A public church, not a partisan church
By George Weigel, First Things.
The temptation to ally the Church with a particular political party and its program is a perennial one, it seems. When that temptation is not resisted, it invariably leads to trouble—politically and, more importantly, evangelically. That was true in twentieth-century Quebec, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal; it is now a danger in twenty-first-century Poland, where a number of Polish bishops have identified the Church’s public interests with those of “Law and Justice,” the present governing party.
As I had been invited to speak to several groups in Poland at events marking the fortieth anniversary of John Paul II’s election, I thought it a good moment to raise some cautions about this, drawn from the teaching of Poland’s greatest son, in these terms:
As envisioned by John Paul II, the Church of the twenty-first century was neither an established Church nor a partisan Church: It was not a Church that sought to put state power or the mechanisms of a particular political party behind its truth claims. As the pope wrote in the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, “the Church proposes; she imposes nothing.” The Church asks, and if necessary the Church demands (as it did under communism), to be able to make its evangelical proposal in public; and the Church claims the right, as a civil society institution, to be a vigorous partner in the public debate. But the Church does not seek legal establishment, nor does it ally itself with any political party. Partisanship jeopardizes the independence of the Church and, even more importantly, partisanship reduces the Gospel to a political program…
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