The national party conventions have ended, the parties have nominated their presidential candidates and the election season is entering its final weeks.
It is a good time for us to pray for our country and reflect on our duties as citizens and believers.
The Scriptures teach us that we “no lasting city“Here on earth. Our citizenship is in heaven and we seek the future city.
But as the prophet Jeremiah reminded the Israelites in Babylonian exile, we are called to the welfare of the earthly city in which we live.
The early Christians prayed for their political leaders, blessed those who opposed them, and responded to the evil around them by doing good.
Even in the face of hatred and persecution, they never compromised their faith or the teachings of Jesus.”We must obey God rather than men”, they said.
The Acts of the Apostles is the blueprint of the first evangelization. It should continue to be our blueprint.
In this we see how the first believers refused to adapt to the spirit of the times or the fashions of the culture. preached the word emphaticallyin season and out of season.
At Ephesusthey challenged the idols of economy and society; AthensThey took up the ideals of the cultural and intellectual elites.
In the Acts of the Apostles, the opponents of the Church complain that the disciples “ has turned the world upside down.”
The early Christians never tried to change the world through power or violence, but they turned the world upside down by proclaiming and practicing values and virtues that the world had never seen before.
They proclaimed that God loves us and that He wants us to love others as He loves us. They practiced mercy and compassion, especially toward the weak. They even loved their enemies and taught that we should care for everyone, even those outside our “group.”
Today we take these ideas for granted, but they came into the world with Jesus and were first spread by his church.
The early church was the first to proclaim the sanctity of all human life.
Athenagoras, a Christian layman, wrote to Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century: “For we consider the fetus in the womb as a created being and therefore an object of God’s care.”
These early Christians were willing to die for their faith and their right to live according to their faith. Religious freedom was another new idea that the church brought into the world.
Sometimes we think that our world today is so complicated that it is impossible to live our faith with the same clarity as the first Christians.
But our challenges are the same and our mission remains.
This year, the U.S. bishops have again provided us with excellent resources to help us reflect on our duties as citizens and disciples of Christ. I highly recommend you visit their website (usccb.org).
I also invite you to reflect on the passages of the Catechism on respect for human life (no. 2258–2330), on the person and society (nos. 1877–1948) and on Catholic social teaching (nos. 2419–2449).
Catholics are not a political party or a voting bloc; we have no political program.
But Jesus has called all of us through baptism to continue the mission of those early Christians: to spread the values and ideals of the Gospel in our society.
In our time, this means that we must defend human dignity from conception to natural death, and that we must defend the freedom and equality of every human being, regardless of race or origin.
We are called to make the world more like the way God created it.
This means being good stewards of creation. It means building a society in which men and women have jobs that allow them to live a dignified life, to marry and have children, and in which they know that they are protected when they become disabled, sick or old.
There is a beautiful letter from the early church that says:What the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.”
This is how we must think about our lives. We are the “soul” of the world.
Each of us can bring the love of Christ into every area of our lives and spread His joy and peace in our dealings with our neighbors, in our work and in our participation in society.
This is how the first Christians lived. And this is how we can turn the world upside down again in our time.
Pray for me and I will pray for you.
And let us entrust these coming weeks to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Patron Saint of this great country.
