Pelosi, Church & State
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, June 01, 2010 4:04 PM
Via CNS, here’s our Speaker of the House on the influence of her faith on her politics.
Pro-lifers will be having apoplexy about now, but let that pass. I find her comments interesting for a different reason.
Namely: whatever judgments we may make about how accurately she assesses the “values” of The Word, Speaker Pelosi seems to consider it her duty to aim to embody her personal religious beliefs in the law.
we have to give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the values of the Word. The Word.
How different that is from the Holy Father’s understanding of what Christians are called to do in public life: namely, give witness.
Certainly we hope to persuade our fellow citizens of the fitness of our views, but it is not the Church’s aim to impose her beliefs on anyone.
For the five years of his papacy Benedict XVI has been laboring to help Christians and unbelievers alike recover a human and free politics in which the model is not tyranny of the majority, but genuine dialogue in which many different parties search for justice and for solutions to problems in common.
This requires religious freedom and that religious believers be respected as partners in the dialogue. Additionally, even unbelievers should be able to see that holding ourselves to standards outside ourselves helps human reason to remain free—free of the passions and selfish interests which can corrupt it.
But the Pope has no wish for the Church to impose its views on others—he insists only on the right to propose, and on the Catholic duty to witness.
He has said this explicitly most recently in Fatima in speeches to bishops and to “the world of culture.” We can see it in all three encyclicals, especially God is Love, in which he teaches:
Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, in other words, the distinction between Church and State, or, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, the autonomy of the temporal sphere. The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions.
and later:
The State must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: what is justice? The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests.
Here politics and faith meet. Faith by its specific nature is an encounter with the living God—an encounter opening up new horizons extending beyond the sphere of reason. But it is also a purifying force for reason itself. From God’s standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly. This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place: it has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.
Ask your grandparents if they thought to see the day when the Pope of Rome is more liberal and democratic than the Liberal Democratic Speaker of the House of the U.S. Congress!
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
