The Duty of Catholic Citizens to Ensure Religious Liberty

What is our duty as Catholic citizens? The obvious answer that we think of, especially in more recent times with the erosion of religious liberty, is that we are to work toward maintaining our rights as Catholics in our society. This has been focused on changing the laws so that we can counter the culture of death. There is a far more important side to our duty as Catholics: We must attempt to convert the culture that we live in. Changing the laws to ensure religious liberty is wonderful, but without converting this culture of death that leads to the erosion of religious liberty, religious persecution will always be knocking at the door.

Think of the culture as a mosaic poster; a bunch or small pictures put together to make a big picture.

The little pictures are the lives of each person in society, and the big picture is society as a whole. We can change the big picture by moving all the little pictures around, or we can change the big picture by changing each of the little pictures.

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But if the pictures are just moved, but not actually changed, they can move back easily to their former positions. If they are actually changed, it is not as easy for them to do this. Instead of changing the society from the top down, we have to change it from the bottom up. The culture isn't changed by the law; the law is changed by the culture.

How can we convert this culture? We have to live out the Faith.

Not just as what we do on Sunday, but as an integral part of our lives, indeed, as the center of our lives. We can do this using the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, as a model.

Faith comes first. Faith is our trust in God. Oftentimes, we think we have to control everything around us to “make sure" that it will come out right. If our faith is in God, we trust that He will make it all come out right in the end. A big part of this is in trusting other people. We should trust other people, because if everything is in God's hands, then we don't need to control and monitor everything around us to make sure everything is going well. That is all in God's hands.

Next is hope. Hope is optimism. We should have hope that we can have a better future, both in individual matters in our lives and in the area of the way Catholicism is treated by the law. Instead of despairing and assuming that it will our come out badly, we should have the hope that it will come out right, if we each bear down and do our part.

Last, but probably most important, comes charity. What this comes down to, on the day- to-day level, is being happy that the people we interact with are alive and putting that into action by working to make their lives better. If we can put these three theological virtues into action, we can convert the culture. The way they think about us is deeply affected by how we treat them, and so we must treat them well. If we do this, then we cannot fail to convert the culture.