My question for you guys—well for Jimmy—is: what does the Church teach with regards to
faithful Catholics responding to laws pushed on us by the government or state
authorities? I guess my question is rooting from masks and vaccines and all that sort of thing.
Okay, so we should probably start with the definition of a law.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, a law is an ordinance of reason—or to put it another way,
it's a reasonable ordinance—that is promulgated by somebody who has the care of the community, for the
common good. And so in the case of ecclesiastical law, the pope and the bishops promulgate laws
that should be reasonable ordinances for the good of the Church. In the case of the state, you know,
it could be the local—it could be the city council, it could be the state legislature, it could be
congress over in Washington D.C., but basically the lawmakers need to pass a reasonable ordinance
for the good of the community and promulgate it so everybody knows about it, and that's what makes a
law. Now as long as those conditions are fulfilled—as long as something is a reasonable ordinance
that's been duly promulgated by the right people—
we, all things being equal, have an obligation to obey it. If it's not reasonable, then it fails to be
a law in the proper sense, and we're not obliged to obey it. And in fact, in some circumstances we can
be required to disobey it. We see an example of that early on in the book of Acts where the
apostles are brought before the Sanhedrin, which was the Jewish ruling council in Jerusalem, and
they're told: "Don't preach in Jesus' name anymore." But that conflicts with what Jesus himself told
them, because he gave them the great commission—as I'm sure you know, Cy Kellett. He did indeed. And
so they're required by Jesus, and thus by God, to preach in Jesus' name, so this order from the state
is unreasonable. It's not an ordinance of reason. It also doesn't promote the common good, because
preaching Jesus will itself promote the common good. And so in that case, because
it directly conflicted with something that God required, they were obliged to disobey the law. So
how does that apply to us today? Well, there can be circumstances where the state orders people to do
things that are flat wrong, and in those cases people are required to disobey. There are other
cases, though, where people are not required to do something wrong, but in those cases, you know, since
they're not required to do something wrong they're not required to disobey the law.
Now you had a special mention of masks and vaccines. Well, here in the United States, so
far as I am aware nobody is required by law to get—I assume you're talking COVID—nobody is required
by law to get the COVID vaccine, so you don't gotta worry about that. Local areas may have masking
mandates, and people can have different opinions on that. I know I have my own opinions, and in fact,
I just yesterday was in two shops where I had very strong disagreements with the people in the shop
on that very subject. I won't say what my opinion was and what their opinion was, but the
shop workers and I had very strong disagreements, and they're probably not going to get my business
again anytime soon. Oh yeah. There's so much of that going on. Yeah. Having said that,
if your local area requires you to wear a mask in a particular situation, you're not breaking God's
law, you're not defying God's law if you go ahead and wear one. This would be a kind of "going the
extra mile" situation that Jesus talks about where even though you're not obligated to help someone
carry something for an extra mile, you can go ahead and do it because you're not breaking the
law and you're being generous in spirit by going ahead and doing it anyway. And so, you know, it's
not like God has forbidden us from wearing masks, and so if you're required to wear one, even if you
don't feel that it's a reasonable ordinance and thus not a law in the proper sense, you could still
go ahead and do it in good conscience. On the other hand, you know, if you were to determine
that this is not a reasonable ordinance and you could get away with breaking it, it'd be a
little bit like breaking the speed limit, which is meant to be more of a guideline. The
state doesn't really expect everybody to obey the speed limit at all times—but if you get caught, you
gotta pay the price, and it would be the same thing if you're deviating from a mask mandate locally.