Fr. Pavone: Pulpit Under God’s Authority, Not Government’s

Date: September 28, 2008

Washington, DC – Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, commented today on the “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” that a group of pastors observed this past weekend, in which they spoke about the moral qualifications of candidates for public office, with a freedom that they maintain the IRS is wrongly taking from pastors.

“This effort is not about bringing politics into the pulpit; it’s about getting government out of the pulpit,” Fr. Pavone explained. “It should be Church authority, not government authority, that determines the criteria for how pastors should address politics.”

“When a preacher goes into a pulpit, he does so under the command and authority of God, to preach God’s word. Now God’s word cannot really be God’s if the government can limit or censor it. Moreover, if preachers didn’t historically have the freedom to challenge government authority, we would have neither Christianity nor the United States of America,” Fr. Pavone pointed out.

“My advice to my fellow priests and pastors is simply this: Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to the actions some pastors took this weekend, simply dismissing such actions as inappropriate. Rather, think about whether you are fully exercising the freedom you already do have under the law, and think about how much you are not doing simply because you fear legal entanglements.”
 

Priests for Life is the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization dedicated to ending abortion and euthanasia. For more information, visit www.priestsforlife.org.