CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - The Christian navigates between two pole stars, as it were.  On the one hand, he recognizes the divine warrant given secular authorities.  He remembers that the early Christian following the example of Christ the Lord respected the civil authority of Caesar.  "You would have no power over me," the Lord told the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, "if it had not been given to you from above." (John 19:11) 

Sts. Peter and Paul enjoined their flocks to obey all governing authorities, including Caesar who had arrogated to himself powers he did not have, and whose philosophy of government was wholly false. (E.g., 1 Pet 2:15; Rom. 13:1)  Ordinarily, therefore, Christians ought to be model citizens, conscientiously required to follow the laws of the State.

And yet absolute obedience is never due the State.  Any arrogation of divinity by the State is absolutely rejected by the Christian.  Here is the veiled teaching behind Christ's answer to the query by those sent by the Chief Priests seeking to entrap him either as a revolutionary or a bad Jew, a trap he deftly avoided:

"Is it permissible for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" But He was aware of their cunning and said, "Show me a denarius. Whose head and name are on it?" "Caesar's," they said."Well then," He said to them, "give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar - and to God what belongs to God."  (Luke 20:21-25).

The coin Jesus pointed to, one ought to add, claimed falsely that Caesar was divine. 

With these soft-spoken words, Jesus ushered in a revolution in political thought.  Wherever the words of Jesus take root and sprout, there will be a separation between political power and moral and religious truth, a de-divinized political order.  The political order will be demoted, constrained, circumscribed.  Its desire to be a "mortal God," as Hobbes would have it, will be muzzled.  The Beast has been tamed.

There are, then, "things of Caesar" and there are "things of God."  There are "things of God" that Caesar may not touch, one of which is moral truth, the other of which is the human conscience which is our means of accessing that moral truth. 

And if Caesar has the temerity, the audacity of trespassing on moral truth or human conscience, the Christian may not respond with the obedience enjoined by Sts. Peter and Paul in ordinary situations.  In such extraordinary situations--when Caesar trespasses the moral law and asks from his citizens what God forbids-- then we must stand with St. Peter and declare: "Obedience to God comes before obedience to men." (Acts 5:29)

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church addresses the issue of when and how St. Peter's teaching that obedience to God comes before obedience to men applies in the modern Christian's life.  It is a teaching she hates to pull out of her sheath, for it usually means that, as Shakespeare might put it, "something is rotten in the State of Denmark."

The latest HHS mandate is a concrete instance of a deeper political reality that American Catholics confront: a real threat from their governing authorities to their way of life.  This threat is the result of a unhealthy hodgepodge whose ingredients include the erosion of any moral consensus in the West, the increase in moral relativism built upon false notions of individuality and moral autonomy, a "reductive secularism" which neglects moral and spiritual truths and restricts truth to mere "scientific rationality" or "political power or majority rule," and the increased political intolerance from those with world-views hostile to traditional and Christian morality who have no compunction in imposing their views through the authority of the State.

These ingredients have given rise to a sort of political witch's brew.  It is a political witch's brew that Pope Benedict XVI recently referred to in the ad limina visits of the American Bishops as a "radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres."  This "radical secularism" is slowly backing Christians into those corners where obedience is no longer due civil authority.  Indeed, with the HHS mandate, there is no more backing up.

Presciently, or perhaps better, prophetically, Pope Benedict XVI foresaw and foresees increasing conflict between American Catholics and a public authority increasingly secularized and increasingly hostile to the moral values of its Catholic citizens.  The conflict is caused by the increasing demands of the State to "to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices." 

The aggressive secularist State wants freedom of religion to be limited to "mere freedom of ...