You must all obey the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities were appointed by God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God’s decision, and such an act is bound to be punished. Good behavior is not afraid of magistrates; only criminals have anything to fear. If you want to live without being afraid of authority, you must live honestly and authority may even honor you. The state is there to serve God for your benefit. If you break the law, however, you may well have fear: The bearing of the sword has its significance. The authorities are there to serve God: They carry out God’s revenge by punishing wrongdoers. You must obey, therefore, not only because you are afraid of being punished, but also for conscience’s sake. [Romans 13:1-5 (Jerusalem Bible)]
As Terri Schiavo wastes away, many Christians will be righteously indignant (or, as the media will label them, angry), and in some hearts indignation at a cruel decision will metastasize into fury at the United States and Florida governments. One commentator has already called for “storming the Bastille”, that is, rescuing the victim by executive fiat despite the absence of legal authorization. Others, less vocal or excitable, will merely harbor dark thoughts about the virtues of civil disobedience.
Before giving way to such sentiments, we should reflect on the words of St. Paul. Is it an evil that the governing authorities have approved the death by starvation of a middle-aged woman and frustrated all attempts to save her? Suppose that they allowed parents to kill any infant who was judged “sickly”, or that fathers had unfettered power of life and death over most of those in their households, or that judges routinely ordered torture, flogging and cruel executions? Is it dismaying that Christianity is widely denounced as an improper basis for public policy? Suppose that merely naming oneself as a servant of Christ were a punishable offense?
Those suppositions were, of course, facts in the 1st Century Roman Empire. According to St. Paul, the officials who routinely perpetrated horrors greater than those inflicted on Terri Schiavo, “were appointed by God”, and resistance to their decrees was tantamount to “rebelling against God’s decision”. They were to be obeyed, not merely because defiance would lead to penalties but because conscience demanded it.
If the Apostle could write that about Caesar’s minions, a fortiori, it is true of duly elected or appointed officials of the United States and Florida. If conscience demanded acquiescence in the decisions promulgated by an absolute monarchy that excluded Christian opinion entirely, the force of that demand is magnified when the state is subject to popular control and allows Christians full freedom of speech. It is hard to accept an outcome that one believes to be drastically wrong, but conscience (as we too often forget these days, when “follow your conscience” and “do what feels good” are generally treated as synonymous) is the faculty that instructs us to do what we do not like.
Bowing to the wisdom of St. Paul does not mean spinelessly accepting tyranny. The duty to obey the constituted authorities is not man’s only duty. A “just rebellion” is no more unthinkable than a “just war”, but neither is the norm. Indeed, one need only contrast America, Florida judges and all, with Lebanon or Kyrgyzstan to see how frivolous it is to grumble that our government is undeserving of patriotic allegiance.
So let us respond to the Schiavo tragedy not with railing but with prayer, not with anger but with fasting, not with disobedience but with repentance. The evil done already is enough.
Your counsel, though generally wise, would lead one to believe that civil disobedience is never called for. There has to be a point at which civil disobedience is appropriate.
Surely you don't think Christians and Catholics who participated in the clearly civilly disobedient Orange Revolution in Ukraine were morally wrong? Surely you don't believe that the Christians, Jews, and Catholics who dominated Martin Luther King's civil disobedience were wrong, and that the moral thing for them to do was acquiesce?
I would think at some point even Paul would acknowledge that injustice done to others rises to a level where an devout Catholic MUST speak out and if necessary, disobey or face the wrath of God for not doing so. The millions of Catholics and Christians who perished along with their Jewish brethren in the Holocaust appear from here to be seated at the right hand of The Father for having resisted vs. those who went along and allowed the bodies to pile up.
Paul's verses from Romans make certain suppositions about the authorities that were not present in the case of Hitler's Germany, the Jim Crow South, or the corrupt Ukraine.
And how DID the Christians come to "triumph" in Rome if that is the right word? They did so when Constantine, a devout Catholic SEIZED POWER with military force in 306 AD and ended the persecutions.
I would submit that an obedient Catholic must prayerfully evaluate the situation to see if disobedience is appropriate. There has to be a point where the impulse and God/Paul's command to obey DULY appointed authority is overridden by the extreme sinfulness and tyranny of those who are NOT duly appointed or who are not properly carrying out their duties.
Of course I have wandered into the realm of the judiciary, which thinks it IS the law, and that its law is more important than that of mere presidents, legislators, and voters. Whether the Schiavo case is the time or the place to disobey these tyrants in robes is debatable. I would submit that someone viewing an abortion body count of 40 million plus and what appears to be a precedent for a new wave of euthanasia should not be dissuaded by Paul's words to the Romans into concluding that the time for the end of acquiescence has indeed come.
