Monday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 443

First of all, I ask that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone, for kings and for all in authority, that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all devotion and dignity. This is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.

In recent years many critics have raised concern about the Church's support of the state. When Saint Paul urged Saint Timothy and his disciples to offer prayers for kings and all in authority, few authorities were even aware of their Christian subjects; they were so few.
By the time of Saint Augustine, the Church had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Seeing the Empire disintegrating before his eyes, he wrote his City of God, a book-length essay that foresaw the rise of the Church to political eminence during the middle ages. There was no single state for many centuries but virtually all rulers in Europe claimed allegiance to the Catholic Church, even as they waged continual warfare with one another and the City of God, Rome.
Many Catholics, citing Augustine's work, believe the Church's greatest century was the 13th, when the pope and bishops had enormous political, financial, military, economic and social power. This, despite Pope Innocent II's recognition of an inner corruption and his promotion of the mendicant orders to reform the Church. More than ever before, Europe needed to hear of Jesus' poverty and helplessness.
By the dawn of the 20th century secular governments had regained authority and the Vatican empire was reduced to 110 acres; the Pope's influence, mostly moral. But it took a Second Vatican Council to recognize the rightness of that arrangement.
Throughout these many centuries we have found justification for our attitudes toward secular authority in today's passage from Saint Paul's letter to Timothy and a similar passage in his Letter to the Romans. 
The Church has an obvious preference for economic and political stability. We pray for our rulers because we want civil authorities, of whatever religious persuasion, to govern wisely and justly, and so to maintain peace. 
We have a long memory of injustice, both those we have suffered and those we have imposed upon others. The Magisterium might deny our support of racism, bigotry and persecution, maintaining as it does the purity of God's action within the Church, but we know that sinful societies, acting in fear and greed, fighting for stability and defending their prosperity, can do terrible things. Catholics recall the hostility we met arriving in the United States and we remember the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, which spawned such suspicion. We remember too, Catholic Spain's expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492. We're not innocent. 
Since Saint Paul wrote his letters to the Romans and to Saint Timothy, we have devised ways to select our governors and change our laws. The Apostle would have supposed God himself willed the Empire, it was so deeply entrenched and settled. We know we have the duty to support, criticise and challenge our governments. They are only secular institutions set up to serve a purpose.
Christian patriots are profoundly aware of their own sins and those of governments. They demand justice especially when it might cost them some measure of comfort or security. Habitually they make sacrifice and they don't mind asking the same of their authorities. 
The Lord himself sent us from Jerusalem to our native or adopted lands to be a blessing. We remain as staunch supporters of good government and fearless critics of corruption; and thus we contribute to God's work of building the Kingdom.