This Sunday, the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, the readings and the Gospel could not have been more appropriate. In our first reading we are asked to love our God with all of our heart, mind and souls, in other words, with our total being and in total trust of God. Our motivation may not be as noble as we would like. Perhaps we only worship God and keep his commandments out of a sense of fear for our own consequences. We hope to grow into relationship with God where we reach a point of relationship and trust that we do things from an informed conscience, our sense of duty arising therefrom and ultimately love and faithfulness with our God and Creator. Unfortunately, most of us begin from following precepts out of obedience, as a child obeys his/her parents. This obedience is rooted in trust that our parents and our God wish what is right for us. It takes a lifetime to develop a well-formed conscience and to act on that conscience.
It takes a relationship with God to ultimately move from obedience to acting out of love.
We are charged with doing our best, (NOTICE: We are not called always to succeed), to develop a sense of what we consider right or wrong and ultimately developing a well-formed conscience.
This takes patient listening to opposing views, it takes research into what we as members of the Catholic Church are called to do, it takes careful consideration, and after we have enough
information for acting FROM a well-formed conscience- it takes acting on our best decision of what is right or avoiding that which we consider wrong.
In 2007, The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops prepared a letter for use for Catholics regarding the responsibilities we as Catholics have in forming our society and in helping us to consider our faith responsibilities as we exercise our constitutionally guaranteed right to vote our conscience. An excerpt follows:
“Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship is widely used to share Catholic
teaching on the role of faith and conscience in political life. …In short, it calls Catholics to form their consciences in the light
of their Catholic faith and to bring our moral principles to the
debate and decisions about candidates and issues.”
Importantly, this paper explicitly makes clear that no candidate or issue is advocated. What this position paper does make clear is that we are to vote our Catholic conscience. In our gospel of this weekend, we are told of the basic commandment to love and serve God with all of our being AND to love our fellow brothers and sisters as well as ourselves. May God be with each of the good people of St. Brendan as they cast their vote and in so doing seek to accomplish this gospel imperative.
