North of the Shire

Having given a general overview of where we are as Catholics in relation to the political circumstance of the day, let us make a few notes about our life here on earth as Catholics and how it affects our membership in the Kingdom of God.

We know that as individuals we have an obligation to help the poor. To paraphrase Pope Leo, after our own needs are met, everything we have belongs to the poor. He stated that in very specific language which we won’t go into here, but sufficient to say that we as Catholics have a clear and unequivocal obligation to the poor that is bound up with our ultimate membership in the Kingdom and to neglect it is to neglect that membership.

Clearly, we are also bound to the prescriptions of the Natural Law, that very minimum that all men recognize as moral right and wrong, even if they have no clue as to where that interior understanding came from. It came from the Garden of Eden, actually, specifically from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The cost for that knowledge was very high, as we have pointed out in the first part.

Next, we know that the moral prescriptions of the Decalogue are the framework above and beyond the Natural Law from which the entire moral teaching of Jesus Christ expands and leads us to the understanding of what it is to be perfect before God. As Catholics we are responsible to live according to the Ten Commandments as Christ has shown us must come from the heart. Clearly, it would always be beneficial to live in a society governed in such a way as to allow and even promote our moral way of living.

Ultimately, as we mentioned earlier, we owe our allegiance to the Kingdom of God first and then to any temporal regime, nation or territory in which are born or find ourselves. It is better to obey God rather than man. We have always understood this to mean that when there is a conflict between God’s law and man’s law we must obey God first regardless of the temporal consequences because to do otherwise may well have eternal consequences.

Having said that, we believe that legitimate government is ordained by God and must be obeyed. We are not anarchists, subversives or revolutionaries in that political sense. It must be remembered here that when we speak of obeying God rather than man we must put an even finer point on it. Here we are speaking of man’s laws that would instruct us to sin against God, to sin against brother or sister, or to prohibit us from passing on the faith to our children or anyone who might ask, and/or prohibit us from practicing our faith, including our liturgical worship of God. If we experience physical or material hardship at the hand of our government we are not called to revolt. If we experience such things expressly because we believe in Jesus Christ, we are called to rejoice.

There have been those in the recent past who mistrusted Catholics and strongly opposed Catholics running for political office in America believing that said Catholics would hold their first allegiance to a Pope in Rome. Men like John F. Kennedy went out of their way to assure people that they were loyal patriotic Americans. In fact, in my opinion, they went too far in that direction and successive generations of Catholic politicians have used this radical view of separation of Church and state as the wedge to abandon their conscience and Church moral teaching in order to get elected.

But let us now steer our way back to the point of this discussion, the ideal form of government or the best blend thereof.

FIRST THINGS PART THREE