Since I only get one newspaper since last Lent, I also catch news on television and check in with the Internet.  That last is a font of information: I recently read online about an Evangelical pastor of a Minnesota mega-church who lost 1000 people because he could no longer put up with the unholy union of his congregation and right wing politics.  He still has 4000 members left but some of the most committed have departed.

 

I can understand the Rev. Gregory Boyd’s frustration.  A pivotal moment in his evolution was attending a 4^th of July celebration in another mega-church.  On the church’s screen fighter jets mingled with crosses and a huge American flag emerged center stage.  When one adds this event to requests to have politicians speak from his pulpit and the American flag installed in his sanctuary because we are at war, he began to publicly proclaim a dissociation of his church from the right wing in our nation’s culture wars.

 

Boyd said, regarding Christianity, “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world.  When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.’  We Catholics have had this experience in our history, haven’t we?  Franco’s Spain comes to mind as well as the former close union of church and state in Ireland to say nothing of France, ‘the eldest daughter of the Church.’  The cozy relationship of royalty and clergy meant that priests and nuns were marched to the guillotine as well as the Louis and Marie Antoinette in the Revolution.

 

So what are Catholics and other Christians supposed to do with politics?  If you believe the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, we are obliged to take an active role in the ways of local, state and national government.  We vote, support candidates who agree with our moral and political values—and when it comes to the local parish, we follow the narrow way.  We don’t allow politicians to campaign from the ambo from either or any party [I have always wondered why left-wing candidates do so with impunity in inner city churches.] We don’t put out voters’ guide with the Catholic position on issues and candidates; we do provide written and spoken teaching to inform consciences. When we get in political discussions over coffee and doughnuts after Mass, we realize that because our ideas are ‘correct’ we are not dispensed from charity and civility…!

 

As all of you who belong to this parish know, not a Sunday goes by that we do not pray during the Prayer of the Faithful for a deeper reverence for human life at each stage.  On occasion I have preached on abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, and the destruction of human embryos for their stem cells [surprise, surprise: as a Catholic priest I am, of course, against all four.  This reminds me of the laconic President Coolidge who came home from church and was asked by his wife what the minister had preached about.  ‘Sin,’ he replied.  What did he say, she asked.  ‘He was against it’ came the reply.]  Having said that, you can appreciate the difficulty of explaining Catholic moral theology during a regular weekend homily: it is hard to explicate important distinctions in the short time allowed.

 

Can I tell you one of my biggest worries for our society?  It seems to me that many of us have stopped thinking, that we fail to employ logic, study and clarity in our expression.  This means we are sitting ducks for spinning, for being emotionally manipulated into mindsets that are not only unchristian, but [for lack of a better word] dumb. 

 

I wish the world were as a clear as an old cowboy movie: the good guys in white hats, the bad in black.  Alas, I am not that clear so why should I expect the interaction of politics and religion to be so precise?  So we do our best…to make this a better world and knowing ‘we have here no lasting city.’