“The Lord reigns; the peoples tremble! He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! The Lord is great in Zion; he is exalted over all the peoples” (Ps. 99:1-3). There is nothing and no one that is outside of the authority of God. As the well-known African-American spiritual puts it: “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” We are fortunate indeed that the Al-Mighty God is also the All-Good God who loves reason and order. He created all things within his loving plan, and he designed the universe to be intelligible to us creatures by the light of reason.

As a just ruler, God governs through divine law, a reasonable command aimed at the common good. This divine law he placed in the human heart as the natural law which teaches them to avoid evil and choose good. After the Fall, as societies of humans grew and spread over the earth, authority was exercised within families (Gen. 3:16, Ex. 20:12), within villages, up to kings and emperors. Each exercised this authority either well or poorly through civil law: parents to children, elders to villagers, kings and emperors to subjects. Yet all their authority ultimately came from God who designed the earth and human society to be this way. Even when they exercised it imperfectly, each ancient society recognized the existence of a divine authority to which they would have to answer.

The Enlightenment (16th-18th c.) changed this paradigm dramatically by promoting a conception of human society independent of God and religion. Authority comes through the consent of the governed, and civil laws are made based on social norms for good behavior rather than God’s eternal law. This conception is not only incorrect but corrosive to society. As I mentioned last week, without objective truth or morality there’s no guarantee that civil laws will be just or promote the common good (abortion and segregation are just two examples). Without God’s judgment over earthly rulers, there are precious few restraints to the greed and violence to which people with absolute power gravitate. The Catholic vision of God’s authority does not require a Catholic monarchy or a Congress of solely Catholics. It does mean that while the spheres of civil government and the Church remain distinct, civil authorities should govern and enact laws in accordance with the natural law implanted in their hearts by God and should seek out the Church’s wisdom because only God’s revealed religion recognizes humanity’s origin and destiny in God.

We as Catholics should strive to bring all aspects of our life and society as a whole under God’s reign. This is what we pray for each time we say the Our Father: “Thy kingdom, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It means knowing God’s word and his commands, learning the Church’s vision for society (through these articles), and not being afraid to bring our faith into the public square.

-Fr. Stephen