What is the place of the church in politics? Andrew Willard Jones is next.

Hello, and welcome to Focus. The Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding,

and defending your Catholic faith. I'm Sy Kelly at your host, and before we start,

let me just review where we are as Catholics in the public square right now.

The US Supreme Court within its abortion decisions has aroused the upset of many commentators,

Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times says, the fact that four of the court's six Roman

Catholic justices and a fifth who has raised Catholic allowed a blatantly unconstitutional

law to remain in place pending appeal has barely been noted publicly. She says no one's talking

about their religious faith and how it affects their abortion rulings. Nancy Pelosi, she's a Catholic,

she's the speaker of the US House of Representative, and recently when she passed a bill that makes abortion

more available or protects it more in law, she was asked this. The Archbishop of San Francisco warns

that the bill is nothing more than a child sacrifice, and he calls on Catholics to fast and pray to

defeat this bill. Your Catholic, your reaction? Speaker Pelosi answered in part that the Archbishop and

I have a disagreement about who should decide this. I believe that God has given us a free will

to honor our responsibilities. I don't even need to go into all the difficulties the bishops the

US Catholic bishops have had with President Joe Biden regarding abortion and receiving the

Eucharist, the Pope has gotten involved, and then this is just abortion. I mean, what about Catholics

in the public square on issues like marriage and transgenderism, immigration, the death penalty

and others? We need to figure out what is our place in the public square and help us do that. Andrew

Willard Jones is here with us. He's the author of The Two Cities, a history of Christian politics.

Here's what he had to say about our moment and about how we should understand politics from a Catholic

perspective. Dr. Andrew Willard Jones, director of Catholics studies at Franciscan University in

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