Fr. Luke Millette 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 18th, 2020

“Render unto what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” Apparently little has changed about human nature through the centuries because in today’s Gospel when the wanted to entrap , they questioned Him about politics. “Knowing their malice, Jesus said, ‘Why are you testing me you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax.’… He [then] said to them, ‘Whose image is this and whose inscription?’” As we know, after they responded that it bore Caesar’s image, Jesus gave the famous response which opened today’s homily. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” If we are not careful, however, we run the risk of misinterpreting Jesus’s words into a support of separation of Church and state where the politician and the priest labor in their own separate worlds and never the twain shall meet. This, however, could not be further from the truth. While half the coin bears Caesar’s image, it is the other half of that “coin” which we often fail to reflect upon. “Render unto God what is God’s.” In this, Jesus invites us to reflect upon the fact that we ourselves have been made in the image and likeness of God. So, while the coin might bear Caesar’s image, we bear God’s image and therefore we must also render unto God what is God’s, namely ourselves… our very lives and souls. This important realization strips political authority of any claims of divinity and reveals the truth that our duty is always first and foremost to God and ordering everything in this world towards Him. It is only because of this that secondarily we also have a duty to care for the common good and submit to all legitimate and lawful authority whom God places over us. In other words, we are first and Americans second. Throughout most of human history, and in many places still today, human beings do not have an actual choice over who was placed over them in authority. In

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Fr. Luke Millette 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 18th, 2020 reflecting on this, Christians realized that God allows their leaders to exercise authority over them and that they are agents of God to the extent that they use the authority entrusted to them by God legitimately. This highlights the great gift that we have as Americans to actually discern our elected officials. Our responsibility for the common good, that “sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily,” means that we have a moral duty to vote in accord with our faith so that our nation might be ruled in a way that allows for the proper flourishing of all human beings. This moral duty to vote is not always easy, especially today as we are besieged on all sides by hatred and animosity and vitriol and ideologies contrary to God, and yet we must still exercise this right to vote so that we might try to protect and preserve the common good for all. Our bishops have spoken extensively about this in the document titled “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship”, and I would recommend that everyone takes the time to prayerfully discern it. Since our duty is first and foremost to God, we cannot simply vote along party lines, but must instead vote first and foremost in accord with our faith. As our bishops have said, “the Church cannot champion any [one] candidate or party. Our cause is the defense of human life and dignity and the protection of the weak and vulnerable.” Elsewhere they say, “as citizens, we should be guided more by our moral convictions that by our attachment to a political group… our participation should help transform the party to which we belong; we should not let the party transform us in such a way that we neglect or deny fundamental moral truths or approve intrinsically evil acts.” The first step in this process is forming our conscience about the issues that must be discerned when voting. This requires that we live out our commitment to

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Fr. Luke Millette 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 18th, 2020

God and prayerfully reflect on the truths that He has taught us through Scripture and the teachings of the Church. The teachings of the Church can help us to identify priorities which we must discern in possible candidates to political office. For example, in Sacramentum Caritatis Benedict XVI says that we “must make decisions regarding fundamental values, such as respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.” He calls these values “non-negotiable.” In our bishops’ letter, they elaborate on some of these preeminent priorities which we must discern when voting by adding other threats to human life and the common good such as racism, immigration reform, the environmental crisis, poverty, an end to the death penalty, the economy, taxation, and national defense, to name a few. As Pope Benedict said, some of these issues are non-negotiable. We can NEVER support intrinsically evil actions such as abortion and euthanasia and other attacks against human dignity. If we were to ever vote for a political candidate because of their support of these types of intrinsically evil actions, then we ourselves would be formally cooperating in grave evil. We can only support candidates who support these intrinsically evil actions when all available candidates are somehow supporting intrinsically evil actions. In this situation, we must discern in our conscience which of the candidates will best serve the common good while at the same time staunchly opposing any actions they attempt to take in these matters that are contrary to life and human dignity. In making this discernment, it is important to look past our personal feelings on the candidate to what they have actually done while in office and/or promise to do while in office. Armed with this knowledge, we must then vote in accord with

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Fr. Luke Millette 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Oct 18th, 2020 the dictates of our faith and conscience so that we might render both unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s by voting for the candidate who will best limit intrinsic evils and support the common good. This is especially important today when our religious freedom is increasingly under attack and we encounter those who will try to silence us in the public square. These modern day Pharisees will try to entrap us and force us to choose between serving either God or Caesar. In reality this is a false dichotomy for, as Christ taught us, the best service we can give to our country is when we first and foremost serve God. In doing this, we recognize that our country will ultimately never be saved by a political party or an elected official but by God Himself. And this will only be able to happen if we actually invite God into the civic life of our country. As we do this, however, we must never forget that everyone we encounter, no matter who they are or what they believe, like us has also been made in the image and likeness of God. We must always proclaim the truth to them, but we must always do it in a spirit of love. As our bishops have said, “Our commitment as people of faith to imitate Christ’s love and compassion should challenge us to serve as models of civil dialogue, especially in [todays] context where discourse is eroding at all levels of society.” This restoration of dialogue is perhaps the most important thing that we can do to serve the common good so that all human beings might flourish and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this way, we truly begin to live out our baptismal calling of bringing about God’s kingdom here on earth when we “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

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