A priest friend told me that he gave a sermon at Mass in which he explained that in Christian teaching, God has an internal life, a life that manifests itself in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
To his surprise, days later a parishioner accused this priest before his pastor of being “anti-Jewish” because he explained the Catholic teaching of the New Testament on the nature of God. Many a clergyman in Washington and elsewhere have likewise been quietly told not to invoke the Christian God at public invocations. Keep it general. Rights before duties.
Logically, freedom of religion should mean that the invited clergy-man is free to pray after the manner of his own faith, not after the sanitized wordings that represent no specific religion. Otherwise, prayer cannot be honest or authentic. Tolerance means “I listen to your prayers,” not “you can only pray in the vapid way approved by politics or opinion.”
The conflict between revelation and politics is whether politics will allow revelation to state what it is, what it holds. The state wants to censor prayers lest they be unsettling to legislators, themselves defining good and evil. Religion has a political restriction. Certain things cannot be preached in private and even fewer things in public if those present “disagree” with what is taught.
In this regard, the case of the Reverend Joseph Wright of Wichita is instructive. Wright is an Evangelical minister who was asked by his local legislator, a parishioner, to deliver the invocation before the Kansas legislature. This honor is a feature of American legislatures, including the federal legislature. Generally there are certain restrictions, about which the minister or priest or rabbi is informed before he can present himself.
The Reverend Wright wrote his prayer in about a half-hour to give the following day before the Kansas Assembly. His invocation has since become famous. He said many things that few clergy are saying these days. But he really did not say anything that we should prohibit a clergyman from saying, unless we are now in effect making our politics the criterion of our religion, which of course is precisely what we are doing.
Wright’s prayer began with a petition of forgiveness and divine direction. “We know your Word says, Woe to those who call evil good,” he continued, “but that’s exactly what we’ve done . . . We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your Word and called it moral plural-ism. We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism. We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.”
Wright went on to cover most of the contradictions between what we now do “by right” and what is taught in the faith. His prayer was subsequently read in other legislatures—in Colorado, in Utah, in Nebraska. Needless to say, Wright was recalling things that are seldom articulated in the halls of our legislatures. Some people naturally were pleased and thought it about time that someone called for the truth. Actually, Wright said nothing that John Paul II did not already say in Veritatis Splendor or before the United Nations, with pretty much the same hostile reaction. Many simply reject the truth or its possibility.
A Republican lady in the Colorado legislature called the prayer “divisive,” what else? Apparently, in the Colorado Legislature a paper is given to prospective clergy informing them that before them is an “ecumenical group.” No doubt this is the first time in history that a political assembly has been called precisely “an ecumenical group”! Others, in outrage, have tried to abolish the tradition of praying before sessions at all, lest they have to hear about absolutes. Today “ecumenism” is coming to mean that believers must conform to the least common denominator. Religion is thus stripped of any bite.
Wright observed that people rarely hear anything about absolutes in the mainline churches, however hungry people are for such truths. I like Wright’s response: “I’m a preacher at an evangelical church. What else would they expect from me? I don’t know if they were just looking for platitudes . . . but there are absolutes, and God has called me to preach the truth. Naturally, any time you preach absolutes, you’re going to offend some people.”
I read this column just before Pentecost when Mass readings were from the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul went from place to place speaking in synagogues and fora. He spoke the truth. Sometimes he was listened to; sometimes he was driven out of town. Now the same thing has happened in Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and Nebraska.