Bulletin column from July 4, 2021

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish: Praised be Jesus Christ!

This Sunday our celebration of the customary Ordinary Time liturgical observance also coincides with July 4th meaning that for many of us the birthday of our Nation is very much on our minds and hearts this weekend. It is an opportune moment to offer a couple of points of commentary about political, national, and Catholic topics.

It can be noted that our current American climate is one of strong rhetoric and bitter divisions. For a few decades in our recent political history, even with our evident disagreements, at least there existed an atmosphere of basic civility and generic consensus about the need to maintain a political center that allowed governing to occur. All of that seems to be over with these days. The heated nature of our politics is both a reflection of, and is reflected back to, an increasingly heated attitude of discontentment in the American population at large. Tempers are running high everywhere. Whenever that happens, either on a personal or a communal level, it is a reflection of an attitude of despair, or helplessness, or disenfranchisement over the possibility of a better future.

To be a Catholic Christian in America has always been a situation of somewhat mixed allegiances, and today is no different. The Christian worldview offers some helpful corrective perspectives to so many of the dominant currents in American life, especially our present-day atmosphere of tension, division, and despair.

It is crucial to remember that for all of the goodness of America and the ways God has blessed us here, America is not a divine State. “America” as a concept and as a nation is not identical with the Kingdom of God, and it is not a permanent entity. America will pass away like every other nation, empire, or people passes away. We must always work hard to be good citizens and make this nation a great place to be, but we must always recognize as well its limitations. Doing so tones-down the rhetoric of all that is at stake in our national debates about our future.
Similarly, politics itself is not divine and is not the answer to all of our problems. However, in our increasingly secular age, we usually think that it is. Part of why our politics have grown so bitter is because we have placed too much weight and hope in its ability to lead us to a future free of problem or worry. Politics has become a religion all on its own, and we believe that if we just manipulate processes, policies, and electorates enough then we will arrive at the solutions to all that vexes us. But, politics is merely a mechanism of human organization, and it absorbs like a sponge the values and sentiments that are placed upon it. By itself it is not an ethical system, or a value system, or a source of salvation. It is not a source of hope.

When a population is more fully infused with a Christian ethos, it more easily grasps what politics can and can’t accomplish, knowing that only grace, faith, and revelation can truly fix anything wrong with our world. It takes the political realm somewhat less seriously, entrusting its processes to God’s greater plan and design. More concretely, a Christian understands that this will always be a fallen world, and that we should not labor under the illusion of arriving at a utopia in this life in which all problems are cured. Political fighting these days is in many respects fueled by the mistaken idea that with politics everything is on the line. That is an illusion. Only in the realm of faith, grace, divine revelation and conversion is everything on the line. And, in that realm, we believe in a merciful and just God whose wisdom and rulings are flawless. Nothing of the same can be said of a bureaucratic state that has only at best a skewed concept and treatment of the human person as its guidepost.

America needs Christianity to remind it, to remind all of us, of its limitations. With a healthy sense of its limits, it can be truly a great nation. Because it will be a nation under God, who is the source of all blessings and of all greatness.