Church And State
The recent Republican Primary Debate was a sobering reminder that the next race for control of the White House has begun. With this in mind, we would do well to re-examine the relationship between politics and religion, the better to understand how each is essential in our lives, albeit in entirely different ways.
The political world is what governs the State. In our case here, the United States of America is a nation unlike most others in the Western World in that it was not originally Catholic. The founding fathers of this country devised a system that avoided any kind of “established” religion, whether it be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or whatever. Most of them had a deep hatred for organized religion, and they wanted to create a secular state that recognized only the existence of some vague being whom they called “God.” But the god they had in mind bore little resemblance to the God who revealed himself to the world through the prophets of the Old Testament and the incarnate Son of God in the New.
In this country Church and State are firmly separated, and the State makes sure that no religion has any advantage over another and that all are equally respected or despised according to the “rights of man.” The laws of the State are not determined by the Ten Commandments any more than by the Catholic Book of Canon Law or the Jewish Talmud. Instead, the State is solely responsible for creating laws, presumably according to the will of the people, or more specifically to the will of the majority of the people. If morality plays any part in the creation of laws, what’s right or wrong is determined solely by the will of the majority. It should come as no surprise therefore, that the Democratic Party is so hell-bent on dumbing down the population to the point where this majority will be brainwashed to accept even the most absurd and immoral of ideas. The majority is now the determining factor in all things, be it the murder of infants in the womb, the number of genders and the self-determination as to which we belong to, unnatural marriages and so on.
In short, while the State has made sure that Church and State remain absolutely separate and will not allow any Church to interfere with what’s legal or illegal, they themselves have no problem whatever with trampling over the rights of the Church to govern what’s morally right or wrong. As Catholics we should abhor this contradiction where Church has no control over the secular laws of the land (reasonable), but where State may have full control over the moral laws which are the domain of Church.
It’s a system that may have worked fairly well since the days of the founding fathers, when the Common Sense of the people and their representatives in Congress prevailed and upheld the Natural Law. Unfortunately, the madness that has taken over our nation in these modern times is the logical conclusion of an essentially flawed system. The Devil has finally figured out how to use the Constitution against God and his Church. We will soon see where this new approach takes us.