Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down

through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in New Year is brought to you by

Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 291. We're reading paragraphs 2244 to 2257. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith Approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism with the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash CIY. And lastly, you can click follow or subscribe on your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. Today, day 291, we're coming to the end of commandment number four. This is the last little section. We have three quick paragraphs and then a bunch of little nuggets. So we're going to talk all about that. Today in paragraphs 2244 to 2257, we're looking at the political community and the church. And so, yes, of course, we know we talked yesterday about the duties of citizens. And so there's plenty of duties of citizens. We have the duties of civil authorities we

talked about the day before. But today we're looking at this. How do we see the church in relation

to political communities? How do we see political communities? What are their limits? And what should

be their guiding points? We only have three paragraphs on this. And yet these three paragraphs are

quite powerful, I believe. Once again, we affirm and assert the right to

exist of every institution because every institution has, is inspired, at least implicitly, it says in

2244, by a vision of man and his destiny. That's every, every organization, every institution

has a vision of what it is to be human and what it is and what is the goal of being human.

And we recognize that when an institution lacks a true and authentic, a comprehensive view of what it is to be human and of the destiny of that human being or of humanity itself, there's always going to be a lack.

There's always going to be a distortion. And so because of that, we pay attention to those things.

And secondly, we also recognize that because of that, the church can never fully endorse any one

particular view of the human person. That is not comprehensive and that is not completely adequate

when it comes to reality. Also, the church does have a say in the sense that the church has the

right to weigh in on matters of political consequence, right? The church does get to weigh in on this

because the church has a lot to offer. The church has a

truth to offer. The church has a vision of the human person that is adequate and that is comprehensive.

And so because of that, church must weigh in, but also the church must weigh in as church,

not as another political entity. Does that make sense? Hopefully all those words made sense,

but as we get today in paragraphs 2244 to

...