We all have friends who are panicked by the growing anti-Catholic and anti-family movements in our politics and popular culture. Our natural instinct is to retreat into a “family stockade,” hoping to be ignored. But as Catholics, we’re not permitted to give in to that instinct, to concede any defeat of the Kingdom of God. We’re called to evangelize the culture, “wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” The question is in our current situation how do we do that? 

In the fifth century, Western Christianity was overrun by savage barbarians. Yet, over the next three centuries, the monks of the day slowly transformed a culture of homicidal, rape-loving brutes into honour-bound, mother-revering, chivalrous knights. They did this, “gentle as doves,” with services of family love: teaching their children, nursing their sick, and sheltering their orphans. As much as possible—given the reality of Original Sin—they humanized a warrior culture with their devout, free and personal sacrifice. Indeed, the Church has always earned its independent moralauthority by bucking the local bully with its free services of love. 

What’s our situation today? We’re overrun by a bureaucratic culture as brutal as the medieval warriors and as much in need of humanizing. In the 20th century, our Christian society foolishly downloaded its duties of family love onto the government. Over the next century, civic education became socialist indoctrination; nursing became statistical protocols, and shelter became welfare dependency. Our free society’s services of love were sucked into the Bureaucratic Bubble. 

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For Bureaucracy, regulations are everything, and the results, literally nothing. And everything government does is coercive—like the taxes going to abortion “services.” So how do we humanize the bureaucratic regime? 

Some years ago, an old friend was dying of cancer in local hospice. We visited nightly until the evening we found him in a deep coma. As we entered his room, the four-to-midnight nurse told us, off-hand, that we should say our final goodbyes. We asked, why? She replied that she had doctor’s orders to give him the injection. 

After she left, my wife whispered, “We’re not leaving.” As the evening wore on, the nurse peeked in periodically to see if we were still there. Then at midnight, as her shift was ending, she announced that she had to give our friend his shot. My wife asked, will it kill him? She shrugged, embarrassed. 

My wife asked what precisely the doctor had ordered. The nurse read, “If the patient is disturbed…” But he’s not disturbed, my wife insisted. No, he’s not, the nurse agreed, he’s resting quietly. Minutes passed. Then she said, “I’ve already drawn the ampule into a syringe, so I’ll have to squirt it into the sink.” She seemed pleased: “I’ll have to throw it away.” That way (unsaid), if our friend survived the night, there’d be no unused ampule in the drug locker, to raise questions the next morning. And he died naturally the following afternoon. 

What did my wife achieve? A still-humane nurse was not forced to commit procedural murder, for which she was grateful. If we’d challenged her orders directly, she’d have been forced to dig in her heels or risk her job. Yet such orders and regulations are often couched in conditional terms—“If the patient is disturbed…”— this so the supervisors can download any final responsibility onto their staff. This creates regulatory wiggle room. 

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Probing for wiggle room can sometimes encourage humane inaction in the name of procedural caution. Almost always, simply looking for wiggle room can be a gentle way of appealing to the humanity of a civil servant who is trapped in check-box protocols. We can always say, “It must be so hard for you, to have to make these sorts of decisions in other peoples’ lives.”

Can’t we do something more dramatic? More quickly change the culture around us? Usually, no. It would have been useless for medieval monks to preach Christian pacifism to their warrior bosses. But politics is downstream of culture, and we must first humanize the culture with small acts of love, necessarily—sigh—one person at a time. 

Any clerk entrusted with coercive bureaucratic authority must be bound by protocols, the rule of law. Social workers may know in their hearts that sometimes, a child seizure is traumatic, and not justified in the circumstances. Yet violating protocol risks everything for them, and confrontation only pushes them into stubborn anger. In witnessing to the Imago Dei, the image of God in everyone, what comes first is concern for the front-line minions, and sympathy for their unspoken dilemmas. With kindness, we might help them find some wiggle room.

The Bubble’s first victims are its minions—ordinary nurses, teachers, city clerks, CRA accountants or police officers—responsible for implementing policies that sometimes violate their own, deep longings for family, community and citizenship. Our culture, then our politics, may be very different, someday, when our “social services” are defined in terms of free families, rather than dependent individuals: family education vouchers instead of cookie-cutter schools, neighborhood hospices instead of “assisted suicide,” and subsidies for dependent relatives rather than welfare ghettoes. But first we must change the culture—sigh—one person at a time. 

Joseph Woodard is a Research Fellow at the Gregory the Great Institute.

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