Moral life is crucial to Christian discipleship.  The saving deed of God wrought in the resurrection of Jesus Christ leads first to proclamation and then to conforming our life to that of Jesus—a life of love of God, of self and of neighbor.   Moral life is not a duty-bound ‘doing the right’; it primarily is a generous and conscious behavior to the gift of redemption offered to us.  Moral behavior, then, expresses a life of human freedom, freedom from slavery to cravings and instead craft a “life well lived”.  

The Scriptures, especially the letter of St. Paul, are replete with instructions and exhortation to live a life “worthy of the calling to which [we] have been called.”  This is a life to be lived among the Christian disciples.  The extension of this moral behavior beyond the Christian community, into the world, is often difficult because one cannot expect the same kind of reciprocity from the world: kindness may not be given in returned; honesty may not be given in returned; modesty may not be valued; respect may not be given in returned.  

The moral behavior of Christians is being tried in some corners of the world: in Baghdad, in China, in Palestine (although less so this past year), and in Pakistan.  Church bombing and assaulting Christians in church have been frequent in the past few months.  What is the motive for these attacks?  The Christian communities have been heroic in their non-violent response, but it also is very challenging to endure this without any security or assurance of safety.   

In another corner of the world, much closer to us, Christian behavior extended into society faces a different challenge: a society that philosophically exalts the rule of law based on individual freedom.  The role of government is to extend maximum access to social goods (e.g, voting, rights to assemble, to speech, to legal defense) while not interfering with other social action (e.g., economics).   The prevailing Catholic philosophy of government differs from this in that it espouses a Greek (Aristotelian) notion of governing that makes citizens good, not just good citizens; there is an implicit understanding of what (who) good is.  This model collides at times with the modern Western politics of neutrality, especially moral neutral, because values will contend with one another.  A key difference is the fierce protection of individual choice by western governments, even if there is a preferred choice.  This is a moral issue for Christians (Catholics).

Now, would the Church do well to garner among her members the desire and discipline to ‘do the good’ as a public marker of what it means to be Catholic?  What if outsiders recognized us based on our consistent moral code of behavior?  Would that this was transparent!  It would mean that any data about crime, rape, abuse, larceny, murder, adultery, drunkenness, or malicious deeds would not include any (many) Catholics.  Is this too ideal?  Perhaps it is, but why should Catholics weigh in with the same frequency of malfeasance as others?  And if we do, how, then, do we differ from an atheist or a Communist or whatever?  

For the next few weeks, let’s muse about various issues that we face as American Catholics in our social context that is crafted mainly from the thought of John Locke, Thomas Jeffersonian, James Madison, and Milton Friedman, with a dash of social welfare.  I don’t have the answers.  Let us ponder/converse together…