In the Wake of Santorum, Catholics Must Not Retreat From Political Participation Comments
After Rick Santorum suspended his Presidential campaign I received numerous E-Mails.This comment worried me and prompted this article, "Politics saves no one. My focus will return to the religious/spiritual." We are called to integrated Christian lives of moral coherence. Continue Reading
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Rick Santorum did his part despite much opposition. We must continue to do ours....we have a president who has unleashed war on law-abiding, conscience following citizens of all faiths. We must stand up to him and exercise the privilege we have been given as citizens in this democracy to speak out against evil.
To CCS, how is electing a Mormon president going to lead you to hell? Are you going to commit the sin of omission then and allow another non-Catholic president who extols the killing of babies and persecutes Christians for their faith to prevail? This so-called Christian president does not even go to church every Sunday. Will St. Athanasius be happy then?
Rick Santorum did his part despite much opposition. We must continue to do ours....we have a president who has unleashed war on law-abiding, conscience following citizens of all faiths. We must stand up to him and exercise the privilege we have been given as citizens in this democracy to speak out against evil.
To CCS, how is electing a Mormon president going to lead you to hell? Are you going to commit the sin of omission then and allow another non-Catholic president who extols the killing of babies and persecutes Christians for their faith to prevail? This so-called Christian president does not even go to church every Sunday. Will St. Athanasius be happy then?
I enjoyed the article and agree. But, I do have to wonder that we may be missing the boat right now. I seem to think that in order to get more people on board of these Catholic teachings, we need to make this a "Christian" situation.
The "Catholics: that are voting contrary to many of the church teachings seem to be so partisan it doesn't matter what the Church thinks."
I began to think this way when we said the HHS mandate was framed as an attack on the Catholic Church. I felt this made many Protestants feel that they are OK with the mandate because their particular denomination isn't affected. (But if they look more deeply it is for sure affected) I do know that we have mentioned it in the articles that it isn't JUST a Catholic or not even a Christian thing which is so true.....It is a Constitutional thing. SO if we make it feel like we are ALL in this together, we may be able to increase our voting body by swaying more of our Protestant brothers and sisters. Make this more of an Ecumenical situation. Thanks for reading and I hope I didn't ramble with things that make no sense.
May God's Peace be with you all.
@Michael..."No one is saved outside the Catholic Church." If I was a protestant who agreed with all the things said in Deacon Fournier's column and have agreed with the Catholic Church Fathers in their opposition to the HHS mandate, and then read your above statement today, I would seriously question my position of agreement. How can you say that no one is saved outside the Catholic church? Please explain the statement.
Well done! You articulated a position we, as Catholics, should be taking. Life, and particularly politics, is not fair and just, nor is it generally the way we (Catholics) think it should. However, to dropout and retreat to the sanctuary just exacerbates the existing problems and gives our opponents the impression of not caring or not being interested in how or what they do. I too am extremely disappointed with the remaining candidates for the presidency; nevertheless, our option not to participate in rejecting Mr. Obama is, in my opinion, leading to a self fulfilling prophesy of his re-election, and consequently additional restraints on(or elimination of) the 1st Amendment.
Now that Santorum has withdrawn I will vote for Romney. Although the Republican party is imperfect it is still the last bastion of prolife, as the Democrats sold out long ago to relativism, abortion and homo "marriage". That party is blatantly anti-Christian and any Catholics in it are in opposition to the Chuch. They are Catholics in name only. Romney is a Mormon but he is not a religious bigot and neither am I. His record is strongly prolife and pro true marriage. He has been a very personally charitable man. Don't let the support of business for him fool you into thinking the support of business is automatically wrong. In the real world money is needed to support a campaign. Did anyone stop to think that maybe the Holy Spirit is drawing together people of true faith, true morality based on natural law together now to win this election and promote the true common good? We Catholics can support him without apology to anyone, least of all to our enemies.
Obama vs. Romney? What does political participation look like when you have to choose between a radical secularist and an active member of a radically false religion that mimics Christianity but has the potential to lead many people into hell? Would St. Athanasius tell us just to go ahead and vote for the Mormon?
An excellent writing on the Truths of the Catholic faith. Jesus told us He is the way, the truth and the light. Thank you for putting into words not only the tenets of our faith, but a gentle call to action for all of us, where ever we may be in our relationship with the one true God.
Good article, Deacon Keith...just a few comments. First, despite what many libertarians and some conservatives often proclaim, government is not an evil thing. Temporal governments, in fact, are willed by God and are good, objectively speaking. Our involvement, then, in voting is a good thing. Gregory XVI, in his great encyclical, Mirari Vos...a letter that modern Catholics with false notions of freedom ought to read by the way...wrote about the early Christians under persecution in the Roman empire. They prayed for and obeyed in all legitimate areas, the emperor. And just who were the emperors? Nero, Diocletian, and other various bloodthirsty pagans. If these Catholics worked in this system, I think that we should be willing to work in our present day, political reality. But as a final remark...those early Catholics, as instruments of the Holy Ghost, converted the Roman Empire to Catholicism and the truth. In our nation, bishops, priests, and laity, unfortunately, never brought this conversion about. Why? Because we embraced the error known as Americanism so well defined by Leo XIII. The American model, unfortunately, has become the Church model. And what is its main error?! Modern notions of religious liberty. Deacon Keith, you speak of false notions of liberty quite well, i.e., rights to abortion and homosexual unions are absurd. Yet, you seemingly forget false notions of religious liberty, i.e., that people have a supposed God given right to worship false gods...this is absurd, too. What we forgot is a basic dogma of our Holy Faith, namely, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. No one is saved outside the Catholic Church. This dogma drove men like St. FRancis Xavier half way around the world to bring pagans to the light. He did not affirm their false religions, he condemned them. St. Boniface did not celebrate paganism, he cut down and burned the trees they worshiped. In recent decades, Catholics have failed miserably in their mission to convert the world to Christ. But today, we speak about religious liberty and the constitution...and Cardinal Dolan speaks about creeds and protecting people of other faiths. The Bible says there is only ONE FAITH and that is the CAtholic Faith...the only Faith that pleases God, period. To quote just another erroneous Protestant "pastor" and Obama supporter, the chickens have come home to roost. We are reaping our Americanist errors.
It is to avoid such disappointments that the Bible in the truth calls us to depend, on GOD & His Christ through Faith in the help of The Holy Spirit , & not on man & his ways which are foolishness unto GOD, is also saying to man's Literacy or his knowledge(gnosis) through the interpretations of his mind & all the awards that go with it, which is the foolishness, instead of understanding by the revelation of the Spirit, that which the Bible ought to be, again to "Where the mind is to Knowledge the Spirit is to Recognition for in it is all the Knowledge", like when Jesus Christ called out to Lazarus, who had been dead for some days, to "Arise" he arose from the dead, by the way of GOD. Today the world's foolishness is based on people like 'Simon Magus" or Simon the Magician who wanted to buy the power of the Holy Spirit, in such foolishness to "Sorcery" indeed, not knowing that the Holy Spirit is a person, the third in the Holy Trinity.