How will you vote? Will it be in a way that corresponds to your faith commitment to the Lord whom we will address in the liturgy as Christ the King in a few weeks? “King” is a political title that we loyally apply to the man who preached about the kingdom of God more than about any other topic in the Gospels. And he spoke about this kingdom knowing that it fiercely antagonized the political potentates who had so much to say at his sham trial about his apparent treason. For them, Rome was the only allowable kingdom. The Romans wanted to insult the rebellious Jews by posting in three languages over his head, so there could be no mistake, what Rome does to pretenders.
Acknowledging Jesus as vitally interested in something so secular alerts us to how different the Lord’s agenda is from our ideas of religion. We generally see our religious duties as church-centered, pious, personal and private. This is not all wrong. Our First Amendment gives us something billions of people even today do not enjoy: religious freedom. Our Bill of Rights guarantees us the right to worship as we see fit, or not worship at all. However one down-side is that believers tend to make their faith intensely private so as not to offend others. This hurts the community nature of our belief, reducing it to something merely individualistic, and sometimes idiosyncratic. Do you want to believe that the world will end next month on 12-21-12, as do some Mayans? You may. How about a rigidly fundamentalist reading of early Genesis, rendering Adam and Eve as historically real as Jesus? Go ahead.
But the Lord’s agenda elevated community responsibility among his disciples. While they were to pray — something he taught them to do — they were to feed the hungry in the community, house the homeless, visit the prisoners, bind up wounds, clothe the poor, get into social action to better the lives of the marginalized and not step over the mugging victim as did the priest in the Lord’s parable of the Good Samaritan Care for other people can no more be divorced from Christianity than can belief in the Trinity.
I cannot urge you to vote for my candidates or platforms. If I submitted a column trying to do that, it would never appear in print because the editor, who may or may not like my choices, knows that this tax-exempt church newspaper would be in violation of federal tax law. While sermons and papers like this may — and should — discuss the morality of platforms and policies, they risk losing their exemption if they venture into partisan preferences. Parties and their candidates may not be endorsed. I agree with this law. If we Catholics enjoy being excused from paying federal and state income tax, and sales tax, we must respect the neutrality imposed on us. Otherwise we would enjoy an unfair advantage over those who must pay these taxes.
The U.S. bishops before every presidential election issue an advisory to Catholics and others urging voting responsibility and consideration of all the moral issues. I agree that some individual bishops skate close to the edge of the thin ice by steering congregants one way or the other with more or less visible intent. Studies have shown, however, that this has limited success in swaying voters as people become more politically sophisticated. I have read pundits who object to their efforts. I have also read the bishops’ own attempts to influence the vote. Perhaps you have too. But we enter the booth as moral agents trying to make the decision best for not just ourselves but for the common good of the whole country.
This is why I began the way I did. Our overwhelming temptation is to vote only for our own income bracket or social class. We are tempted to leave to generous idealists the care of the poor since we think that charity is what will help them best, unaware that we would not need charity if we first had justice, the virtue that sees to it that each person gets his/her just due. And since we as followers of Jesus hold that all people of whatever provenance are equal sisters and brothers in God’s kingdom, we vote for the common good.
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