Seek First the Kingdom: Challenging the Culture by Living Our Faith by Wuerl Cardinal Donald

Author:Wuerl, Cardinal Donald [Wuerl, Cardinal Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2011-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

The voice of the churches was strong at the time of America’s founding, and it remained so for centuries afterward. Religious morality was the engine of reform, whenever reform was needed. The political parties depended upon it. Secular government simply did not have the means to resolve disputes about the personhood of slaves, about equality before the law, and about civil rights. Such matters are utterly dependent on rights that are God-given — or there’s no such thing as rights at all.

Once upon a time, our nation took this role for granted. Candidates for office, civil servants, legislators, and bureaucrats all assumed that religion should occupy this place — that it should be the conscience of society.

Today, however, that’s not the case, or at least it’s not common in certain sectors of media, academia, and government. Where religious values once held sway, many people today look for a secular frame of reference. I welcome these efforts insofar as they might help us better to articulate the natural moral law. Yet many of these efforts are striving for something more — or maybe less — than that worthy goal. Rather than seeking truth and justice in a way that’s respectful of religion, today’s secularist seeks to bleach religion out of public life. Their goal is to start over — this time without God.

The Church continues to be the one place where such issues can be discussed in a moral framework. We’ve moved on, however, from the personhood of slaves, and now we must defend the personhood of all humans from conception through gestation and all the way to natural death. The Church remains the conscience of the country as we confront a new range of technological possibilities: abortion, in vitro fertilization, embryonic stem-cell research, and physician-assisted suicide. The Church continues to be the place where we consider not just special interests, but the common good; not just opinion polls, but divine law; not just possibility, but morality.

Secular governments simply cannot resolve these profound disputes about right and wrong. The natural law is discernible by all, but only with difficulty, as all human beings are impaired by original sin. Divine law, as we find it in revelation, does not contradict natural law, but clarifies its demands so that they are easier to fulfill, given the weakness of human nature. When people hear the divine law, they often recognize that it accords with the law they find in their conscience. It has the ring of authenticity, the ring of truth.

As Catholics, we look to the Church for guidance that can come only from God. We believe that the teaching of the Church represents for us an opening to the wisdom of God. Our choices in the political arena must be conscientious. Christ promised us he would not leave us orphans. He established his Church as his new body so that his presence would continue with us. He also sent the gift of the Spirit, who would guide us and remind us of all he taught.

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