Sage Advice from George Rutler

From Fr. George Rutler’s weekly column in the bulletin of the Church of Our Saviour, this time on removing references to God in our culture:

It would be easy to exploit this out of demagoguery, and some politicians do indeed like to pose righteously protesting against “the removal of God” from our culture. That kind of rhetoric itself betrays some insecurity about God’s ability to be God. God cannot be removed from anything because he is eternal and omnipresent. Attempts to marginalize God only marginalize those who try. The Catholic should understand this better than anyone, for the Holy Church outlives all nations and cultures. In the practical order, however, many nominal Catholics do not realize how they have been invaded by banal agnosticism and degraded by cultural mediocrity. Once in preparing a wedding, a bride from another part of the country wanted excerpts from Ernest Hemingway and Kahlil Gibran read as scripture in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Her reaction to my refusal was the indignation of an indulged youth who had never been denied access to a parallel universe of sentimental delights. It has been observed that even many self-styled Christians seek no Saviour for they do not know that there is anything to be saved from.

A presidential proclamation of Thanksgiving Day enshrines a civic obligation to the Divine Creator, but for some it is a vestigial tribute to custom, encroached by football and parades. No president is a pontiff, and civic prayers are only commentary on the Eucharistic duty of the stewards of God’s creation. So the Feast of Christ the King, which we celebrate today, puts all civic intuitions of God into perspective, and reminds us that Jesus was crowned with thorns by self-satisfied people who hymned their way to destruction by shouting, “We have no king but Caesar.”