• David Sessions, he doesn’t believe in God
• Where are the young adults (RC)?  , Social issues ran high

Sessions

The latter point might be another one in the church’s favor, a juncture at which history has turned its conservatism to radicalism. While the Catholic church’s destructive opposition to key scientific advancements should never be overlooked, the church has also perhaps been most resistant of all global institutions to the stranglehold pseudo-scientific and economic classifications increasingly place on human life. The church remains the closest thing to a massive anti-capitalist institution the world has ever seen. It is difficult to imagine Catholic education embracing the end-oriented schemes that have infected public education in the U.S.; at my own Catholic institution, we still require all undergraduates to take a broad-based humanistic curriculum that includes history, philosophy, and theology. In terms of graduate education, while general academic trends are equally applicable to Catholic universities, those universities continue to be generous supporters of the humanities, and it is simply understood that our disciplines are on equal footing with others. Even as an atheist graduate student, enduring the “crisis of the humanities” at a Catholic university makes it hard to ignore the church’s historical role as a repository of humanistic inquiry. (At Boston College, we even have some pretty sensational homegrown examples of no-holds-barred Catholic free-thinking.)

None of this, of course, is to suggest that unbelievers should head immediately to the nearest mass. The point is that political emancipation in general, and particularly resistance to the current trends that have put us on the path to ecological disaster, is an unimaginably arduous task. It’s not a job that will be accomplished by the occasional occupation, die-in, or state-sanctioned protest. Organizing political movements, especially around labor and environmental concerns, is of course an important challenge, and one that can give birth to a measure of real-world solidarity. But for countless others, whose inclinations or life situations put them at a certain remove from the activist life, solidarity remains simultaneously crucial and very difficult to find. While it is by no means clear that the answer is “yes,” the question is whether it makes strategic sense to ignore or oppose an institution as large or as favorable (in some respects) to leftist politics as the Catholic church.