As we celebrate Thanksgiving, we experience a renewed sense of gratitude for so many things — our families, friends and the gift of our faith, to name but a few.
We Have Received a Great Heritage
Truly, our faith is a gift from God, infused in us at the moment of our baptism. By faith, we believe all that God has revealed to us, and we entrust ourselves to Him wholeheartedly, with a generous “yes,” not only of our minds and wills, but of our entire lives. The faith we believe, celebrate and live each day is a heritage handed on within the Church from one generation to the next. It includes all that is necessary for us to believe and all that is necessary for us to live as disciples of Christ Jesus. Indeed, faith and life cannot be separated from each other. How we live should reflect what we believe, and what we believe should guide how we live.
Moral values are among the gifts that we can be grateful for as baptized Christians. Rooted in the Gospel and in the natural moral law, our moral values — what the Catechism calls “our moral life in Christ” and indeed the entire deposit of faith — keep us from being, in the words of St. Paul, “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14).
When Good Competes With Good
Yet there are so many values which call for our attention. On a personal level, we can sometimes be torn, for example, between time spent at work versus time spent at home with the family. On a societal level, we can be caught between the value of privacy and the free exchange of information in a democratic and open society. On the international level, we can understand the value of defending our national security by armed force if necessary, but we also understand the value of proposing and working for non-violent solutions to conflicts. How do we make sense of these at times competing values?
As Catholics, we recall that God has created us, men and women, in His own image, and He sent His own Son to redeem us. What God has done for us bestows upon all humanity a dignity which provides the only sure basis for human rights. Men and women demonstrate that dignity when they respond to God’s love and act according to His law.
A Foundation of Dignity
The foundation for all of the rights we enjoy is the recognition of our dignity as persons. In turn, this recognition calls each of us to work for the preservation and promotion of the most fundamental of our moral values: the protection of human life, the promotion of marriage and family life, the pursuit of social justice and the practice of global solidarity. These values are all based upon the dignity of the person and upon the objective character of the moral law. There is no Catholic social teaching independent of the essentially personal nature of Christian ethics. We must bring to society a sound personal morality, based on natural and divine revealed moral law, if a just society is to be built. Morality is what God wants; only if we follow in Christ’s way can we be truly happy and build a just and loving society.
As we enter into this season of Thanksgiving, I hope you will join with me in gratitude not only for our family and friends, but also for the heritage of our faith and moral teaching. Please God this gratitude will spill over into a deepened acquaintance with Catholic social teaching. The recent Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, released by the Holy See, can aid us in coming to know and live better our Catholic doctrine concerning the person and society. In this way, each of us can “be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). That hope is rooted in our faith. With you, I thank God for the gift of faith which He has so graciously and lovingly given to us! It remains the source of our life!
Paul S. Loverde is the bishop of the diocese of Arlington, Virginia.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
