“Give back to Caesar what belong to Caesar – and to God what belongs to
God.” What do you think that means? Well, you might say, it’s saying that
we have to both good citizens here on earth, and also citizens of heaven:
we have duties to our country and to the Lord. We have to be good citizens,
so that includes things like paying our taxes and not speeding, and we’re
also supposed to put God first in all things, which is why we are here
tonight/today. Job done. You can stop preaching now, Father.
But what about areas of overlap, or even conflict? A while ago, the French
President, Emmanuel Macron, didn’t like what one of the French Catholic
bishops had said: that the law of God takes precedence over the law of the
state when there is a conflict. Monsieur le president disagreed, saying that
in France, the law of the state is supreme. But he was wrong. Normally,
there is no conflict, but when there is, if the law is seriously and definitely
unjust, then we can, and indeed should, disobey it.
A classic example would be at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the
Second World War, where “I was just following orders” was considered to
be no excuse. For something even more scary, take this quote from
Hermann Goering, one of the top men in the Nazi regime: “I have no
conscience. Adolf Hitler is my conscience.” From this it follows that any
state, if it makes a law or a rule of some sort that goes against human rights
and the moral teaching of the Church, then it can and should be ignored.
Since the Second World War, we also had this problem in Communist
countries. The state officially didn’t believe in God, and what happened as
a result was that the state tried to be God. Pictures of Jesus and Mary were
replaced with pictures of the dictator. Instead of God being the moral
authority and seeing everything you do, now it became the state, complete
with their network of spies. It was joked that after communism fell in East
Germany, those working in the secret service then got jobs driving taxis.
You didn’t need to tell them your address: just give the driver your name
and he’ll know where you live.
So, yes, even the state has its limits, and it’s not infallible either. But that’s
not an excuse for always ignoring the law.
The first reading, as it often is, was from the Old Testament, and so many
of the details don’t make much sense to us, especially all the different
names we sometimes struggle to pronounce, never mind remember whether
that is the name of a person or a city. Mesopotamia? It could be the name
of a place, or it could be a nickname for someone who is good at messing
things up. So, to decode the first reading a bit, the king, Cyrus, is not a Jew,
so it would have been surprising for a citizen of Israel to hear the Lord
referring to a pagan king as “his anointed”. But Cyrus still has a purpose
that God wants him to carry out (I quote):
“It is for the sake of my servant Jacob,
of Israel my chosen one,
that I have called you by your name,
conferring a title though you do not know me.”
The important message, as far as we are concerned, is that God can work
through all sorts of people – the end of communism wasn’t just brought
about by practising Catholics, although we certainly helped. God can also
work through the state, whatever the imperfections of the present
administration.
I said the state is not infallible, which it isn’t. So, what about the Church?
Well, the Church does teach, without error, the whole of what Christ taught,
and has the gift of infallibility from the Holy Spirit. But, that doesn’t mean
that individual priests, like myself, can’t get things wrong sometimes. Or
you might have misunderstood what I said. The teaching in the Catechism
of the Catholic Church is what you need to follow, but the way Father tries
to put it across during Mass might sometimes leave something to be
desired. And the Pope, whilst he does have the ability to infallibly clarify
disputed areas of the faith or morals by a solemn act, doesn’t have that all
the time. So if you were to ask him what the football scores were going to
be that evening, he might get it wrong, although that also wouldn’t be an
issue of faith or morals.
“Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to
God.” Otherwise, we could arrive at: “Adolf Hitler is my conscience”.