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America’s Double Standard
The front page photo in last Monday’s New York Times should have sent shivers down our spines. There was Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama speaking from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Selma, Ala. The Christian cross, illuminated by incandescent bulbs was in full view as was the Christian symbol IHS.
How could this happen in America where there is the strict separation of church and state? Shouldn’t we be mortified that a Christian believer would use a church pulpit to deliver a political message?
Let’s get real! It’s done every weekend in churches all across America. Locally elected politicians are invited into places of worship to say a few words and to make their pitch for votes to religious congregations.
What appalls us is the double standard applied to Catholics and to members of other religious organizations. If the photo showed a Catholic candidate delivering a pro-life message to a receptive church congregation, there would be a firebrand of protest from the daily press and TV outlets. The politically correct standard bearers would raise their voices at the insensitivity of the Church and call for strict penalties. The IRS and the U.S. Postal Service would investigate as to whether the line of separation had been crossed and the Church would be threatened with loss of its religious tax breaks.
Instead, the nation’s most prestigious newspaper runs a four-column photo that dominates the front page and it’s perfectly acceptable.
There’s a terrible inconsistency in American political circles. The Catholic Church is a popular whipping boy while everyone else seems to get a free pass.
We call for a more even-handed approach to how the standards of politics are applied in American society. Isn’t it about time we recognize that Catholics are Americans too and that anti-Catholicism should no longer be the last acceptable bigotry in America?
The Wait for Peace
The latest news that Pope Benedict will not be coming to the United Nations later this year is disappointing. That means that he will not visit our city or country for at least another year. U.N. and papal schedules do not allow for the 2007 trip, so we will have to wait a while for any face-to-face meeting in New York.
Church leaders and the faithful well remember the visits of Pope John Paul II and how they seemed to breathe new life into our city. Even the United Nations itself as an organization gained a breath of new respectability by having the pope visit. But the delay is understandable, given all the preparations that go into such a venture.
Our welcome will just have to wait.
The prospect of a papal visit and all the excitement involved should not distract us from thoughts of what we hope to accomplish by such a visit and the values involved. Recent popes and certainly Pope Benedict XVI have been constant and consistent voices for world peace. Certainly, they have addressed Iraq, but their visions have been far broader than Iraq or even the Middle East.
A pope’s concern is worldwide, and necessarily includes the Far East and Africa. The call for peace itself is broader than simply the cessation of warfare. Pope Paul VI was clearest about the call for justice as a necessary preliminary for world peace. We cannot speak, or even think, of peace as long as starvation is rampant and the distribution of the world’s goods is so uneven.
Iraq is important but so is Darfur and neither just happened. They are the culmination of long-standing injustices which get too little attention in the press and therefore the consciousness of the world.
We cannot look the other way and be surprised when situations that call to God for resolution break out. The popes have the one unwavering call to the consciences of all nations.
We have to ask ourselves how diligent are we about the impact of papal statements. Do we look at the Holy Father as a visiting celebrity with all the attending pomp or are we looking at a religious leader calling us to conscience?
Pope Benedict, in his Easter message, calls our attention to a God who loves us to the extent of taking upon himself our wounds and our pain, especially innocent suffering. The pope called our attention to a Christ who is risen and is alive among us. Christ is our hope for a better future.
The pope made this affirmation after honestly reviewing all that is in the world that rightly challenges us to unbelief. But the Holy Father cited the “almost dead faith” of the Apostle Thomas but insisted that “almost dead” faith can be born again by the resurrected Christ. Are we willing to take these words of hope to heart and to make them our own?
The question of how we make them our own remains. Here, again, the Holy Father is helpful and hopeful. “Humanity expects from Christians, a renewed witness to the resurrection of Christ,” he said. “It needs to encounter him and to know him as true God and true man. If we can recognize in this apostle the doubts and uncertainties of so many Christians today, the fears and disappointments of many of our contemporaries, with him we can also rediscover with renewed conviction Christ dead and risen for us.”
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