"Render unto Caesar ..."

Homily for the 29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A; Gospel; Matthew 22:15-21

Good Morning:        

            As I look at the calendar this morning I note that it is just over two weeks before Election Day. So this will be the last time I’ll have the opportunity to address you from this pulpit before that day. Four years ago I had the same opportunity to speak here just three weeks before the election. I remember what I said that day. I don’t intent to re-read that homily to you, but I do intent to draw on some of the things I said then.     

            In reflecting on the election we must understand that no matter how important the races are, neither the Church nor any of its ordained ministers can or should tell you who to vote for. That is not our role, and the decisions some bishops made to curb their clergy from electioneering from the pulpit is not out of line.

            But what we can advise you to do is to understand your duties as a citizen of God’s kingdom in conjunction with your obligations as citizens of the United States. So how do we determine how to vote? I think the obvious place to begin is with this morning’s Gospel: Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to him.

            “Render unto Caesar” is a phrase we have heard a lot. In today’s gospel reading we see another effort by the local Jewish establishment to trap Jesus.  The tax he was asked about was a head tax required of every man, woman and slave between the ages of 12 and 65 – it amounted to about a day’s wage and was the price of being a subject of the Roman Empire. 

            Now as you heard, there were two groups involved:  the Pharisees, who would have opposed paying the tax because to do so meant paying allegiance to the Roman emperor, and the Herodians who supported the tax and the Roman puppet King Herod. Thus, between the two factions there was no way in which Jesus could answer their question without condemning himself.

            But, as he had done before, Jesus gave an answer that was unexpected and told the crowd what really mattered: our ultimate allegiance belongs to God, our allegiance to the state is limited.

            Fast forward to today; what does this mean to us today in 21^st century America?

            Well, for many it was taken as an endorsement of the separation of Church and state.  Of course, the separation of Church and state is a modern concept; for much of Western history Church and state were interwoven.  But for the United States – with our history of religious tolerance – it was probably not a bad explanation; and in any event, few issues bridged the gap between Church and state – or between God and Caesar.

            Thus, we have always had a very patriotic Church, one willing to support our nation and willing to give its sons to protect it.  Our political involvement was limited to aspects of social and racial justice, and defending the right of conscience and religious freedom and we generally tended to adhere to the partisan beliefs of our parents, believing that God and Caesar could coexist nicely in America – and indeed they had.

            Times, however, change, and with that change many moral issues have become political ones.  As the Freedom Riders of the 60s found, when these issues arise it is our duty as Christians to bring Caesar to God and if there is a dispute between them, to do as Jesus suggested in the Gospel today: give our ultimate allegiance to God; for to do any less is to set Caesar as a rival to God and to cloak him with the robe of divinity as did the Romans – for the inscription on the coin given to Jesus read “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, high priest.”

            Thus as Christians we cannot retreat to the mantra of separation of Church and state and pronounce these issues “just politics” and evaluate them using the same considerations one would give to questions of road use taxes, arts funding, or monetary policy. 

            So the question that is posed to us is this:  Do we render to Caesar these basic questions of morality, or do we render them to God?  In short, what is it that belongs to God that must be reserved to him alone?

            Let’s start then from a simple, basic premise:  Life belongs to God; especially the innocent life of the child in the womb … for if we render that life to Caesar we have, in effect, revoked that right and have rendered every other human right contingent on the will of Caesar, not God.

            We are today engaged in exactly that struggle.  For under the guise of claiming the right to life to itself, our modern Caesar is now claiming the right to our conscience: dictating when and how Catholic institutions must react to its dictates.

            And it is happening. In New York, the governor signed an abortion law that permitted abortion of a baby even during the birthing process, before a crowd that gave him a standing ovation for so acting. New York is not alone, and across this great nation there are those who promise more liberal abortion laws, including the call for employers, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, to be forced to provide such services or to be forced out of business.

            In a like manner, today we are seeing forces of evil trying to use Caesar to close our churches and places of worship, many finding an excuse to do so in the pandemic that has disrupted our lives for the past nine months. Religious liberty is being attacked in some quarters as violation of the separation of God and Caesar. And I’m not thinking about isolated cases, these forces permeate our political landscape.

            Now many of you know that I am an attorney and part of what is loosely referred to as the Catholic media. I assist when I can on issues of religious liberty, I write a weekly column for the national Catholic newspaper The Wanderer, and I host a program on religious liberty weekly on Iowa Catholic Radio called “Faith On Trial.” 

            Every day my in-box is filled with new reports of secular forces trying to wrest the crown of divinity from God and to crown Caesar with it. Catholic and Christian groups are being banned and thrown off the campuses of public universities; local officials are using zoning laws to control access to churches and Christian facilities, and, of course, secular politicians who are protecting the chief architect of death, Planned Parenthood – some even going so far as to prosecute reporters who uncovered its horrendous business practices of illegally selling the parts of aborted babies.

            The problem can also be seen in those areas where Catholic adoption agencies have been forced to close because men have given Caesar the right to determine what a family is, and in hospitals where secular groups are trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and other medical procedures that violate the tenants of Catholic moral teaching. Here in the United States several courts have already held parts of Sacred Scripture to be “hate speech.” 

            As you know it is happening around the globe.  In Canada I could be arrested for the content of this homily; and in Europe, as I’ve mentioned before, a Protestant pastor, Ake Green, was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of preaching against same-sex relationships in a sermon he gave in his church to his congregation. 

            The point is, once we have ceded the basic issue of life to Caesar, there is nothing he will not be able to do.  We, as Catholics, must follow the example of Christ … he did not fear Pilate nor Caesar … he spoke the truth.  We cannot do less.

            Pope Benedict, summed up this problem in what he termed the “silent apostasy” – the inclination many of us have to stand back from the political fray – to look on these issues as private, dogmatic views that we can take or leave at will; or the fallacy that economic policies are somehow equivalent to or even trump the issue of life.

            We have come a long way to this point. I do not think that our grandparents ever had to face the moral choices we do today. And I think we have gotten here because somewhere – maybe in the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, or our support of costly overseas wars, or perhaps it was the abuse of capitalism and the rush to accumulate personal wealth and secular goods.

            But somehow we have sunk into a cesspool of moral relativism, where we have jettisoned the God who created us and placed the crown of divinity on a god which we ourselves have created.

            It’s time for us now – for the sake of our own souls to return to him who caused us to be. It is only then that our nation can be saved from the ravages of the cesspool which we have helped create.

            We are told in Scripture “If my people humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from Heaven and pardon their sins and heal their land.” In the few weeks before the election I would urge each of you to do just that. Come here, in our chapel, and sit with Our Lord, humbly seeking his healing for our ailing nation.

            And then when you vote, remember what belongs to God and do not surrender it to Caesar. That crown of divinity belongs to Jesus Christ and him only. And remember when you appear someday, as we all will, before the great heavenly choir, sitting on the throne of justice will NOT be the Divine Caesar.

Deacon Mike Manno

St. Augustin Parish, Des Moines, Iowa

October 18, 2020