Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 4:
Catholics are liable to be influenced by their Church at all times, not only in times of national crisis. What would be the use of any religion if its adherents were not liable to be influenced by it? Never, however, does the religion of a Catholic conflict with any genuine obligations of loyalty to his country. It urges fidelity to those obligations. And so far from dreading lest Catholics should be influenced by their Church, the State authorities in our country deliberately appoints Catholic chaplains that Catholic soldiers, sailors and air-men may still be influenced by their Church and have the opportunity to fulfill their religious duties.
Catholics have, not a divided allegiance, but a twofold allegiance, to God and to their country. So has every conscientious religious man.
Are you talking religion or politics? Or are you hopelessly mixing them both? From the viewpoint of politics, Catholics owe no allegiance to any foreign power. They owe allegiance to their country only. From the viewpoint of religion they again owe no allegiance to any foreigner. They owe religious obedience to the Pope; but religiously the Pope is not a foreigner to them. He is a fellow Catholic. According to Christian teaching all who believe in Christ, love Christ and serve Christ are members of Christ. How can members of Christ be foreigners to one another? Or will you refuse to recognize as a fellow Christian any Christian who has not the same national blood in his veins as your own?
They are not only able to do so; they are obliged to serve both their country and their Church. And the Church herself tells Catholics that their duties to her can never really conflict with their duties to their country. For the Catholic religion acknowledges the divine authority both of the Church in the things that are God's, and of the State in the things that are Caesar's.
To owe allegiance to a foreign power as well as to our own country would mean trying to serve two masters. It would also be a violation of Catholic principles concerning the duty of citizens to give undivided loyalty to their own country and to its just laws.
That is true. But it is also true that, when the case came before the Court on August 23, 1950, Mr. Justice Fullagar declared Crittenden's case to be "vexatious, intolerant, and an abuse of the Court's processes, which had no prospect of success whatever." And he ordered the petition to be struck out and proceedings concerning it to be "forever stayed." His declaration that such efforts to prove Australian Catholics to be subjects of a foreign power cannot possibly be sustained in law ought to settle once and for all the absurd charge against Catholics of divided political allegiance. In America, in February, 1953, Paul Blanshard was guilty of crass folly similar to that of Crittenden here in Australia. Blanshard demanded that the American citizenship of Archbishop Gerald P. O'Hara be revoked because he had been appointed by a "foreign power," that of the Pope, as Papal Nuntio to Dublin. The State Department rejected his demand declaring that Papal representatives make no oath of political allegiance to the Pope before taking up their ecclesiastical duties.
Firstly, Bishop Moyes, during his visit to U. S. A. and Canada, moved chiefly in Protestant religious circles, meeting people subject to the same religious prejudices as himself. Secondly, it is necessary to ask whether the "suspicions" and "fears" of which he speaks were justified. I maintain that they were not. Thirdly, by making such statements the Bishop only fosters suspicion, fear and misunderstandings among Protestants, to their own harm and to the regret of Catholics.
I deny that the charge is true in the sense in which Bishop Moyes intended it. I admit the charge from the spiritual point of view. As the kingdom of Christ in this world, not as a worldly kingdom setting itself up as a rival to earthly kingdoms, the Catholic Church claims the religious obedience of her subjects as distinct from their political allegiance to their country. The only alternative to that is either to abolish religion altogether, or to identify Church and State, insisting on one and the same allegiance, spiritual and political, to a national power. That would be to confuse religion and nationalism. And the more people think of religion in terms of politics, the more ready they are to attack the Catholic Church which positively refuses to identify the two. Little as Bishop Moyes realizes it, he is making the same unjustified charges against the Catholic Church as the Jews brought against Christ Himself before Pilate. For the spiritual kingdom Christ established was made the occasion of the charge that He was setting up a "kingdom within a kingdom," a rival earthly kingdom to that of Caesar. The answer to that charge, which Bishop Moyes knows quite well, is the answer to his own charges against the Catholic Church.
Not necessarily. In purely temporal matters, social or political interests might have to come first. Thus, because the "civic good" requiring the widening of a highway in N. S. W. cutting right through a Catholic Church property and the destruction of one of our oldest Catholic Churches, a treasured heirloom from the past and one very much still in use, the Catholic Church authorities decided that the civic good came first. Again, when war with some other country in which the temporal welfare of the Catholic Church in that country is threatened becomes necessary, Catholics are free to volunteer for the campaign against that country.
In religious and moral matters, yes. And from that point of view every man who has a religion necessarily has two allegiances, unless his religion is one of straight-out "Statolatry" - a blind worship of the State which acknowledges no higher law anywhere above the decrees of temporal rulers. Will not you yourself say that if a State makes a law opposed to the Commandments of God, a citizen must obey God rather than man? That principle holds whether the Will of God is made known to a man by the reading of the Bible as the Word of God, or by the teaching of J his Church if he has faith in the authority of his Church to teach in the name of God. The position is the same for sincere Protestants and sincere I Catholics in this matter. In Germany, under Nazi persecution, both Protestants and Catholics insisted that there was a law higher than that of the State, insisted that they had to obey God rather than man, defied civil law, and paid the penalty in concentration camps. Surely it is evident that your attitude in this matter is based solely upon anti-Catholic prejudice.
"THAT CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Radio Analysis"
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