The Church Can Avoid Parties. It Cannot Avoid Politics.

The Church can avoid political parties.

It cannot avoid politics.

The moment faith says a human life possesses dignity, somebody will eventually ask what that dignity should cost the state.

A hospital bed has a budget. Palliative care requires policy. Poverty survives through decisions. War arrives carrying official signatures. Even silence must pass through a polling booth.

During his recent visit to France, Pope Leo criticised the country’s new assisted-dying law. Asked whether he had entered politics, he drew a useful distinction: he had not joined French party politics; he was teaching what the Church believes.

That distinction matters.

A pulpit should not become a campaign office with better acoustics. Clergy should not baptise candidates, launder corruption with prayer or convert congregations into voting blocs for whoever donated the loudest generator.

But neutrality can also become a costume for cowardice.

When laws concern life, death, poverty, disability, migration, punishment or war, theology has already entered the room. The only question is whether it will speak carefully or hide behind the furniture.

At Lourdes, Leo argued that sick people do not lose dignity because pain has narrowed their horizon. He called for palliative care, research and accompaniment rather than abandonment disguised as compassion.

One may disagree with the Church’s conclusion. A secular state must not turn doctrine into legislation simply because a religious leader has spoken.

But separation of Church and state does not require the separation of conviction from citizenship.

Believers vote. Bishops speak. Atheists argue. Patients suffer. Legislators decide. Public life is precisely where competing visions of human dignity meet and discover that none arrived without assumptions.

The Church should therefore enter politics without becoming a party: defend principles, expose cruelty, submit its arguments to public reason and remain willing to rebuke the politician who sits on its preferred side.

Faith loses credibility when it becomes a party uniform.

It loses its conscience when it becomes silent.

Abraham Ikongshul Ashindortiang

Sources

Reuters: Pope Leo and France’s end-of-life law

Vatican: Pope Leo’s address to sick people and caregivers at Lourdes

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