What belongs to God?

This past Tuesday I went to the Metro government center on Barrett Avenue and voted. Since I'll be away on November 4th, I wanted to let my voice (ballot) be counted. I'm thankful that we are allowed to vote early if it is necessary.

Did you know that the U.S. bishops have called voting a moral obligation for faithful citizens? Fr. Patrick Delahanty, recently retired head of the Catholic Conference of Kentucky, spoke to a group of mainly Catholic students last night at the Interfaith Center on UofL's campus. He said that in his forty plus years of being a priest he has never had a single person come to the Sacrament of Reconciliation confessing that they failed to vote. (I have to say that my experience in the confessional is exactly the same as Fr. Pat's.) Since it is a moral obligation for us as Catholic Christians to vote, it follows that it must be at least a minor sin to fail to vote.

The U.S. bishops, in their 2007 document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, also urge us to do more than vote. They ask us to be responsible and faithful by asking legislators to defend life and promote the dignity of human life while they serve us in the government. We are called by our bishops to call, write, email, tweet, and address our government leaders regularly over the concerns that promote and protect human life, including care for the world that we share. They also ask us to discern whether God is calling us to serve as one of those government leaders. Whether we to run for an elected office or we choose a career that serves the public in some government office or program, it is a vocation that God may be calling some of us to.

This weekend the Gospel reading has one of the most misquoted lines in all of scriptures. In the twenty-second chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says to the Pharisees who were trying to trap Him, "Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God." Many have used this line as a justification for choosing to ignore God's will and law, while choosing to be faithful to their government. Jesus was not advocating patriotism over faith. He was recognizing that we do have a duty to follow reasonable and moral civil laws. But since we are created by God in His image, and all that God has created is still God's, with us as His stewards, then our true calling is to always serve God in all things and in all ways. Sometimes that may even  mean disobeying the civil law in favor of following God's will and laws. It always means being informed and involved in the ways that we vote and the ways we are loyal to God in civil activities.

This Gospel comes at an opportune time to do some praying and studying about how we are going to fill out our ballots. May God guide us and bless our country and our world, especially by the ways we share the blessings of our lives with others.

peace,
Fr. Chuck