Yesterday I returned to my car, a Suburu Impreza, to find two gouged troughs — each about a foot long and denting in about three inches deep — on the hood. They are the tell-tale marks of the undercarriage of the sport utility vehicle or "SUV" which was previously parked in front of me and which had obviously backed up too far, a good distance too far. So much for the vaunted visibility that SUV's offer their drivers.

The depth of the gouges indicates that it would have been very difficult for the driver not to know of the damage. No note was left. I confess that I treated the empty seats in my car to a string of expletives while I was driving home. It was the second accident causing damage to the car by an SUV in under a month. The first was when one spun out in front of a line of cars. So much for the marketed perception of the added control of an SUV. Insurance companies determined that due to the recent snowfall, no one was at fault.

Because of the inconsiderate nature of the driver in the first case, I have no personal redress. Otherwise, I could have simply sought an estimate and had work done for which the driver paid, either personally or through insurance. Because of the self-interest of the insurance companies — "no-fault" means that they do not have to pay out — I have no legal redress in the second case.

However, it might be worth looking at SUV's from a moral perspective and the Catholic social tradition or "CST" offers such a standpoint. We can look at it as "CST vs. SUV." I am sure that some readers might well be thinking, "Whitmore, lighten up. It's just a car. CST doesn't apply to everything, just the big issues." But I encourage even the skeptics to stay with my argument that the matter of SUVs is a big issue both in its own terms and for what they reflect about who we are. Afterwards, you can make your own determination.

The first thing to say is that the matter of SUV's is a specific issue that requires the prudential application of the general principles of Catholic teaching. The teaching is clear that persons of good will can come to different judgments. The American bishops, for instance, write, that "when making applications of these principles" they are "making prudential judgments which can change or be interpreted differently by people of good will." They simply ask that their arguments "be given serious attention and consideration."

The first set of relevant principles are those of human dignity, solidarity and the common good. We are to act with solidarity towards the common good because of the inherent dignity of all persons. John Paul II writes that solidarity is "a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good." We should commit ourselves to the common good, "that is to say, the good of all and to each individual, because we are all really responsible for all."

SUV's fail the test of human dignity, solidarity and the common good on three counts. First, they use more gas and release more poisonous emissions than cars in general do. This might be acceptable if there was a specific need for SUV's, but as we will see, in the vast majority of cases, there is not.

The second way in which SUV's fail these principles is in the fact that they are more dangerous to other vehicles and their passengers than cars generally. This is both because of the size of SUV's and, especially, their height. Such height means, for instance, that the lights from oncoming SUV's go directly into the eyes of the driver of a standard car. This is part of the intimidation factor that SUV's are designed to bring, but it also can blind the other driver and cause an accident. The height of SUV's also means that in collisions the full weight of the SUV strikes above the protection of the car. Again, the rear bumper of the SUV went above the hood of my car. The SUV driver may walk away, but the passengers in the other car may be decapitated. This is why insurance companies have been investigating raising rates on SUV's.

The SUV driver may not walk away, however, and this is the third conflict with the common good. The vehicle may even be more susceptible to one-car accidents because of its tendency to roll over. SUV owners and drivers should read Charles Wheelan's Jan. 10 editorial in the New York Times, "Lives Changed in a Split Second: The Terror of an SUV rollover." Wheelan normally writes for The Economist, so he can hardly be charged with leftist, anti-freedom, anti-capitalism bias. In this particular column, he writes that his vehicle, "felt a lot less practical as we lay smashed upside down in it on Interstate 80 at 4 a.m ... I learned a lot of things very quickly. Each of our girls screams in a slightly different way and I now know that it is a good thing to hear both screams coming from inside a crushed vehicle — because it means that everyone is alive ... I know that when there is no other way to get a six-month-old out of a crushed vehicle, you will drag her through broken glass ... My three-year-old daughter's hand was smashed and she lost her right thumb."

Wheelan continues, "SUV's as a class are more likely to roll over than other vehicles. Indeed, the problem is inherent in vehicles that ride high on a relatively narrow wheel-base, which is the most attractive feature of SUV's." Wheelan's message to potential and real SUV drivers is this: if you don't care about the good of passengers in other vehicles, at least consider the good of the passengers in your own.

SUV drivers may claim a right or freedom to own one,and in a legal sense this is the case. In Catholic teaching, as John Paul makes clear in Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor or Truth"), the exercise of freedom is not an end in itself, but must be in relation to truth. Wheelan confesses that he bought the SUV because it "projected a different image than a minivan or a station wagon." That image is one of the rugged outdoorsman, as is evident in the many SUV commercials and vehicle names like "Expedition."

However, the vast majority of SUV's are not used for these purposes; the minivan would do even better for the owners. The image sells. The automotive industry's own psychological studies — used for marketing purposes — state that SUV owners are more anxious about their image than other vehicle owners. They are more taken up with what John Paul II decries as "consumer culture" than other drivers. Meanwhile, the automotive industry is thinking, "gotcha."

The irony is that persons who really do those outdoor activities look upon SUV's with a skeptical eye. One of the magazines that actual rock climbers and alpinists read, Climbing, ran a survey about whether it should run tobacco and alcohol ads. The consensus was that it should not, but a further concern surfaced. "The heated debate also revealed that many readers are strongly opposed to any advertising that is not directly related to climbing, with unrealistic SUV ads taking the brunt of the criticism."

If one travels to Red River Gorge, the best place to climb in the Midwest and parks at Miguel's, the place where most of the climbers camp, one finds few SUV's, but rather high mileage pick-ups with cabs converted for sleeping and — the horror of SUV owners — minivans. That's right: real rock climbers drive minivans. There may well be places and times where high carriage on a vehicle is helpful; northern Indiana even in this winter does not count.

It seems that when freedom is related to truth, the only honest SUV is the "Suburban." Saying so doesn't take the dents out of my car, but it is more cogent than the expletives I unleashed on the way home.

Todd David Whitmore is an assistant professor in the theology department. His column appears every other Thursday.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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