“Repay to Caesar What Belongs to Caesar, and to God What Belongs to God”
(Mt 22:21)
Fr. Francis Nguyen, O.P.
Dear Sisters
and Brothers in Christ,
There are
always tensions, and sometimes conflicts, in the relation between the Kingdom
of God and the kingdom of man.
Separation of the State and the Church can be realized without difficulty
in principle. It is rather complicated
when we deal with this issue in certain concrete circumstances.
Tensions
become, on the one hand, visible and touchable where the Church is regarded as
a threat to the State. The State tries
to keep the Church under control, or at least limit the latter’s power and
influences. This often happens in
dictatorial and totalitarian regimes.
The Church in such situation is deprived of means necessary for its
ministry and mission in worshipping God and serving man. Christians, treated as second-class citizens,
suffer countless forms of injustice and repression. They are not given equal opportunities to
take part in the building of the country.
Serious abuses of power by the State against Christians’ basic rights,
the most important of which is the right to worshipping God, are deceitfully
covered up by unlawful decrees. As a
result, the Church cannot but fight for its freedom.
The Church, on
the other, by being involved too much into politics neglects its duty to preach
the Good News of Christ. It turns worse
that the Church, once being sunk in the thirst for possession and dominion,
compromises moral values, even faith in Christ’s saving truth. The Church, in such a role, sides with the
State—the rich and the powerful—and abandons the poor and the oppressed.
History
gives evidences numerous and strong enough to convince people that whenever the
Church is politically more powerful, it becomes less effective in terms of
being witness to the saving power of the Crucified Christ.
“Repay to
Caesar What Belongs to Caesar, and to God What Belongs to God”, in the context
of the perennial tensions between the State and the Church, would rather be
aimed at reminding the Church to honor its mission to build the Kingdom of God
than at asking the State to respect God’s rights which He always has and which
no one can take away from Him.
This is also
a reminder to Christians as individuals who, in their everyday life, find it
hard to reconcile their double duties: that of worshipping God and that of
serving man. Similar to how to perfectly
observe the commandment of love, which consists of loving God as the heart, the
soul of the commandment, and of loving neighbor as the structure, the body of
the commandment, the building of God’s Kingdom gives the raison d’être—the reason for being—of the building of the kingdom
of man, which, in turn, becomes the visible and touchable form of efforts to
build God’s Reign, right now on earth.
“Repay
to Caesar What Belongs to Caesar, and to God What Belongs to God” demands that
we be honest in living up to our call to be critically good and responsible
citizens of both City of God and City of man.
Fr. Francis Nguyen, O.P.
