Faithful Citizenship

Director of the Office of Ministries and Social Concerns

What does it mean to be a Catholic and a faithful citizen?  As we ponder that question, the first thing to remember is that the Church is not a political institution.  She has no special wisdom about the tax code, economic stimulus packages, farm subsidies, the nation’s highways or defense spending.

On the other hand, politics is hugely involved in safeguarding fundamental human rights and determining corresponding responsibilities, and here there is a radical and inevitable intersection with the Church’s moral teachings.  An awareness of these basic rights and responsibilities is written in our hearts, in our nature, by God.  And so we call this awareness the natural law.  It is our inner compass that tries to point us toward good and away from evil.  It is the reason that in every society people “just know” that certain things like lying, stealing, cheating and murder are wrong.  Without that natural awareness we would be lost.  The Church recognizes that, and part of her mission is to keep that awareness sharp and focused, because we have an amazing capacity for developing blind spots when selfish desires motivate us to rationalize evil choices. 

The natural law provides the foundation for our most important civil laws.  The result is that our political system is constantly involved in “legislating morality.”  For example, we have criminal laws against domestic abuse not because we find it merely subjectively distasteful or annoying, but because we find it objectively evil, immoral, and deserving of deterrence and punishment.

When the Church talks to us about our responsibility as citizens, she is addressing the realm of the natural law, since that pertains to everybody, to the common good.  The obligation of Catholics to go to Sunday Mass is not part of the natural law, so the Church is not interested in getting laws passed that would make everybody go to Sunday Mass.  But core principles like the right to life, freedom of religion, and marriage between one man and one woman—these are at the very heart of the natural law and thus essential to the common good.

So faithful citizenship for Catholics can be boiled down to what we might call moral common sense.  Make sure your actions and your votes defend and promote the core principles of the natural law, and then try to use a sense of charity, fairness and sound judgment on the whole host of other things that can be argued in various ways—like tax reform, immigration reform, public education and welfare.  On matters like these there are many points of view worthy of careful consideration.

But when it comes to matters like abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, stem cell research that destroys embryos, and same-sex marriage, there is really nothing debatable.  These are seriously wrong and strike at the heart of the natural law and the common good.  We refer to them as intrinsically evil, meaning that nothing can ever justify them.  That is not the case even with war or capital punishment, for example.  Both of these have been accepted by the Church as legitimate where there was no other way to defend the innocent from unjust aggressors.  Of course, anybody who takes joy in war or capital punishment is morally sick, but the fact remains that these means of defense have sometimes been deemed acceptable after all other reasonable options have been exhausted.  How many more Jews would have been slaughtered if we had not chosen to fight Hitler?

Faithful citizenship for a Catholic, then, means first of all becoming broadly informed about candidates and legislation, but zeroing in especially on how they relate to the core principles of human rights and the natural law.  For example, would a faithful Catholic vote for someone who was wonderful on a whole host of issues but thought people should have the right to own slaves?  But many people fail to see that abortion is a far greater evil than slavery, with more than 45 million lives cruelly cut short in just the United States since 1973.

Of course, there may be times when candidates are good on some core principles and bad on others, or when all the candidates hold positions in some degree of violation of core principles.  In that case, we are justified in turning to the person we think would bring the most progress or do the least damage.

One day perhaps we will see a new light flooding our political landscape and find a world in which the great gifts of life and love and family are universally cherished, defended and promoted.  What a welcome day that will be!  In the meantime, our responsibility to work toward that goal as faithful citizens is serious indeed.

Christopher Ruff, Director of the Office of Ministries and Social Concerns, is available for more extensive parish or deanery presentations on Faithful Citizenship.  Contact him at 608-791-2667 or cruff@dioceseoflacrosse.com.