Me: As I said in my original post, civil obedience is not the only Christian duty. I don’t dispute that, under circumstances analogous to those for a just war, disobedience or rebellion can be justified, as they were in the Ukraine and are in Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan and would be in Zimbabwe. The contemporary United States is, however, very far from presenting such circumstances. In general, we live in a decent, civilized, humane and well-governed country, one that most men in most times and places would envy. It does harbor evils, of which the greatest is the legalization of feticide, but all earthly regimes are imperfect, and we have reasonable hopes of gradually reintroducing the protection of unborn human life in America. There is no reason to believe, and much reason to doubt, that violent or extra-constitutional means would bring about faster or better results than “working within the system”. In the absence, then, of strongly persuasive factors on the other side, we should pay heed to St. Paul and feel conscience-bound to obey the duly constituted authorities. (Another correspondent reminds me, in a message not for publication, that civil disobedience does not include exercising the right of free speech to bop the ungodly on the beak. Mocking the irrationality of anti-Schiavo polemics is wholly commendable.)
Posted by: Tom Blumer | Friday, March 25, 2005 at 05:27 PM
Religious power plays in the public arena worry me. No, let me restate that. They terrify me. Such exercises of power in government should terrify everyone. Religious assertions in the public arena should unnerve us to the core because of the long sordid history of intolerance, persecution, crusades, lynchings, torture and restrictions on human liberty and freedom such assertions have produced. How is it, I wonder, that our nation in particular seems to have forgotten that these very evils, and freedom from these evils, played the major role in why so many people began settling in this New World 300 years ago?
The people who want to keep Schiavo alive against her physicians’ prognosis, her husbands’ wishes, and the courts’ permissions, have been using terms like “defending life” or “supporting a culture of life” as their reason. Yet everyone knows that “defending life” is certain religious code for the belief in the “holiness,” if you will, of creation. Read Noonan's piece, she says exactly this. Creation is divine, the belief goes, and so its destruction should only be at the hands of its creator, not man.
But this kind of talk gives me the creeps and it should you too. Not because I can prove it wrong, I can’t. But in the United States there are not suppose to be any religious presumptions in the public arena. None. Mr. Schiavo had only a medical burden to overcome in court, not a religious one. Through the expert opinion of the physicians caring for his wife he met that burden. And yet just last week the Congress of the United States of America, in its self-ascribed role as defender of life, passed legislation attempting to enforce its interpretation of a religious principle. That is wrong. That is so far removed from the Republican party I support -- the one that believes in the principle of limited government and individual freedom -- that it's a freak to me, a monstrosity. For Noonan to call the sentiment of people like me "bizarre passion" makes me wonder if she and the people who agree with her have lost their minds.
Me: The fact that “religious power plays” in the Schiavo case have utterly failed does not seem to mitigate this commenter’s terror. I’m not sure that I can say anything to reassure so easily frightened a soul, but let me try:
Making judgements about whether Mrs. Schiavo’s parents should be permitted to take custody of her and keep her from starving to death requires forming an opinion on a number of issues, such as the value of the lives of severely incapacitated human beings, the degree of evidence needed to demonstrate that an individual desired to be killed if her quality of life diminished, and the extent to which one spouse should have unfettered authority to make decisions about the health care of the other. The commenter wants those judgements to be made without “religious assertions” of any kind, “because of the long sordid history of intolerance, persecution, crusades, lynchings, torture and restrictions on human liberty and freedom such assertions have produced”. But purely secular reasoning has its own sordid history, from the Jacobins’ reign of terror through Stalin and Mao. Perhaps the right way to proceed is to jettison all presuppositions and toss dice?
There is no way that anyone can avoid having a moral system that informs his views on public policy. Some of those systems may be so monstrous that a case can be made for expelling them from the public arena. That seems to be the position of many of our more ferocious secular leftists with regard to Christianity and Judaism, and there has historically been a similar strain within the Republican Party. Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), for instance, was a major Republican figure in the 1870’s, whose devotion to his version of “the principle of limited government and individual freedom” led him to regard Baptists and Roman Catholics as freaks and monstrosities. He fit into the Republican mainstream of his day, and his spirit persisted for a long time, one of the elements in the image of the party as the bulwark of hard-hearted materialism.
Anyway, I urge Mr. Ames to buck up and get over his childish fears. The theocrats are, after all, rallying behind the cause of giving too high a value to human life and are carrying out their tyrannical scheme by compelling judicial review of the decision to terminate a life. Would that Stalin had oppressed the kulaks by feeding their children and putting authority into the hands of an independent judiciary!
Posted by: Richard Ames | Friday, March 25, 2005 at 03:10 AM