Donald Wuerl - Seek First the Kingdom: Challenging the Culture by Living Our Catholic Faith

Mary Ann Glendon

In 2006, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences invited six university students, from six different regions of the world, to observe and participate in a conference devoted to the situation of children and young people in todays societies. When the time came for the students to speak, they presented the academicians with some tough questions: What can one person do to help create a more just and peaceful world? How, exactly, does one bring the rich resources of Catholic social thought to bear on the burning issues of our times? One young woman said she often felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenges ahead. She confessed that, When I look at the daunting problems of the destruction of marriage, abortion, poverty, hunger, child soldiers I am tempted to feel powerless. But then, wise beyond her years, she told us how she dealt with that feeling. She said, I know I need to grasp my faith and to begin by living it in the smallest ways, closest to me in my studies, my work, my future family.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl must have had in mind the countless persons who feel similarly overwhelmed when he took up his pen to write this lucid and encouraging guide to living a Christian vocation amidst the complexities of todays world. Like the young woman at the Roman conference, he begins with the insight that seeking the kingdom begins at home in the sense that we have to change ourselves before we can change the world.

That insight is not a trivial one. For if only one person truly lives his faith in his daily surroundings, that little part of the world is already reclaimed for Christ. And if many people do so as has happened before in history and could happen again an entire culture can change and be renewed. As Pope Benedict once put it to a group of young people in St. Peters Square, We must have the courage to create islands, oases, and then great stretches of land of Catholic culture where the Creators design is lived out.

Although seeking the kingdom requires personal conversion, a principal message of this engaging book is that personal transformation is only a beginning. Catholics do not have the option to withdraw into a completely private spirituality. Not even our cloistered contemplatives are exempt from the duty to be salt, leaven, and light in the world in their own distinctive way. The philosopher and martyr Edith Stein, now St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, explained this in one of her letters:

Immediately before, and for a good while after my conversion, I was of the opinion that to lead a religious life meant one had to give up all that was secular and to live totally immersed in thoughts of the divine. But gradually I realized that something else is asked of us in this world and that, even in the contemplative life one may not sever the connection with the world. I even believe that the deeper one is drawn into God, the more one must go out of oneself; that is, one must go to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.

For most laymen and laywomen the problem is not severing their connection with the world, but rather that we tend to sever the connections between our faith and the rest of our lives. In contemporary societies where family life, work, worship, recreation, education, and civic activities take place in separate spheres, it is all too easy to relegate religion to a few hours a week spent in prayer or at Mass. From there, it is all too easy to fall into a mindset like that of a professor who once told me, I happen to be a Catholic, but that has nothing to do with my professional life.

Cardinal Wuerls book is a forceful rebuttal of the idea that a Christian can keep his faith shut up in a compartment. All Christians, he reminds us, are called not only to seek the kingdom, but to build up the kingdom. The great dignity of the lay vocation, he writes, is to take the faith out into the world and give witness everywhere. Lay Catholics go to all the places I, as a bishop, cannot reach. Catholic laymen and lay-women may be standing near the office water cooler when the conversation turns to abortion, or the death penalty, or euthanasia, or immigration. If they know the social teachings of the Church, they are well prepared for the conversation. They are well prepared for witness.

Moreover, as the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council emphasized in Lumen Gentium, the obligation to work toward the transformation of the world has a definite political dimension: Every Christian in keeping with his or her abilities has a right and duty to participate in public life, albeit in a diversity and complementarity of forms, levels, tasks and responsibilities. Indeed, The effort to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws, and structures of the community in which one lives, is so much the duty and responsibility of the laity that it can never be performed properly by others. Like his predecessor Blessed John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI has lifted up that message on several occasions, calling for a new generation of committed lay Christians capable of working competently and with moral rigor in the fields of work, the economy, and politics.

Noting a certain amount of confusion among Catholics on the respective roles of clergy and laity when it comes to public affairs, Cardinal Wuerl reminds us that while bishops and priests have the duty to enunciate and proclaim the principles of Catholic social teaching, it is up to the laity to take those principles and apply them in the public square. He observes ruefully that in his twenty-five years as a bishop he has been told by many political leaders that they hear less often from the Catholic laity than from bishops and priests. If that is so, he wonders, What is it that keeps people silent?