When Pope Benedict spoke in Westminster Hall to the assembled UK leaders last September he echoed these words of Paul. He began by asking, where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? He did not go on to say they were found in the bible or church teaching but rather that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason.
You dont need the church to tell you what is right or wrong. The role of religion, he continued, in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known to non-believers, still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion, but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles.
If this language is rather heavy at least its meaning is clear. The church sheds light on what everyone should already know. We know, we dont need the church to tell us, that all people are equal and should be respected as such. Yet in practice some are not respected but are ignored and made little of. People with intellectual disabilities are a clear example of this.
Society often considers them of no worth and families can break up if such a child is born to them. Yet the church welcomes them and provides places where they are cared for and respected and where they can find their place a place where they can contribute their gifts.
One needs to be careful in saying these things because the church often fails in this area and the world often succeeds, but in general it is the gospel that breaks down barriers where reason alone often fails. The whole thrust of the popes remarks was that faith and reason need one another. The nations cannot do without the light.
And so, when we come to Zimbabwe, the church is often told to keep out of politics. What is often meant by this loose talk is the church should not say anything critical of the government. Well, the church does not and cannot claim to have the answers to specific political issues. But what she can and must do is to shed light on any issue that concerns human relations. How could she be silent on the slave trade, the conditions of children in factories in the nineteenth century and all the abuses of human rights in our own time? We will continue to walk in darkness if we do not let in the light.
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