In February 2016, Pope Francis said that “a person who thinks only of building walls, wherever it may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian.” I was reminded of those words as I was watching President Trump’s speech before Congress last week. The theme of “WALLS AND BRIDGES” has been applied most often to the issue of immigration, but it is an issue that has been a common theme in both the OLD and NEW TESTEMENTS, and throughout all of history from ancient times up until today. I found it interesting in 2016 when I heard the Pope’s words, and again today as I watched the proceedings in our own United States Capital, that both at the Vatican and at our Capital we have walls surrounding those buildings and state of the art security systems and trained personnel to guard what is inside of those walls.
In the Books of The Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah, we hear the story of the Israelites returning after 80 years of Babylonian Captivity to find Jerusalem and the Temple completely destroyed. The returning people were two generations removed from the Jewish culture and community that their grandparents had known and left behind. These children of Israel had to discover once again who they were supposed to be. Theocratic governance was the way of the Hebrew people since the time of Moses, so both a physical and a spiritual moral identity had to be reestablished. Nehimiah (the politician of his day) immediately identified the need to rebuild the walls around the Holy City. The people needed to be protected from outside marauding tribes and nations. By standing up to common enemies, they would reestablish their identity as a people.
Ezra (the Priest) saw things a little differently. He understood that the people not only needed to be united physically, but also spiritually. They needed to have a common moral law and a common spiritual identity, not only to define themselves individually, but to also define the way they were going to interact with each other. After 80 years of Babylonian captivity a common physical and spiritual identity was required, or the Hebrew people would be destroyed from without (hence the need for physical walls) and from within (hence the need for spiritual and moral laws) and the civil codes derived from those laws.
Only after the physical and spiritual laws were reestablished, could the bridges be built between peoples of foreign nations and even those living within the city who were foreigners and who were willing to assimilate. They understood that in order to survive the people needed to know who they were and what they stood for and mostly they needed to know the WHY that formed the moral predicates that define civil and communal interactions.
As I watched our Congress—deeply divided as WE THE PEOPLE are divided, respond to the words and presentation of President Trump, I thought that somehow, we must build a bridge between the two desperate political factions that exist in our country today. The problem for me is that the pillars of morality and civil order that are the bases of all our civil proceedings and our laws, are not shared between the two groups. The traditionalists (Republicans) were like the Hebrew elders who were trying to establish traditional values in society. They were happy almost to the point of being giddy, that the traditional conservative values—that up until the progressive movement of the early twentieth century were called “classical Liberal”, were being reestablished and reaffirmed. The other side of the isle who thought that the progressive and socialistic inroads of the modern-day progressive Obama- Biden era were going to be continued, were angry that their policies and ideas were not going to be reaffirmed, but in many cases replaced with conservative policies that mirrored conservative principles.
The metaphor being played out on the floor of Congress that night was that each side had built a wall around themselves. Our side’s wall has Christian Enlightenment pillars supporting the roof. We approach governance from the standpoint of stewardship. The other side builds its beliefs around principles of humanistic progressive nihilism. They only bend the knee to the power that they always try to accrue more of, with each election cycle. Their power comes from themselves. After four generations of indoctrination in our academies and by the media—power has become their god. Our concept of power comes from the belief that all power is held “in trust”, it is temporary and comes with moral strings attached. We believe as our Founders believed that there is a higher Power.
Until each side has shared values, building bridges can be difficult. Pope Leo XIII talked about these issues in Rerum Novarum in 1891. Until the Vatican tears down its own walls, no longer hires security and the Swiss Guards for protection, and starts taking in refugees like so many American cities and all of Europe has done, they should spend more time building spiritual walls and less time tearing down physical ones. Until our politicians and public officials stop insisting upon private security for themselves and their families, they should stop lecturing us about “walls and bridges”.
Like Ezra, the building of spiritual walls needs to be the priority. The bridges come only after we ALL know who we are and WHY we believe the way that we do.
