St. Peter Canisius Apostolate

• Barack Obama is our next president. As Catholics, we have the moral obligation to support him with our prayers. His position on abortion is evil, but as president he will be making many decisions on many other issues, and he will need God’s help to make those decisions wisely. Furthermore, it is God’s will, as attested to in Sacred Scripture, that we pray for and respect those who have been put in authority over us (1 Timothy 1.2; 1 Peter 2.13; Romans 13.1; HT: Internet Monk). Furthermore, the Church tells us that our sacred duty is to engage in the temporal sphere and work toward building a civilization of love. That being said, we also have the moral obligation to obey God. As St. Thomas More so famously said, “I die the King’s good servant but God’s first.” So our political task is clear. To support President Obama with our prayers first. To work with him, as best we can, when we deem his ideas and courses of actions are correct, and to oppose him when we his decisions and courses of actions are contrary to the natural law.
• I think it’s time for Catholics to become fluent in the natural law. So long as life and family issues are part of the political scene — and I suspect they will be with us for a very long time indeed — we must stop making them religious issues. We mus stop calling them traditional values. You see, the Evangelicals in our country have made every social issue about religion or about traditional values, and that language has become like noisy gongs and clanging of cymbals. The pro-abortion crowd and the pro-same-sex-union crowd won’t listen. And rightly so. Would you listen to someone who makes moral statements based on a religion you don’t hold? No, you would not. The beauty of Catholic Social Thought is that it is build on the natural law. Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, the first great social encyclical, argued for the human right to own private property from the natural law. In order to get those who disagree to listen, we must engage them with arguments that do not appeal to religion. They are tired of that. On one liberal blog I read, someone challenged: “Can anyone argue against same-sex marriage without appealing to religion?” That’s our challenge. As soon as the words “God” and “Bible” come into play, the discussion is over — from their point of view. So we must, as my old moral theology professor used to say, “put our religion on the shelf” when discussing these issues and argue completely from the natural law. To this end, I highly recommend Charles Rice’s 50 Questions on the Natural Law: What It Is & Why We Need It.
• Though I completely reject the doom-and-gloom scenarios I’ve been reading in the comments of some Catholic blogs, this election has compelled me to look very hard at my own life — most especially with a view to how I’ve been spending my time. Maybe it’s just a coincidence; maybe my conscience has finally caught up with me. After all, I have been wasting a lot of time. But there’s something else, and I can’t really pinpoint it. The best I can say is that I need a kind of jubilant sobriety. I feel that I can no longer take delight in trivial things: sitcoms, popular novels, sports. Not that these things are bad or sinful. But time is precious; the hour I wasted reading an inconsequential novel is an hour I can’t get back. I could have been praying, reading a work of theology, playing with my kids, exercising, rewriting the book on the Trinity that’s been sitting in my drawer for three years. Some of it is work, some of it is play, but all of those choices are better than reading trash fiction. So though I reject the beginning of the end of America has arrived because of this election, I am also aware that this election has somehow affected me.
• Just as the natural law is the key to the social debates that are and will continue to rage in this country, the key to the health of the Church is holiness of life. And maybe this has something to do with my previous “random thought.” If the history of the Church teaches us anything, it should teach us that words are of little consequence . . . especially when compared to the power of a holy life. More people were converted by the life of St. Francis of Assisi than by reading the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. But I’m not so dim as to say that intellectual work is pointless, or that nobody has ever been converted by reading St. Thomas. Yet, the fact is that the intellectual can relate only to a fellow intellectual, but every life can relate to a holy life. Perhaps this conviction has made me ultra-critical of how I spend my time. Perhaps it is my own conscience convicting me. Perhaps it was the election. Perhaps it was all of them.
• Back to the jubilant sobriety, with a quick thought on the word “jubilant.” I think it was St. Teresa of Avila who said there is no such thing as a sour-faced saint. A joyless life is not a holy life, simple as that. It does us no good — it does our neighbor no good — to live without joy. Therefore, any kind of mortification one imposes upon oneself, any kind of penance, of self-denial, or discipline — if it isn’t done with joy, then, at the least, it is not inspired by God, and at the worst, it is done for the sake of pride and self-love.

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