The Pulpit Is No Place for Politics
The political does not build up the faithful
I preach every weekend and my parishioners know that I work hard on my homilies. Often I proclaim the Gospel in two languages English and Brazilian Portuguese. Never do I speak about a political candidate or a political reality unless it directly relates to the readings.
For example, there is no question that there are factions in this country that want to enact anti-Christian policies and laws. Many are pro-abortion and do not want to support those organizations, including churches, that are anti-abortion. Others see churches as threats to other more leftist policies such as gay marriage and lgbt issues.
Some pastors respond that we must gather together and work hard to vote against candidates who promote those policies. However, the pulpit is not the place to discuss political issues. It is the place to strengthen one’s relationship to God and to increase our witness in the world via the way we live our faith.
I live in Massachusetts and I am in a state that rejects many of the Catholic Church’s teaching. Strangely enough the Commonwealth has a strong history of Calvinism which is anti-Catholic by definition. It is after all the home of the famous Protestant sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” by Rev. Jonathan Edwards. Therefore, Massachusetts has a strong anti-Catholic history. It was the French colonists, the Irish influx and then other immigrants over the past two hundred years that made the area more Catholic. Over the past two decades, it became one of the most secular states in the country.
I disagree with most of the political positions of my state. Further, if I were to embrace the ideas of one of our founding fathers it would be Thomas Paine’s “The government that governs least, governs best.” As a registered independent, I do not hold sway to any political party. I personally believe that we need to return to a time where government was a part-time job for legislators. We need only to enact any new law as a last resort. Laws should be small in number and rarely new.
If I reject a party, it is because it rejects me as a Catholic more than anything else. At least one of them does. Many will cite the saying ‘separation of church and state’, but I also believe in ‘separation of state and church’.
This is my political position which I just expressed here on Medium. Do not expect me to express it from the pulpit. It is not my position to share with you my own political views there. It is rather my position to preach on ways that we can increase our witness to Christ which is our vocation as Catholics. Therefore, you will often hear me preach on the need to pray, the need to deepen our faith. We need to understand sin but that means true sin.
Recently, I learned on Medium about a teen who killed himself after being outed as gay. There are times to preach on the sinfulness of sex out of a sacramental marriage open to life. This situation needed a message against detraction which St. John Vianney believed was worse than virtually any other sin one can name.
Detraction is the act of spreading information about a person, even if it is true. In our world today, one form of it is cyber-bullying which is the sin committed against that teen who killed himself. What the cyberbully said about him may have been true, but that does not mean she did the right thing. It is not illegal in the state where this happened — Tennessee — but that does not mean it is not sinful. Her actions are a felony in Massachusetts.
Many churches will preach on morality issues, but our own faith teaches it is impossible to live Catholic morality if we are not people of prayer. (CCC 2098) So, for me to preach morality without preaching on prayer would be counter-productive. However, that is rather commonly found in many pulpits including Catholic ones.
Catholicism is a mystical faith. This means a central part of it is a spirituality rooted in knowing Christ as we seek to serve Him. Therefore, morality cannot be the first part of our faith, but prayer must be first.
Prayer must be the place we go to individually and as a family and community.
St. John Vianney understood that the worst of all sinners was not the most worldly of people but lukewarm Catholics. He actually had more hope for the salvation of the worldly than the lukewarm. So my work must be in leading people to be committed to Christ and steer them away from the tepid way of living our faith.
I must teach what it means to receive the Eucharist and what the Eucharist truly is.
I cannot do any of that if I am politicizing the message and turning the pulpit into lobbying platform.
A few years ago, I attended a conference in Brazil that ended with a Mass. The retired bishop celebrant obviously was a liberation theologian. The whole preaching was more like a badly produced campaign against politics in that country. It was sorely out of place and completely uninspiring. I hope never to see a repeat of the experience.
It is true that I feel rejected as a Catholic by one of our political parties. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, the other party had an anti-Catholic plank in its platform, so we have in our history been on the wrong side of each party at one time or another.
It is not my role to preach which party to follow, which candidate to vote for as much as it is my role to call people to take whatever steps are necessary to live a holy life. That must be my first priority starting with myself. Political discussions are for another time but they will come out of a quest for holiness.
We must first seek the Kingdom of God, my role is to encourage that. Let everything else will fall into its right place outside of the pulpit scenario.
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