By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE
Part 2
(Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, patron of the Order of Malta, delivered the following address to the Church Teaches Forum, Louisville, Ky., on July 16, 2016. It is reprinted here with permission. All rights reserved. Because of its length, we are presenting it in two parts; the first part appeared in last week’s issue.)
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Order In Society
And The Common Good
If any form of government is to serve a community or nation, society must recognize a certain order which permits the individual to pursue his own good, while, at the same time, respecting the good of others who form a community with him.
The good is defined by the order found in the nature of persons and things, by which the same persons and things are directed to objective ends. In truth, the individual must understand that his own good cannot be served, while the good of others and the order of creation are violated. The individual cannot achieve his proper end and, therefore, happiness, apart from the respect of the proper end and ultimate happiness of his neighbor, and the proper end of the things with which he interacts. Government is, otherwise, reduced to the tyranny of whatever group is able to prevail by winning the support of a majority.
Without the recognition of the common good, to which the individual good is essentially related and which it serves, society breaks down and a government is soon beset by the violence and destruction which is the inevitable fruit of unbridled individualism and self-pursuit.
The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council described the common good precisely in the context of the formation of a political community:
“It follows that political authority, either within the political community as such or through organizations representing the state, must be exercised within the limits of the moral order and directed toward the common good (understood in the dynamic sense of the term) according to the juridical order legitimately established or due to be established. Citizens, then, are bound in conscience to obey. Accordingly, the responsibility, the dignity, and the importance of those who govern is clear.”
The laws of a democratic nation, therefore, are to be ordered to the common good, which, one hopes, will coincide with the will of the majority, but which will, in any case, not only be laws “by the people” but also laws “of the people” and “for the people.”
The objectivity of the common good, as it is discovered by right reason in the natural order, determines the good order of a nation. Laws which safeguard the common good rest on the reality of the nature and end of the persons and of the things whom or which they govern. It is essential that citizens be educated to understand the relationship between the political order and the common good, in order that they obey the laws. It is essential that lawmakers and servants of justice understand the meaning of law for the citizens as individuals and as a community.
In his Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI takes up the question of the common good which, in his words, “is sought not for its own sake, but for the people who belong to the social community and who can only really and effectively pursue their good within it.” Dedication to the common good, as Pope Benedict XVI makes clear, is an obligation imposed by both justice and charity. He concludes: “The more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours, the more effectively we love them.”
Law And Religious Freedom
The realism of laws, their foundation upon the objective nature and end of things, has been, for some time, severely questioned or rejected by a positivist and utilitarian philosophy. Pope Benedict XVI succinctly describes the situation in his speech to the Bundestag in September of 2011. Speaking about the contemporary banning of the discussion of the natural moral law in public discourse, he declared:
“Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ An ‘ought’ can never follow from an ‘is,’ because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature has come to be almost universally accepted….A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, as the natural sciences consider it to be, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers.”
Clearly, the positivist view divorces the law from being, from its metaphysical foundations.
Such a view also clearly excludes from reason anything which is not demonstrable according to the positivist criteria. Pope Benedict XVI, therefore concluded:
“Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else — and that is broadly the case in our public mindset — then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded.”
The recognition of an objective moral order in law is, therefore, necessary, if freedom is to be served. The Church’s clarity in teaching the moral truth and in refuting moral error is critical to the sound political order. The Church’s moral teaching forms the character of the citizens who are her faithful and also of other men of good will who recognize the truth of her teaching, in accord with the common good. On the other hand, moralists whose theories do not correctly account for universal and unchanging moral norms undermine human freedom in the political order.
When one studies the foundations of the law and, therefore, of life in society, in general, one also understands the fundamental importance of religious freedom. The respect for religious freedom is fundamentally respect for the conscience. If citizens are not permitted to act according to conscience, with the religious freedom which a rightly-formed conscience requires, then the entire society is in peril. Society risks becoming the theater of the violence and death which are the result of rebellion against God and the good order which he has placed in creation and, above all, in the human heart.
On January 19, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI spoke to the Bishops of the United States from the Provinces of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and the Military Ordinariate, indicating to them the grave and pervasively negative results of the denial of religious freedom. He declared the Church’s fundamental responsibility in the matter with these words:
“For her part, the Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering (cf. Gaudium et spes, n. 10). To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that would curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality, or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being and ultimate vocation, our relationship to God.
“When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it invitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.”
Conclusion
On March 30, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI spoke to the members of the European Popular Party, addressing the role of the Church in the political order. He brought to mind the irreplaceable contribution of the Church to democracy in Europe, both historically and at present, through the formation of citizens in the Christian virtues. He cautioned that the elimination of Christians, as Christians, from the political order would result in the loss of the strength which the Christian faith and its practice bring to any nation or political body. He described the perennial service of the Church and of her teaching to the civic community.
He stated:
“It must not be forgotten that, when Churches or ecclesial communities intervene in public debate, expressing reservations or recalling various principles, this does not constitute a form of intolerance or an interference, since such interventions are aimed solely at enlightening consciences, enabling them to act freely and responsibly, according to the true demands of justice, even when this should conflict with situations of power and personal interest.”
He had already presented the same teaching, in a more solemn manner, in his Encyclical Letter Deus caritas est, in which he discussed the relationship of justice, politics, and ethics. He taught us with these words:
“Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics. Politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life: its origin and its goal are found in justice which by its very nature has to do with ethics. The State must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: what is justice? The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests….
“Building a just social and civil order, wherein each person receives what is his or her due, is an essential task which every generation must take up anew. As a political task, this cannot be the Church’s immediate responsibility. Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.”
The Church in our time has a most serious responsibility to teach insistently the truth about religious freedom and to challenge the State which would violate the freedom of conscience of its citizens, in order to carry out certain immoral agenda.
There can be no question that the laws which govern a nation must be founded upon right reason, distinguishing ends from purposes, and respecting fully the natural law which God has written upon every human heart. In the present situation, the Church’s service of the world demands of her, above all, a witness to the foundation of the political order upon the unchanging precepts of the natural moral law, which God has taught and teaches to all men and women of every place and time.
In such a political order, law will indeed serve all that is true and just. The state by its safeguarding of religious freedom will assure that the Church is able to carry out her irreplaceable service of the common good.
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke
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