Dear St. Rita Families,

            Do not forget to seek God first, especially in the midst of heightened political tensions. Whatever your thoughts about Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela, and whatever your thoughts about ICE in Minnesota, do not forget to seek God first, and to surrender your judgment of these things to His Law. Likewise, do not forget that your information and mine may or may not be accurate. The dust will settle eventually, and things will become clearer. That said, with the rise of AI usage, I come across more and more “information” that is not only fake, but obviously so, and yet could easily be mistaken for truth if one is either ideologically driven or simply not paying attention.

            In the case of Maduro and Venezuela, there are many cries of both jubilation and anger, and there is much confusion on the part of others who desire peace and resolution of the issues but are wondering if this is the right path. There is no question that Maduro has run a tyrannical government in Venezuela (ask the many who have fled the country to escape him), and there is no question that many of the drugs coming to our own country have come from or through Venezuela. You can see, here, the beginnings of the possibility of a just war. Justice in war, however, requires both Jus ad Bellum (Justice in Going to War) and Jus in Bello (Justice Within War). Therefore, engaging in an act of war against another country must fulfill both requirements. The simple point is that it is hard for a war to be totally just. Even the argument laid out by Dr. Feser in the linked article has to rely on appearances from the government, while we don’t necessarily have access to all the facts.

For the average Catholic, however, who is not involved in the particulars of an operation like this, the situation creates a certain interior complexity. While on the one hand, we rejoice in the victory of good over evil – for which a necessary prerequisite is justice – on the other hand, we remember both that Christ died for all, including those who may be justly killed, and that the means of accomplishing a good end may not always be good. Because we ourselves are complex beings, we can hold this tension interiorly, and we can distinguish our joy from our sorrow, responding to the situation accordingly. 

Something similar is true for the events in Minnesota. It is possible to be opposed to apparent massive fraud by immigrants and to desire resolution of the situation, and likewise to be saddened by the killing of a woman (who, it appears, was living in a homosexual relationship while raising her children) who opposed the methods being used by the government in a potentially harmful way. The point here, again, is that the complexity of the situation need not be glossed over for the sake of ideology or political loyalties. Our loyalty is to God, first, and He plays no favorites, shows no partiality, and does not bend His Law for any reason whatsoever.

The morality of a given act applies, you will recall, only to the person performing the act, and it is a partially interior and partially exterior reality. The exterior portion has to do with the “object” of the act. Is the act objectively wrong or not? Acts that are always objectively wrong are those which we call intrinsically evil – abortion, homosexual activity, murder, torture, contraception, and the like. There is not a circumstance that can make those acts good, though there are circumstances that may lessen their evil. The circumstances surrounding the act and the intention of the act-or are such considerations, but these considerations can also make an otherwise good act into an evil one instead. Take the act of killing, for instance. Killing (not the same as murder) can be objectively justified in certain very limited circumstances, e.g. self-defense, but even then, the state of my own heart (my intention) must be considered for that act to be morally justified for me. I am the one who will have to answer before God for that act, and so not only must the object of the act be morally good or neutral, but the circumstance and my own intention must also be good or neutral for the act itself to remain morally good or neutral.

You can see, then, that for a particular person in the public spotlight (take, for example, the ICE agent who killed the Renee Nicole Good), it can be very difficult to judge the circumstances and the intention that played into his decision to kill her. We, as Catholics, must not make rash judgments, though we ought always to be saddened by death. In addition, we can be saddened and frustrated by the apparent defrauding of our government and the American people by immigrants who do not necessarily share our values. In the conflict we are seeing at this moment in our country, we also see, then, the importance of the Gospel and of conversion. If our “gospel” is limited to basic economic security, then the vices that have affected mankind since our expulsion from Eden will go unattended to and ultimately unchecked, and we, not surprisingly, find ourselves seemingly stuck in the current mess of things.

Our final takeaway must be, then, that perennial message of the Christmas season. If you want true peace, you must desire conversion of hearts to the Prince of Peace, beginning with yours truly. I may not be able to do much about Minnesota or Venezuela, but I can do much for my family. Perhaps the peace on earth I desire won’t be all that visible in my lifetime, but I can willingly carry my Cross and so prepare a better future for those who come after me. That better future requires, however, your holiness and mine, that our sinful desires are subordinated to Christ, that we conquer them by His Grace, and that we faithfully witness that victory to others.

In Christ,

Fr. Christensen