Ecclesiology 22 - On Second Thought

    I just walked through the den and found the television on with no one watching it.  As I reached for the remote, I realized one of those programs about conspiracies disguised as history was on.  In the several seconds that it had my attention, the program was discussing the Catholic church's failure to protect Jews during the Nazi regime and making it obvious that we should take a condemning attitude toward the church because of that failure.  My mind shifted quickly to more recent headlines in which the media invited us to take the same attitude about the discovery that the church had protected certain priests from persecution when accused of child abuse.

    On August 20 of this year, I included in a post the idea that the church should never attempt to take the law into its own hands, that if a leader is thought to be conducting himself in an illegal fashion it is incumbent upon the church to turn that leader over to law enforcement officers and let them investigate the matter, not us.  At the time of that post, I was thinking specifically about the abusive priests mentioned above.  I wasn't considering the possibility of a corrupt legal system.

    Now, I'm a bit more doubtful.  In our first two examples, the church's responsibility seems reasonably obvious; in the former case the church has an opportunity to defend an entire race of people against persecution, in the latter the church has the opportunity to defend a small group of individuals against prosecution.  The morality of each situation is easily manifest, but only when we compare the specific national laws involved against the Tao, or great universal law.  What about those times when such a distinction cannot be so easily gleaned?

    At the time of this typing, the United States is embroiled in a heated debate over the subject of immigration, specifically immigration over the Mexican border (we are not, apparently, too concerned with Canadian immigrants).  The problem has become so acute that, about six years ago, my home state of Texas passed a law making it illegal to aid or abet illegal immigrants in any way.  The most famous case against that law to date follows an American woman who, when driving through the desert of southwest Texas, came across a trio of (illegal) Mexican teens who were literally dying of exposure and thirst near the highway.  She stopped and offered them water from her personal supply, for which she was arrested and, to my knowledge, still awaits trial.

    I know a number of people - good, God-fearing people - who adamantly stand on either side of this debate.  Both groups can give sound, logical and, yes, even ethical arguments for their positions.  So the question is begged: where should the church stand in support of a law when the morality of that law is so ambiguous?  And, historically speaking, how are we to judge the decisions of the church at those times when it was forced to choose sides in just such a situation?  Hmmm...

 

Pax