Maria Ressa as Inspiration for Social Catholics

What American Catholics Should Learn from a Nobel Laureate

I just finished listening to the Audible version of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa’s 2022 bestseller, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future. Because the book not only tells the inspiring story of an exemplary woman in the forefront of the contemporary struggle for truth and justice, but also illumines the essential characteristics of what is arguably the primary threat to the future of the human family, I wanted to encourage others to benefit from her timely example and experience. Hers is an urgent message, one that calls us all to find ways to become part of the solution before it is too late.

I begin with the publisher’s blurb for her book:

Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rappler crowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections.

But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country’s most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyberlibel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines.

There is another adversary Ressa is battling. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is also the story of how the creep toward authoritarianism, in the Phillipines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by the social media companies. Ressa exposes how they have allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that infect each of us, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. She maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America's Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western listeners to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces listeners to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

As a shorter introduction to the person and work of Maria Ressa, Catholics will be especially interested in a recent talk entitled “Hope Comes from Action” that Ressa gave at a Vatican event for our newly inaugurated Jubilee Year of Hope. As I have previously posted, the Vatican is celebrating this year of hope in a way that exemplifies how the signs of our times require us to recognize the global polycrisis we face and take action in the sure hope of God’s assistance. As I have also recently posted, this balance between realism and hope was also evident in the General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which just “kicked off” the Lenten season under the heading of “The End of the World? Crises, Responsibilities, Hopes.”

I am confident that these words from Maria Ressa can encourage Catholics to follow her advice, and realize the truth that—especially under the assault of information warfare that tries to get us to despair and disengage—hope comes from prudent and courageous action. For especially American Catholics, her message is of the highest relevance because we are dealing with a very similar situation to the one she faces in the Philippines.

Relevance to Contemporary American Catholicism

Ressa’s account of the struggle against the threat of a techno-dystopian future under the domination of nihilistic autocrats and oligarchs also sheds invaluable light on a related crisis in especially American Catholicism. This crisis is multifaceted, and intertwined with the global polycrisis, including the dimensions treated by Ressa. I have touched upon it in many ways before, in various previous posts, and most extensively in the introduction to Social Catholicism for the Twenty First Century? Volume 1 Historical Perspectives and Constitutional Democracy in Peril, so I will not try to explain it comprehensively here.

Instead, I will primarily assert that I think Ressa’s story illustrates the profound disconnect between some of the most influential contemporary American Catholics and the reality of the challenges we face and how that relates to the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. The primary Catholics I have in mind are the broad category associated with the label of postliberal, who have been generally claiming for years that liberal democracy is inherently flawed because of its intrinsic opposition to Catholic truth, and has already failed. Following from this belief, they have generally thought the collaboration between Catholicism and the postwar liberal order was misguided, so they have railed against liberalism and discouraged Catholics from participating in society according to the “integral and solidary humanism” of Catholic social Doctrine. What one rarely hears from this quarter, is a coherent account of the threat posed by the illiberal right, which is embodied in this emerging alliance of tech companies, techno-warriors, grifters, nihilists, oligarchs, and authoritarians.

Now that the future of constitutional democracy is in doubt both at home and abroad and we see a new Orwellian right-wing autocracy emerging in alliance with a kind of Christian nationalism, prominent Catholic postliberals and neo-integralists are suggesting that we can welcome and collaborate in building this new order, quite to the contrary to the messages from the Vatican, which reflect our authentic social tradition. In future posts, therefore, I will continue to explore this situation with particular attention to the Catholic postliberal right.

Readers may also appreciate Ressa’s speech upon reception of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. In it, she alerts us to the situation of the many journalists and civil rights lawyers who are being murdered for their efforts to alert us to the information warfare that advances the plague of autocracy that is spreading across the globe. Amidst the life and death drama she lives out, Ressa’s courage, zeal for the truth, and determination to live out the golden rule are in inspiration.