The Vatican has made public its displeasure at the decision of a retired bishop to run in Paraguay's 2008 presidential elections... Canonic Law prohibits priests from participating in political parties or labour unions.
So it's not just our mob that are paranoid about involvement in politics, then; I didn't realise it was forbidden by Canon Law too. The problem, as I've mentioned before, is that withdrawing from political activity is itself a political act; it is declaring that the Church has nothing to say about the state of the world. Or worse, that it may have something to say about it, but it sure as hell doesn't want to get its hands dirty and do anything about it.
On other words, apathy or cowardice: take your pick.
The odd thing, if you look back into history a little, is that it was the evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who really had a serious social conscience about the state of the poor, about prison reform, about slavery, about public health, and actively became involved in politics, even becoming MPs, to do something about it. I'm talking about the Wilberforces, the Venns, Edward Eliot, Thomas Clarkson... all, of course, nearly two hundred years ago now. Because evangelicalism could only fight against its arch-enemy of liberalism by pulling away from involvement in the world and concentrating on a very narrow interpretation of salvation, the future salvation of the soul. The "social gospel" terrified us so much that we forgot about society altogther. It's just that, well, balance really isn't something we're very good at.
It's not a very good excuse, but there it is. For the Catholic Church, as in this Paraguay case... well, to be honest, I don't know what their excuse is. Maybe, and I'm speculating, it's a reaction against the abuses of Caesaropapism, when the Catholic Church was the political establishment. That didn't go well, and I can understand if the injunction on involvement with politics came as a corrective to that. But it is an overcorrective. I guess balance really isn't something they're very good at either.
In current thought, half the battle is won. The question "Should politics be part of religion?" is more or less settled in the affirmative by Christian theologians these days, thanks in part to the stuff that's been coming out of Latin America for the past fifty years. Not entirely coincidental about our man Fernando Lugo, then. But the other question "Should religion be part of politics?" is still troublesome, and comes up an awful lot when we look at the US.
In my mind, however, it's a very silly question. It's silly because it starts from the curious Enlightenment-era assumption that certain unprovable preferences (economic theory, political philosophy, social philosophy, etc.) are perfectly OK to hold in the public sphere, and perfectly OK for you to act upon - so long as you're consistent - whereas other unprovable preferences (religion, morals, etc.) are not fit for the public sphere and must not be acted upon. It is something of an arbitrary dichotomy, and, as far as I'm concerned, a very dangerous one.
News commentators are asking serious questions about whether America is ready for a Mormon president, and how the religious views of the current adminstration shape their work. But far more serious, and, as I said, far more dangerous in my mind are other, equally unprovable, preferences.
I see "Keynsian versus monetarist", or "capitalist versus socialist", or "neoconservative versus progressive", or "expansionist versus multilaterist", to be far more pertinent questions about political conduct than "Christian versus Mormon". It is the "public" preferences, the "reasonable" preferences, the ones it's OK for us to bring up and act upon, and not the religious ones, that are responsible for much more of the danger, the oppression, and the war that we see around us today. Should religion be part of politics? As much as anything else should be.
(Free reading comprehension, and a copy of the previous post, to the first commentator who thinks I'm condoning politicians using religion to justify doing crazy stuff.)
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