By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Although it’s not wrong to take hope from political victories in the November 4 midterm elections, politics isn’t the answer in the long term, the rector of the cathedral for the Diocese of Phoenix told The Wanderer after offering an evening Mass here.
Fr. John Lankeit celebrated Mass at an upscale hotel for Catholic supporters of the Scottsdale-based Alliance Defending Freedom before they and other friends of this national legal-activist organization that stands up for traditional values sat down to a dinner.
Being at Mass is “the most important thing we can do,” Lankeit said in his homily. . . . This [Eucharist] needs to be the most important food you will eat.”
In an interview, he said it’s proper for Catholics to do their political duty by voting, “but our hope has to be in Christ.”
In his homily, Lankeit, rector of Saints Simon and Jude Cathedral, had referred to the possibility of his going to jail. Subsequently asked to expand on this by The Wanderer, he cited the recent subpoena of five Texas pastors’ sermons and other communications by the openly homosexual mayor of Houston, Annise Parker.
Parker was trying to suppress opposition to the city’s ordinance that allows access to public facilities including restrooms without regard to gender — a sexual activists’ so-called “bathroom bill.” She withdrew the subpoena after public outrage erupted.
Lankeit said such targeting of believers won’t be unusual. “That’s coming everywhere, and we’re naive to think it’s not,” he told The Wanderer.
People need to be “prepared for the spiritual consequences of not playing that game” of the secular world, he said.
Regarding the midterm elections, moral decline will continue “[i]f the politicians are not rooted in truth,” Lankeit said.
“In the short term politically, I was satisfied” with the results, he said. But “long-term, my hope is not in politics. . . . The battle that’s being fought in our nation now is not at a political level, it’s at a much higher moral level.”
Lankeit, a second-career priest who entered the seminary at age 34 in 2001, said he used to be a cafeteria Catholic who wasn’t opposed to Church teachings, but was simply indifferent to them.
He was greatly impressed by examining the logic of the Church’s teaching against contraception, even though many powerful voices attacked the Catholic stand, he said.
In an after-dinner talk to the Scottsdale gathering, he joked that at Ordination, “we are given the ability to read minds.”
However, illustrating that his remark wasn’t so fanciful, Lankeit told of impressing a man who, the priest correctly had judged, was thinking skeptically about priests talking about marriage.
“What does a priest know about marriage? He can’t get married, meaning he can’t have sex,” Lankeit said, illustrating that personal experience isn’t necessarily required. “. . . It’s like saying I don’t want to have cancer surgery from a cancer surgeon who’s never had cancer.”
He urged that people make sure to set aside time to observe Sunday properly. “What it does mean is carving out time for God. . . . Most of us really don’t know ourselves. . . . We’re afraid of silence” and the reflection that it could bring.
Catholics “are really good at saying prayers,” but “don’t think so much that it’s communion with the living God,” he said.
He commended non-Catholics in the audience for thinking in terms of having a personal relationship with Christ. If a person asked most Catholics to tell about their personal relationship with Jesus, “they won’t know what to talk to you about,” he said.
As for political struggles, “It’s a cosmic battle, and we’d better be aligned with the right side,” the divine victor “who has already won,” Lankeit said.
People evangelize for what they believe in, even if their cause is wrong, he said. On the “same-sex marriage” issue, “Those who are evangelizing that position are pushing people away from God, but it is evangelizing” what they passionately believe.
“We have been out-evangelized by the secular. . . . It’s really time to change” this result through prayer and the sacraments, he said.
It’s time to implore God “to give us the grace to be soldiers” on His side, not political activists, Lankeit said.
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