WE HAVE BECOME CAESAR

november 22, 2008

This coming Sunday, the Church brings her year of worship to a triumphant close with the solemn celebration of Christ the King. The day provides the Church a moment to look back at the day Christ died two thousand years ago and reverse the chant of the crowd, “We have no king but Caesar”. As we proclaim Jesus Christ our King, we look forward to his second coming in glory at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, and to establish his reign forever.  Sunday’s feast also challenges us to surrender our minds, hearts, and wills to the supreme authority of his law.

The first Psalm reminds us, that those who follow his law are “like a tree planted near streams of water… Its leaves never wither; whatever they do prospers” (v.3). The wicked, however, “will not survive judgment” (v.5) The Psalm closes by stating: “The Lord watches over the way of the just, but the way of the wicked leads to ruin” (v.6).

The Lord’s law is the true foundation of all legitimate, properly ordered codes of humanly crafted laws, and the standard against which their rightness and goodness are to be measured. No system of laws or public policies can ever be justifiable simply on the grounds that they are the will of the powerful and advantaged, or of a raw majority, or of those who have gained offices of public service.
Our nation’s founders knew this. Of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 52 were orthodox, deeply committed Christians. The other three all believed in the Bible as word of the one true God. They also believed in his providence, and in our dependence on him. Our first president, George Washington wrote that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”  

The originality of our nation lies in our conviction that government should be of, by, and for the people, that is, we believe that we should govern ourselves, and that when we elect persons to public office, we are empowering them to be the servants of our true and common good.  We might say that we ourselves have become Caesar! 

Precisely because of this, we must ask ourselves as a nation whether we will continue to submit to the law of the Lord and rely on his providential care, or blind ourselves to our need of his law to guide us, and say “We have no king but Caesar!”, meaning “We will be gods unto ourselves, and answer to no higher Lord or law!”

Alexis De Tocqueville, the French political sociologist who carefully studied our American experiment in ordered liberty in the early part of the 19th century, asked how a self-governing society such as ours could escape from destroying itself “if it is not subject to God”. 

De Tocqueville’s question is in the forefront of my own mind, having just returned from an annual meeting with my fellow bishops, during which we engaged in an impassioned discussion on how we as bishops and citizens might best foster a culture of life, and protect the first and foremost of all human rights, the right to life. How could such a right, enshrined in our nation’s founding documents as unalienable, now be so easily denied all legal protection in the case of the most innocent and vulnerable among us, namely, infants in their mothers’ wombs?

Nothing can justify an act that is evil in itself, and the direct taking of innocent human life through abortion is an intrinsic evil. So also, therefore, is any form of cooperation with the act. It is the sacred duty of the citizenry to demand of its public servants the protection of law for the lives of all its members, and it is the sacred duty of all those appointed or elected to public office to protect human life from conception until natural death.

Now that we have cast our ballots and the elections are over, our responsibilities as citizens have by no means ended. We must pray for those in public office, and lend them our full support and cooperation in working to meet the host of weighty social challenges that circumstances have placed before us, including the state of the economy, immigration policy reform, extending affordable healthcare to all citizens, improving the quality of education, eradicating poverty, ensuring equal opportunity, finding the best paths to economic recovery, ending our protracted military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fostering better international relations.

These challenges are pressing, to be sure, and call for immediate, practical action. In all these matters, we can hope to improve our situation incrementally. None of them, however, is a foundational issue. In contrast, the right to life, the rights of the family, and the rights of conscience are foundational to the strength and character of our nation. The foremost of these is the right to life.  There is no way of incrementally improving the life of an infant, once its life is taken by abortion, and that is why abortion is the issue of paramount moral gravity and consequence of our time. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “A nation that kills its children has no future.”
If the past is prelude to the future, there is reason to fear that our nation’s foundational strengths will come under sustained legislative and judicial assault in the days to come. Most prominent among these, at the moment, is the anticipated resurrection of the deceitfully called Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA ), a piece of legislation co-sponsored in the last session of Congress by then Illinois senator Barack Obama which, if enacted under his presidency, would first, strike down all existing state laws that ban partial-birth abortion, require parental notification of an abortion involving a minor, and all laws requiring medical attention for an infant who survives a failed abortion. Second, FOCA would require taxpayer funding for abortions, against the conscience of millions of Americans, and third, it would force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions, thus denying doctors, nurses, and medical staffs their right of conscience to forego participation or cooperation in these procedures. The pressure to legalize same-sex marriage and to fund embryonic stem cell research may be expected to increase, as well.

The Catholic Church will not acquiesce to any such proposals that any new FOCA-type legislation might contain. While I and my fellow bishops celebrate the historic significance of the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, and while we pledge our prayer for him and our cooperation with his efforts to address the needs of our society, let there be no mistake. We will not countenance acts which are evil in themselves, or acquiesce in the face of, any legislative, judicial, or administrative acts that tear down the protection of the sanctity of human life and the family, or the rights of conscience.

At this historic juncture of our nation’s history, it is time to recall that, although we have become Caesar, Caesar is not our only king. Caesar must answer to God.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 11-Jan-2010 8:22 sitemap