Internet confession time: I like Michael Novak, Father Neuhaus, George Weigel, Joseph Bottom, and Jimmy Akin. Catholic Answers was an important resource in my conversion. Those Catholics with concerns about their views, especially on war, immigration, and economics, often state their opinions forcefully and with proper emphasis on the gravity of the political questions at hand. I hope we can go into more details as time progresses about those policy questions. But it’s the big picture I’m more interested in first, especially as a conservative exhausted by politics.
Jesus offered us no answer to political questions. Guidance through the command to love others as we love ourselves, certainly, but no answers as we might expect of other great historical figures. As the Holy Father tells us directly in his most recent publication, Jesus came to offer us God.
One of my favorite books, Romano Guardini’s The Lord, sharply turns the attention of the reader to the source and summit of our existence: “If one were to ask of the New Testament: What is Man? it would reply with the words of the apostle John: That creature whom God ‘so loved….that he gave his only-begotten Son…’ (3:16). The answer immediately invokes a second: Man is that creature who dared to slaughter the Son God sent him. He who retorts: What have I to do with Annas and Caiphas? is still ignorant of the collective guilt that binds all men. Already on the historical plane one stands for all, and all have to bear the consequences of the deeds of the one; how much more so here where it is the question of the great collectivity of deicide and redemption. Then Scripture gives still a third answer to the question: Man is that creature who now lives upon the destiny of Christ; him on whom God’s love still rests, but also the responsibility for driving that love to death.”
St. Augustine asks: “What am I but a guide to my own self-destruction?” Let us always care more for people than for ideas. If belonging precedes believing, let us live as examples of Christian love and charity so as to not just witness for our beliefs, where the attention may in some way be on us, but for the Redeemer who privileges us with seeing Him in the redeemed humanity of others.
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