Angelus News | September 6, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 18

NEW WORLD OF FAITH
ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ
Turning the world upside down
The national political conventions
have ended, the parties have
nominated their candidates for
president, and the election season is
entering its final weeks.
It is a good time for us to pray for our
country and reflect on our duties as
citizens and believers.
The Scriptures teach us that we have
“no lasting city” here on earth. Our
citizenship is in heaven and we seek the
city that is to come.
But as the prophet Jeremiah reminded
the Israelites when they were exiled in
Babylon, we are called to work for the
good of the earthly city in which we
live.
The early Christians prayed for civic
leaders. They blessed those who rejected
them, and responded to the evil
around them by doing good.
Even in the face of hatred and persecution,
they never compromised their
beliefs or Jesus’ teachings. “We must
obey God rather than men,” they said.
The Acts of the Apostles is the blueprint
of the first evangelization. It
should still be our blueprint.
In it, we see how the first believers
refused to be conformed to the spirit of
the age or the fashions of the culture.
They preached the word urgently, in
season and out of season.
At Ephesus, they challenged the idols
of the economy and society; at Athens,
they engaged the ideals of cultural and
intellectual elites.
In Acts, the Church’s opponents
complain that the disciples “have turned
the world upside down.”
The early Christians never tried to
change the world by using power or
violence, but they turned the world
upside down by proclaiming and practicing
values and virtues that the world
had never seen before.
They proclaimed that God loves us,
that he wants us to love others as he
loves us; they practiced mercy and
compassion, especially for the weak;
they loved even their enemies and
taught that we should care for everyone,
even those outside our “group.”
We take these ideas for granted now,
but they came into the world with Jesus
and were first spread by his Church.
The early Church was the first to
proclaim the sanctity of all human life.
Athenagoras, a Christian layman, wrote
this to the emperor Marcus Aurelius
in the second century: “For we regard
the very fetus in the womb as a created
being, and therefore an object of God’s
care.”
Those first Christians were willing to
die for their beliefs, and for their right
to live by their beliefs. Religious freedom
was another new idea the Church
brought into the world.
Sometimes we can think that our
world is so complicated now that it’s
impossible to live our faith with the
same clarity as those first Christians.
But our challenges are the same, and
our mission remains.
Once again this year, the U.S. bishops
have given us excellent resources to
help us reflect on our obligations as
citizens and followers of Christ. I urge
you to visit their website (usccb.org).
I also urge you to reflect on the
Catechism’s sections on respect for
human life (nos. 2258–2330), on the
person and society (nos. 1877–1948),
and on Catholic social doctrine (nos.
2419–2449).
Catholics are not a political party or a
voting bloc; we have no policy platform.
But we are called by Jesus, each of us
by baptism, to continue the mission of
those early Christians, the mission of
spreading the Gospel’s values and ideals
in our society.
In our day that means we must defend
Catholics are not a political party or a voting bloc;
we have no policy platform.
the dignity of the human person, from
conception to natural death, and we
must defend the freedom and equality
of every person, no matter what their
race or where they come from.
We are called to make this world more
like God created it to be.
That means being good stewards of
creation. It means building a society
where men and women have work that
enables them to lead a dignified life, to
get married and have children, and to
know they will have security if they are
disabled and when they are sick and
old.
There is a beautiful letter from the
early Church that says: “What the soul
is to the body, Christians are to the
world.”
This is how we need to think about
our lives. We are the “soul” of the
world.
Each of us can bring the love of Christ
into every element of our lives, spreading
his joy and peace in all our dealings
with our neighbors, in our work,
and in our participation in society.
That’s how the early Christians lived.
And that’s how, in our times, we can
turn the world upside down again.
Pray for me and I will pray for you.
And let us entrust these coming weeks
to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception,
patroness of this great country.
September 6, 2024 • ANGELUS • 3