Pope Leo’s prayer intention for October is that we should pray for the collaboration of the different faith traditions, that they “might work together to defend and promote peace, justice and human fraternity.”
I can’t think of a prayer that is more important for the ugly time that we are living through here in America.
If our religious leaders of every faith tradition would unite and speak with one voice that every person without regard for their sex, race or financial status had a God-given right to justice, to live in peace, and that we are all brothers and sisters; children of the Living God, they could change the world.
That is, in essence, what we Americans have believed and sought to achieve since our founding. It has been far from perfect, but the foundational belief of our nation is that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among them are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
You cannot have those things without peace, justice and an understanding that we are all brothers and sisters.
Religious leaders have a big voice. Their teaching authority has power to shape the conscience of their flocks. If enough of them join together with one message, they can shape the conscience of an entire nation.
We have witnessed that ability to shape consciences in the growth of liberty in our nation since its founding. We have ended slavery, extended the right to vote to women, and worked to end Jim Crow brutality. We had even begun to address the genocidal and predatory brutality Native Americans have suffered at the hands of our government.
America is not perfect. But it is founded on the correct principles. Religious leaders, when they preach Truth, can shape the conscience of this nation and lead it to move toward the good.
However, we have witnessed a terrible inversion of this leadership to good in the past 50 years. A huge swath of Christian leadership has sold itself to political and financial power brokers. They have used their teaching authority to shape the consciences of their followers along lines of hideous evil culminating in frank idolatry of fake political gods.
We, as a nation, are reaping the whirlwind of the death of public morality that has followed.
Pope Leo’s call for us to pray for religious leaders to unite and work together to promote justice, peace and human fraternity could not be more needed.
It is a prayer that is necessary at all times. It is also a prayer that is exactly and specifically needed by us, by Americans, at this time.
Note: The discussion of America’s foundational beliefs that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights is from the Declaration of Independence.
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