The Church and Politics

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - February 24, 2006

One of the least commented upon sections of Pope Benedict's first encyclical on God's love deals with the Church and politics. In an era in which the Church in various countries is getting accused of tampering in the political order, however, this section may prove over time to be among the most valuable. But one thing is beyond debate: in the hundred year history of the Church's formal social teaching — from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum 1891 to John Paul II's Centesimus Annus a century later — Benedict's exposition of the relationship between Church and State is undoubtedly the clearest and most concise.

Those who have not yet read Deus Caritas Est might wonder how a political treatise fits into an encyclical on the love of God for us and our love for God and others. The context was Benedict's surgical enucleation of the defects of Marxism. Marx had criticized the practice of Christian charity for retarding the pursuit of justice for the poor by soothing the consciences of the rich and preserving the social status quo. The real way to help the poor, he and his followers taught, was to eliminate charity and make the poor so miserable that they would have no alternative other than to rise up in revolution and overturn the social order. This, the pontiff declares, was "an inhuman philosophy" that sacrificed people today to the "moloch" of a putative better tomorrow. The real way to make the world more human, Benedict retorts, is not "by refusing to act humanely here and now [but] by personally doing good now." Rather than decelerating the pursuit of justice, charity expedites it.

While, happily, there are few card-carrying Marxists today, there are still many who think that the Church's charitable endeavors get in the way of real social improvement. The inexorable progress of the modern social welfare state would triumph, they assert, if the Church were out of the picture. At best, the Church's activities are superfluous and inefficient; at worst, the Church, and her teachings, are regressive and harmful. These are the critics to whom Benedict responds with his tractate the Church and the state, on charity and justice.

The holy father says that the pursuit of justice is the "fundamental norm of the State," and the "aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics." This is a very high and positive view of politics and government. Politics must be more than "a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life" or the means to allow political victors to divide public spoils It must seek to "guarantee to each person, according to the principle of subsidiarity, his share of the community's goods."

Benedict says that it is not the Church's responsibility to wage a "political battle to bring about the most just society possible." Yet, he adds, "at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice." As an institution, the Church's involvement in the pursuit of justice is indirect: it seeks to give ethical guidance about the authentic requirements of justice and "reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper." The institutional Church's duty is to purify and liberate human reason from the ethical blind spots that can arise from "the dazzling effects of power and special interest," and to help "reason become ever more fully itself."

While the Church as an institution has merely an indirect role in bringing about a just ordering of society, the lay faithful, as citizens of the State, have a direct obligation. Benedict states that the mission of the lay faithful is to strive to configure social life correctly according to the principles of justice. This ardent lay political participation is an act of "social charity," the pope says; it is a genuine expression of the love of neighbor. For Catholic lay citizens, therefore, not to get involved in the political pursuit to bring about the most just society possible would be a lack of love.

The clarity of this Benedictine distinction between the indirect involvement of the institutional church and the direct participation of Catholic lay faithful in achieving a just social order could not be more timely. For far too long in our commonwealth — perhaps due to the cancer of a clericalism abetted both by clergy and laity — the visible faces of the institutional church, bishops and priests, have been too directly involved in the political nitty-gritty, and the lay faithful have not been involved enough. That's changing, as more lay faithful, in groups like Catholic Citizenship, are taking the political lead on issues of social justice and more clergy are seeing that their principle duty, and largest impact, is found in the courageous formation of all citizens in the truth of the dignity of the human person.

Benedict's encyclical provides the "spiritual energy" to continue in this needed direction, which, God-willing, will yield great fruit.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.