Loving God is like loving a spouse. But that obedience is limited by what belongs to God. The Church in the United States has done a poor job of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years. When people ask me about the book, the questions usually fall into three categories. For Catholics, politics – the pursuit of justice and the common good in the public square – is part of the history of salvation. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. Loving God is like loving a spouse. He tells them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s.” What our Lord is reminding us is that, as citizens, we have an obligation to render to the state whatever material and personal services are required for the common good of society. Developed by Fiat Insight. Here’s the third point. And serving other people by working for justice, charity and truth in our nation’s political life is one of the very important ways we do that. So what does the book say? The details of our political life change from nation to nation. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. . And what that means is this: From the moment Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” the most important political statement anyone can make is “Jesus Christ is Lord.”. . The New Testament is eternally young. Canada and the United States have a long and close friendship as neighbors. In fact, we have the duty to change bad laws and resist grave evil in our public life, both by our words and our non-violent actions. But it does tell us that numbers can be used to prove just about anything. A […] And that brings us to the 2008 election and its aftermath. We’ll be judged on whether we proved it by our actions when we said “I am a Catholic, and Jesus Christ is Lord.”. So talking about God and Caesar, even if it wakes up just one Christian mind in an audience, is always worth the effort. The “separation of Church and state” does not mean – and it can never mean – separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. So having said all this, what does a book like Render Unto Caesar mean, in practice, for each of us as individual Catholics? Obviously I’ll be speaking tonight as an American, a Catholic and a bishop – though not necessarily in that order. This was originally offered as a reflection upon the readings for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, liturgical cycle A (Isaiah 45:1, 4-6), Psalm 96, I Thessalonians 1:1-5; Matthew 22:15-21). Public life is a demanding vocation, but it’s not voodoo or advanced physics. Not much of what I say tonight will be new. One of the words we heard endlessly in the last U.S. election was “hope.” I think “hope” is the only word in the English language more badly misused than “love.” It’s our go-to anxiety word -- as in, “I sure hope I don’t say anything stupid tonight.” But for Christians, hope is a virtue, not an emotional crutch or a political slogan. Then we need to follow that conscience when we vote. But whatever his strengths, there’s no way to reinvent his record on abortion and related issues with rosy marketing about unity, hope and change. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty – these are Christian virtues. He also had a piercing sense of irony about the comfortable, the self-satisfied and the lukewarm who postured themselves as Catholic -- whether they were laypeople or clergy. Site designed by Hyperdo Media. Copyright 2020 The Catholic Thing. But as I say in the book, one of the lessons we need to learn from the last 50 years is that a “preferred” Catholic political party usually doesn’t exist. Bernanos once wrote that the optimism of the modern world, including its “politics of hope,” is like whistling past a graveyard. . All Rights Reserved. Of course, that can change. If we’re Catholic, then we believe in the sanctity of developing human life. Caesar is not God. Real hope “must be won. Moral reasoning can be hard, and TV is a great painkiller. Because you do not live your faith, your faith has ceased to be a living thing.”. Hope assumes and demands a spine in believers. Bernanos had little use for the learned, the proud or the superficially religious. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won’t stay married for long. The most important fact to remember about our discussion tonight is this: As adults, each of us needs to form a strong and genuinely Catholic conscience. Why? It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But just as God so loved the world that he sent his only son, so the glory and irony of the Christian life is this: The more faithfully we love God, the more truly we serve the world. The only people who ever really change the world are saints. Caesar does have rights. Here’s the second caveat. Nobody can do a survey of the secret places of the human heart. We can’t claim to be “Catholic” and “pro-choice” at the same time without owning the responsibility for where the choice leads – to a dead unborn child. The “separation of Church and state” does not mean – and it can never mean – separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. . I’ve learned from experience, though, that Henry Ford was right when he said that “Two percent of the people think; three percent think they think, and 95 percent would rather die than think.”. The point of Jesus’ saying about “rendering unto Caesar” is that some things should be rendered to Caesar, but not all. We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. St. Thomas Aquinas recognized legal justice, the aim of politics, as the highest of th I found that very strange. The truth is, the American electorate is changing, both ethnically and in age. Virtus, the Latin root of virtue, means strength or courage. This last question will be a good doorway into talking about the U.S. election last year, but let’s start at the beginning first. Likewise if we claim to be “Catholic,” we need to prove it by our behavior. It’s instructive to note that the one lesson many activists on the American cultural left learned from their loss in the 2004 election -- and then applied in 2008 -- was how to use a religious vocabulary while ignoring some of the key beliefs and values that religious people actually hold dear. . And what does the book mean for each of us as individual Catholics? In his essay he imagined “what any decent agnostic of average intelligence might say, if by some impossible chance the [pastor] were to let him stand awhile in the pulpit [on] the day consecrated to St. Théresè of Lisieux.”, “Dear brothers,” says the agnostic from the pulpit, “many unbelievers are not as hardened as you imagine . Dishonest language leads to dishonest debate and bad laws. Real hope is unsentimental. But isn’t that exactly what it should be? Some things really do change when a person reaches the White House. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square – peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. But Ford was right in one unintended way: American consumer culture is a very powerful narcotic. And a real Catholic presence in American life will continue to weaken and disappear. Washington is on our dollar bill, and we must render it unto Washington, D.C. President Obama is a man of intelligence and some remarkable gifts. Ford had a pretty dark view of humanity, which I don’t share. Here’s the third thing to remember. So his full answer is, ‘Well, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Mainstream Bible teaching never gets out of the literal interpretation of events where as if we were to look behind the allegory of render unto Caesar we would find its mystical significance. But he also discovered how hard it can be to raise money, run a campaign and stay true to your Catholic convictions, all at the same time. Some of what I say may not be useful to a Canadian audience, especially those who aren’t Catholic. Here’s the fourth point. That’s a kind of bullying. The political life is inherent to humankind because of our social nature. In Matthew 22, we read that a group of Pharisees confronted Jesus and asked for a yes or no answer on whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, the Roman emperor. [But when] we seek [Christ] now, in this world, it is you we find, and only you . It pertains to the independent sovereignty of the Catholic Church, enjoyed analogously by Christian churches and other religions, and explained by Leo XIII: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things. Another reason for writing the book is that when I looked around for a single source that explains the Catholic political vocation in a simple way, it just didn’t exist. What we do with it shapes who we really are. by ORBC Family | Jul 5, 2019 | Faith, What We Believe. So if I have any partisan roots, they’re in the Democratic Party. As Christians, we can’t claim to love God and then ignore the needs of our neighbors.