The Society of Christian Ethics Annual Meeting -- University of Chicago
Intro
Thank you Bill Werpehowski for your kind introduction And thank you Kathleen Caveny and everyone here with the Society of Christian Ethics for your invitation. My staff will confirm that I've really been looking forward to this opportunity -- chiefly because I get to quote Thomas Aquinas without my local press making fun of me for doing so
I'm also looking forward to panel discussion with Jewish, Muslim, Christian ethicists, and questions from all of you.
I've been asked to share a few thoughts with you today about the challenges of political leadership in a religiously pluralistic society.
Thomas Aquinas once wrote, that "any seeker of a higher truth, or of God, must eventually and inevitably return to the idea of community."
As an American and as a Catholic, I was raised:
To believe in the dignity of every person,
To believe in our own individual responsibility to advance the common good,
And to believe that there is a unity to spirit and matter --
That we are all in this together.
Each of us is needed.
Each of us must try.
My mom and dad, Tom and Barbara O'Malley were children of the Great Depression.
They grew up to become part of that great American generation;
The generation who fought and won the Second World War.
They had six children -- which in those days made us merely a mid-sized Irish Catholic family many of our fellow parishioners at Our Lady of Lourdes Church suspected us of being Lutheran spies.
I was born between times --
A time between the ideological days of my older baby-boomer siblings,
and the more entrepreneurial and collaborative days of my millennial children.
A time between the age of big bureaucracy and big institutions;
and this new age of big-data and global collaboration.
My father was a solo practitioner lawyer.
In our house, the practice of law, like politics, was considered a noble calling -- not necessarily lucrative mind you -- but noble nonetheless.
All his life my dad defended and represented many clients too poor to pay: the sick, the imprisoned, the grieving, the homeless, the old, the mentally ill.
In his daily practice of life, dad was always individually kind to people that others often looked beyond -- servers, bus-boys, janitors, parking lot attendants.
As kids, we had all watched the movie, "To Kill a Mockingbird," and we agreed that dad very much reminded all of us of Atticus Finch -- that great American hero, father, and lawyer who declared:
"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
Baltimore
After attending Catholic University in Washington, DC, I moved to Baltimore for law school and stayed.
I worked as a prosecutor in the State's Attorney's Office for a brief time;
and then in 1991, I ran for City Council from northeast Baltimore and won.
I served two terms.
By 1999, Baltimore, had become the most violent, most addicted, most abandoned city in America.
Confronted by this injustice and compelled by a small voice within, I ran for Mayor against all odds.
In that hit campaign summer, we talked about justice and injustice.
We talked about our fears and our distrust of one another.
We talked about the truth that we must help each other in order to give our City a safer tomorrow.
And we won with 54% of the vote in a majority African American City.
The Washington Post greeted my upset election victory with the headline -- "White Man Wins Mayor of Baltimore."
The next day the paper issued an apology for the headline.
It was the only apology I have ever received from the Washington Post -- and, ironically, it was for a headline that was 100% accurate.
Amber
True story:
At one of our first community meetings in a hard hit neighborhood of East Baltimore, citizens assembled talk to their new Mayor.
To talk about crime, drugs, and policing. There was a tension in the air.
A little girl came up to the microphone. "Mr. Mayor," she said, "my name is Amber, and I am 12 years old.
And because of all the addicted people and drug dealers in my neighborhood, there are people in the newspaper who call my neighborhood, "Zombie Land.'
And I want to know if you know they call my neighborhood Zombie Land, and I want to know if you're doing anything about it?"
Her two questions are the two essential questions.
Do you know?
And are you doing something about it?
We decided as a City to believe in one another.
Together, we took action against crime and drug addiction.
And over the next 10 years, Baltimore went on to achieve the biggest reduction in part 1 crime of any major city in America.
Many police officers gave their lives to save the lives of others and to change the future of our City.
None of it was simple or easy; the problems of crime, poverty, and addiction were all complex.
Progress was complicated.
But the essential questions were fairly simple
Do you know?
And are you doing something about it?
As Max Scheler, the German Ethics philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrote:
"The act of helping is the direct and adequate expression of love, not its meaning or "purpose.' Its meaning lies in itself, in its illumination of the soul, in the nobility of the loving soul in the act of love."
As an American, as a Catholic, as a Public Servant, I have sometimes wrestled with the hierarchies of my own organized religion, within the evolution of ever-more inclusive notions of freedom, justice, and love.
I have worked hard to sort out the difference between justice and vengeance.
With my neighbors I have searched for the right balance between security and freedom;
for the right balance -- under the law and among a people of many faiths -- for protecting the dignity of every person and the freedom of individual conscience.
Together we have sought to better understand the capacities of a government of, by, and for the people; as well as its limitations:
That the law must be ordered to the common good in service of the whole people, people of many different faiths;
That the scope of the law must be limited to the maintenance and protection of public, not private, morality.
In my service, I have sought to reflect the goodness and the best intentions of the people I serve:
A people who seek and imagine a future for our children that is;
Better,
More secure,
More prosperous,
And more compassionate than our present.
As Governor
In two weeks, I will conclude eight years of service to the People of Maryland as their Governor.
Over the course of these last eight years we have accomplished many important things and taken many important steps to advance our common good:
To build an economy with a human purpose.
To eradicate childhood hunger.
To create new jobs and expand economic opportunity,
promoting the dignity of work by passing a living wage and raising the minimum wage,
respecting the right of workers to organize, enacting a fair and progressive income tax.
Passing a state version of the Dream Act,
welcoming and caring for refugee children fleeing death gangs in Central America, reducing the incidence of infant mortality.
Providing a quality education for every child in our State, regardless of wealth,
Protecting God's natural creation for the benefit of future generations, reducing violent crime, rebuilding our cities.
Healing the sick, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the imprisoned.
A Degree of Discernment
Some of these actions have found broad consensus.
Others have involved considerable controversy:
Decriminalizing marijuana possession.
Restricting the purchase of assault weapons and hand-guns.
Enacting Civil Marriage Equality.
Repealing the Death Penalty.
These issues have called upon all of us -- as free citizens -- to exercise a degree of discernment;
To do justice in the law and in our relationships with one another.
To ask -- What is the proper balance between state prohibition, maintaining social order, and the respecting the freedom of individual conscience?
To ask -- How we should apply the constitutional principle of "equal protection under the law" to protecting the dignity of every child's home, and the commitments of same-sex couples?
To ask -- What limits should there be to just punishment among a free and self-governed people?
The answers to these questions define not only the society we share, but the world our children will inherit.
They must be worked out among us, and between us, in a spirit of community and understanding -- in that space between us where the public interest is found.
For what was true in Paul's time is also true in our own:
"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
[And] There is no law against such things." (Galatians 5:22)
Source