Pacem In Terris 62: Reconciliation and Protection of Rights and Duties of Individuals

Today let’s examine a brief single section:

62. One of the principal duties of any government, moreover, is the suitable and adequate superintendence and co-ordination of (people’s) respective rights in society. This must be done in such a way

• 1) that the exercise of their rights by certain citizens does not obstruct other citizens in the exercise of theirs;
• 2) that the individual, standing upon (their) own rights, does not impede others in the performance of their duties;
• 3) that the rights of all be effectively safeguarded, and completely restored if they have been violated.( Cf. Pius XI’s encyclical letter Divini Redemptoris, AAS 29 (1937) 81, and Pius XII’s broadcast message, Christmas 1942, AAS 35 (1943) 9-24)

Note that a serious consideration of duties in addition to rights widens the equation a bit. An individual’s rights do not extend to impede the rights–or even the duties–of other citizens.

As Christians struggle with the legal reality of a phenomenon of same-sex unions, this principle seems to come into play. Do people who see themselves as morally upright really have options in withholding publicly offered services to LGBT couples? It might be easy enough for me to say “no,” as the services I offer are connected with the Church’s sacramental life. And for the present, I have no interaction with couples of the same sex in marriage preparation.

On the other hand, if I were a florist, and offered a public business to the community, could I deny services for a same-sex union ceremony? If I were standing on a moral high ground, as it were, would I not be obligated to subject all prospective clients to moral scrutiny: sex outside of marriage, previous divorce, couples with open sexual habits? If not, why would I be singling out lesbian and gay couples? Because it was obvious to me? Or because I was lazy? Would I stay in business if I applied the same standard of morality to all potential clients? Or can I get away with a public opposition to LGBT clients because they formed a small fraction of my potential clientele?

At any rate, this section deals more with the action of governments in respecting rights. A government is responsible for overseeing that all citizens respect the rights of their sister and brother citizens, and to watch carefully that boundary where the exercise of one might violate the other.

Your thoughts?

 

FBV 38

Our second match-up of the Numinous Nine features our second consecutive Luke-John pairing. The wild card today is Galatians. Saint Paul has only four poll successes out of twenty so far, so we’ll see if our equality before God has any legs:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And from the beginning of one Gospel …

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

… to the end of another …

“Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?”

… these are your verses to consider.

Vote away:

 

A New Dictatorship

Pope Benedict’s “Dictatorship of Relativism” always struck me as a soft adversary. Relativism, as I understand the broad sense of it, is often used as an excuse by some people who otherwise have good intentions. Even the deeply religious Catholic. We explain away war by making it just. We dodge the excesses of hierarchy with encrusted excuses. Some nebulous greater good insulates prelates from consequences for common sins. And those same someones have the nerve to preach a lack of a sense of sin to the laity.

With Pope Francis, I detected in his address to ambassadors today, a new dictatorship. This is one that will be far less elusive. And it’s a cruelty and oppression which is very real for hundreds of millions in our world. If not more.

Consequently the financial crisis which we are experiencing makes us forget that its ultimate origin is to be found in a profound human crisis. In the denial of the primacy of human beings! We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.

The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces (a person) to one of (their) needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away.

The dictatorship of an inhumane economy. Now that’s a real dragon.

Money has to serve, not to rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them. The Pope appeals for disinterested solidarity and for a return to person-centred ethics in the world of finance and economics.

Rock mentioned this was one of the few times the Holy Father has referred to himself as “the Pope.” That’s the kind of Pope we need today.

 

Invoking the Trinity for Someone

I have a quick bicycle commute to the parish from home. It takes me about eight minutes in the morning, as it’s largely downhill. Then I sweat a bit on the 11-minute return leg. My legs feel good after a winter and wintry spring of mostly inactivity.

During Lent, I turned off the car radio. I’ve largely kept to that discipline these Fifty Days, as I try to remember people in prayer.

Intercessory prayer has never been one of my strong points. One, I forget. Two, in my parish, I recruit people to write them up for Sunday Mass. When someone forgets, I usually go to the prayer from three years prior. I’ll make a few edits and drop in the old petitions as if they were new. Three, I don’t like to ask for help.

On that last bit, I don’t know that it’s a guy thing as much as a me-thing. I remember reading somewhere early in my Catholic life that God knows what we need before we utter it as a request:

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. (Psalm 139:4)

A few times, when someone has asked me to pray for them, and I’ve neglected or forgotten, a bad thing happens. They come to me and thank me for my prayers. I figure God is timeless in a sort of science fiction-y time travel way. So I then pray for the person, even though they’ve weathered the storm of their crisis. God sees all moments of all time as a unity, so what can be harmed by presuming on God’s pre-eminence in the fourth dimension?

