting for Social Justice and Catholic Truth

Arthur Hippler was recently described in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as “a brash Alaskan,” a label to which he took great exception.

“Why not inform the reader that I am a black American?” he retorted in a letter to the editor. “But then he would not have been able to describe me as ‘brash.’”

Hippler is director of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wis., Office of Justice and Peace and has been for the last four years under Bishop Raymond Burke, now archbishop of St. Louis. A philosopher by training, Wanderer newspaper columnist Hippler breaks all kinds of stereotypes.

Register correspondent Thomas Szyszkiewicz talked with him about Catholic social teaching.

How did you come to the faith?

I grew up in an atheists’ home. My father was a fallen-away Catholic; my mother really had no religious profession at all. I grew up in a university environment, since my father was a professor at the University of Alaska. I went to public school all the way through high school.

There were people who were friends of my father's who were trying to get him to come back to the Church and they would send books home with him, which he quite irresponsibly left lying around the house. I took to reading those and other things and I read myself into the Church.

The other important thing would be my grandmother, my father's mother, who had us enrolled in Masses by the Blue Army of Fatima for a year. Within a year and a half from when she enrolled us in those Masses, the entire family was Catholic.

When he was bishop of LaCrosse, Archbishop Burke withdrew the diocese from the Crop Walk, which supports the poor in the Third World, and the AIDS Walk, which helps AIDS sufferers. What was the objection?

This turns on a misunderstanding going back to Gaudium et Spes on ecumenical collaboration. The Council Fathers were very clear in that document, repeating the teaching of popes before them, that the moral law must be the basis for ecumenical collaboration. What should join us — people of different faiths and no faith — is a shared understanding of what's naturally good for human beings. That's what's at stake in all of these things in which we have discontinued collaboration.

In both cases of the Crop Walk and AIDS Walk, they involve offenses against the moral law, actions that are condemned not only by the Catholic Church but also really are condemned by a right understanding of human nature.

People grasp the principle. For example, you heard it was a minuscule amount. What if you were collaborating with an organization that only owned five slaves? Or only ran a prostitution service with four prostitutes? Nobody would make, to me, the casuistic qualifications that well, you can collaborate, but make sure the money goes here and not there. They would shun it. If there was anything racist or exploitative about the organization with which they were collaborating, that would mark the end of the collaboration.

All that the Church is doing is being consistent with that principle. Bishop Burke's decision was a witness to the integrity of the moral law by refusing to collaborate with those who violate it. You can disagree on all sorts of things and still collaborate, but you cannot disagree on the fundamentals of the moral law. Contraception, abortion, sodomy — these are offenses against the moral law.

What makes a Catholic social justice activist different from a secular human rights activist?

There is certainly the natural law that is written in our hearts, which we have the ability to discern and follow. But without the benefit of prayer, without the assistance of grace, so often we can do things warped by our own tendencies — tendencies toward pride, vanity, all the other human passions.

For example, Dorothy Day — she went on retreat when she was just organizing the Catholic Worker Houses and on this retreat she asked herself, “How do I know that I'm helping the poor for the right reason? How do I know that I'm not just doing it for attention or vanity or pride?”

And she went to the priest and the priest told her, “When you carry out your service, think primarily of God. Focus on God. If you do what you do for the love of God, everything else will fall into place.”

And that answer gave Dorothy great peace. She said, “Okay, that's what I have to do.” And that's what any of us who works in the social apostolate of the Church has to do. You have to think primarily of the love of God and the glory of God. And hopefully, with grace and spiritual direction, you'll do the right thing. Otherwise, it is so easy for your apostolate to become chiefly about you.

I can give an example of that from the Bible. Who is the only apostle who speaks out on behalf of the poor? Judas. Just because you speak out on behalf of the poor and you make noise about helping people doesn't mean everything is all right on the inside.

In fact, the Scripture seems to imply that Judas, in John 6:70, was one of the disciples who walked away from the Eucharist. So later on it is no surprise that the man who cut himself off from the sacramental life of the Church is the one who betrays Our Lord and betrays him for money.

It is not enough to speak out and to agitate. I can make a general observation that as well as people out there pursuing issues in place of buckling down and really forming themselves according to the Church, there's also a lot of people using activism as a substitute for addressing problems in their own moral life.

The big example of that is contraception. One of the things I discovered in the Crop Walk is that, for many of the people who criticized [the bishop's decision], once you pushed them on the question, they defended contraception. And you have to wonder: Is their activism for the poor making up for a rejection of the Church's teaching on contraception?

Can you tell me what your justice and peace work involves?

A lot of justice-and-peace offices tend to be very issue-oriented; they have particular issues that are motivating people.

When Bishop Burke hired me, he made clear that he wanted people to understand the principles of Catholic social teaching such that they then would see these issues in light of the teaching. Certainly the issues are important, but so many times what you find with our Catholic people is that they do not really know how to apply what they hear in church in the secular world around them.

The Second Vatican Council described this in the Decree on the Laity as a kind of separation of faith and life. And, in fact, the conciliar documents identify this as one of the greatest errors of our age.

That's my task here in overseeing the social apostolate of the Church in this diocese — to help the people understand the depth and richness of the tradition. It isn't just activism — that's a conclusion. We want them to have the complete Gospel.

Thomas Szyszkiewicz writes from Altura, Minnesota.