That said, this is a matter where I can see a little more discipline will be helpful. On the parish staff, each of us was assigned a prayer-partner this year. I got one of our newbies, so that seemed important to remember. I put it on my to-do list, cycled every three days. Mostly successful, it was. But I needed a little more.

During Lent, I tried to remember people by inserting their names in the Hail Mary when I prayed it. I found a decade covered my close family: wife, young miss, my mother, my brother and his wife, their three kids, my sister, and my widowed sister-in-law. My staff colleagues took another decade-and-a-half. Parishioners filled out the rest. More often, I would just pray this altered Hail Mary ending:

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for N, now and all the days of her/his life.

But I was thinking it would be good to have a rote prayer for that daily bike roundtrip. Since the Holy Spirit is much on our minds these days, and the Trinity beckons in another weekend, what if I composed a brief intercessory prayer for people? Something like this:

Loving Father, you have made N and adopted her/him as your very own.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on her/him.
Come Holy Spirit, fill her/his heart with faith and the fire of your love.

I’ve found I stumble over the words a bit. Probably need to get into a rhythm as I avoid potholes and traffic and such.

But a curiosity among other believers reading this, Catholic or otherwise. How do you pray for others? Do you find it enough to keep the person in mind as you pray regularly? I like to image the face of the person, but that’s more difficult when I’m operating a vehicle. And maybe I’m trying to accomplish too much on that nineteen minutes a day. On the other hand, even the uphill trek home has sailed by this week.

 

FBV 37

The Numinous Nine are set. Over the next three days, we’ll get a chance to whittle nine Scripture verses into a final Trinity. The pairings include Saturday’s: 1 Cor 13:13/Ps 46:11a/Mt 11:28 and tomorrow’s Jn 1:1/Lk 24:32b/Gal 3:28

Today’s trio includes another Luke/John matchup, but with a Psalm verse thrown in.

From the raising of Lazarus in the fourth Gospel, a close winner over Micah:

Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live.”

The good thief entered paradise, and also our penultimate round:

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

And the Psalmist urges us:

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear?

Should the Psalmist fear being eliminated by one of two Gospel passages? Vote, then check it Sunday morning.

 

Pacem In Terris 60-61: Upholding Rights and Duties of Individuals

Pope Pius XII supplies today’s thought, that a government that ignores or violates personal rights and duties has abrogated its authority:

60. It is generally accepted today that the common good is best safeguarded when personal rights and duties are guaranteed. The chief concern of civil authorities must therefore be to ensure that these rights are recognized, respected, co-ordinated, defended and promoted, and that each individual is enabled to perform his duties more easily. For “to safeguard the inviolable rights of the human person, and to facilitate the performance of (their) duties, is the principal duty of every public authority.”( Cf. Pius XII’s broadcast message, Pentecost, June 1, 1941, AAS 33 (1941) 200)

61. Thus any government which refused to recognize human rights or acted in violation of them, would not only fail in its duty; its decrees would be wholly lacking in binding force.( Cf. Pius XI’s encyclical letter Mit brennender Sorge, AAS 29 (1937) 159, and his encyclical Divini Redemptoris, AAS 29 (1937) 79; and Pius XII’s broadcast message, Christmas 1942, AAS 35 (1943) 9-24)

 

Retirement Bad?

Is retirement really bad, or is this a gentle nudge by our Corporate Masters to convince us that grinding away to our graves is a personally healthy thing? You’ll notice it’s on the BBC Business page. Not in the health and fitness section.

In my mid-fifties, I’m probably a little bit more than halfway to my retirement, which might take place in my 70′s. I can’t imagine not being active in some way. Many of the retired folks I see in parishes are quite active: serving at Mass, serving the poor. A few of them are as hard to pin down as students. Throw in frequent trips to see grandchildren, and these people are as active and seem as healthy as anyone I know.

Does this finding cast doubt on the pro-life cred in this diocese, for this initiative?

The question for the worker and employer is naturally: Will management be flexible to the needs of the older employee, and what is optimal for her or his health? This isn’t about seventy-somethings flipping burgers with teenagers at the supermall’s fast food joint. This remains a matter of making a substantive and positive contribution to society. Even if a corporation isn’t writing the check while making demands.