Usually the Catholic tradition speaks of the Council of Nicaea, in 325, as the first “ecumenical” council. This year we are celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of that great council. But the council of Jerusalem, briefly summarized in our reading from Acts, is a kind of proto-ecumenical council, showing the apostles and other leaders of the Church gathering in Jerusalem, led by St. Peter and St. James, to settle a doctrinal dispute. The question was the status of the Mosaic law. Should Gentile followers of Jesus be circumcised and practice the whole of the Law? One party said yes; another said no.
I don’t know if this was the intention of those who devised the current lectionary, but it’s interesting to pair this story with the passage from John 14, where Jesus speaks about sending the Holy Spirit to the disciples to “teach all things” and to make them “remember” all that he has said to them. When we talk about the infallibility, or the indefectibility of the Church, we’re neither saying that the Church is magical nor that it is not full of sinful and imperfect men. We are saying just that the Holy Spirit will preserve it despite its members. And that is what is on display in the Council of Jerusalem. We can be confident that when the apostles agree, the Lord will use such decisions to preserve his Church.
In a portion from Acts omitted from today’s selection, Peter stands up in the assembly and says, “Why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?” That is putting the question with characteristically Petrine flare. In other words, we, as the people of Israel, have failed time and time again over many centuries to perfectly keep the Law. How in the world would it make sense to impose that failure on everyone else?
In the end, the Council of Jerusalem sets up a tradition of interpretation continued by St. Paul and the broader Catholic tradition, which is to make a distinction in the Old Testament law between what reflects universal moral norms—what later Catholic tradition would call natural law—and what reflects merely the ritual and civic ordering of Israel as a nation. Although the council in Acts doesn’t make this clear, within the same generation, St. Paul and St. Peter both will say it quite explicitly in their epistles: If circumcision was the marker by which one verified one’s membership in the holy people of God, we can now say the same of baptism, which incorporates us into Christ, the true Israel.
Often this passage from Acts has been used to insert artificial discontinuities between the Old Law and the New. In the modern era, certain streams of Protestantism are quick to see in Acts, and in Paul, the rejection of all Jewishness—which is to say, all rule and ritual in general. What’s fascinating about this tradition of interpretation, apart from its associations with both antisemitism and anti-Catholicism, is the way that a supposed rejection of the Law’s burden tends to lead, paradoxically, to a new kind of legalism. So in so-called “conservative” traditions, the rejection of law weirdly results in a whole new, often less clear set of laws, which must be rigidly enforced. In the so-called “progressive” versions, rejection of law likewise results in an obsessive escalation of “freedom” to such heights that it must become actually coercive. We might label both sides as a kind of puritanism. And I think it goes without saying that these various forms of puritanism are alive and well in 2025.
But what should we actually think and say about law? The council in Acts does not reject Moses and the Jewish law tradition wholesale, as if it were meaningless. It simply recognizes that to truly follow the law of God now requires following Jesus. And the Lord speaks in John 14 about following his commandments. Far from replacing law with some loose concept of “love,” he insists that love finds its proper demonstration in obedience. Such obedience is ultimately possible through the assistance of the Spirit, the Comforter, whom he will send when he returns to the Father.
There’s an obvious and concrete way to think about these ideas in relation to current events. For several years now, our bishops have been struggling to implement the principle of “eucharistic coherence,” which is a fancy way of saying they are trying to figure out how follow the rules about who should and who shouldn’t receive Holy Communion, especially when it comes to public personalities. It remains a bit of a scandal that the bishops can’t seem to unite behind a common approach. So, for example, some famous Catholic politicians who championed deeply un-Catholic and immoral policies were cheerfully ignored by the relevant diocesan bishops (case in point: former president Joe Biden). Others, like former speaker Nancy Pelosi, received public rebuke from some bishops but polite indifference from others.
Those particular two situations have retreated from the forefront of public life, but many others remain. Indeed, we now have a Catholic vice president who, while much more Catholic on some of the items at issue with the previous administration, still seems at times willing to put aside Catholic moral teaching when it is convenient. Whether it is as extreme or significant as the others isn’t really my question today; I only point out that it raises the same questions and the same worries about the places where politics begins to have religious implications, or where religious teaching begins to have political implications.
Among the countless commentators in the public square, we always seem to circle around the same basic complaint: People are upset about bishops and priests “politicizing” religion. We heard this from the “left” a few years ago, when that mean old bishop barred Pelosi from Communion, but now we’re hearing a similar complaint from the “right” about how the bishops need to stay in their lane and stop talking about politics.
I have no intention of hashing out all these problems from the pulpit, both because I don’t have the best solutions and because I don’t think it would be especially edifying to dwell on them. But I do want to respond to the persistent claim that we see repeated—especially when someone hears a perspective they don’t like—that Christianity and Catholicism should somehow stay out of politics.
Christianity has been “political” from day one, because Christianity is concerned with human salvation, and humanity just is political, which is to say it is always involved in making decisions and working things out together. There are reasons why the early Christians seemed like a threat to the state. They recognized that their ultimate citizenship was from above, so they both respected secular authority and rejected it, depending entirely on whether it was acting in its God-given duty to promote the common good and moral order. They refused to act as if the only goods were wealth and power. And since many of our modern “political” arguments seem to come back to abortion, we ought to say: The Church’s teaching on abortion was just as controversial in the first century as it is today. Church teaching on this matter is very clear and always has been: It is the intentional taking of an innocent human life, never to be permitted, even in the service of some other good end. That is not the same as saying that the Church has definite and prescribed strategies for promoting this moral principle in the political realm.
The misunderstanding often in play on all sides of today’s debates about politicians and Communion is the idea that barring someone from Communion is somehow a punishment. But it is a medicine. That is how the canon law tradition of the Church has always understood it. The chief law of the Church is the salvation of souls. The fact that a soul is a public persona does not fundamentally alter the Church’s obligation, or the obligations of particular pastoral authorities. If anything, the Church’s obligations are heightened, with additional stakes involving public perception and scandal.
To say to a person, “You may not receive Communion” may feel mean, may feel exclusive or whatever. The point is to shock, to jolt, to get the person’s attention so that they may repent. It is a mercy, because the Church is saying: To receive Holy Communion would be dangerous for your soul. We cannot simply allow someone to go on publicly submitting his soul to corruption and spiritual death as if it didn’t matter.
So whatever you think about politics and eucharistic boundaries—and maybe you’d rather not think about it too much, which is probably healthy—the important thing here is that love and justice go together. To love Jesus is to obey his commandments. To show his love in the world is to show his teachings as they are, not as we might wish them to be, not just so far as they conform to the party platform we like, or just so far as we believe them to be practical.
That is a challenge not just for the Church as a hierarchical institution, but for each of us as individuals. And this is impossible without a life of constant prayer and offering ourselves up to Christ. Because ultimately, the law is he—himself. He is the new temple and the new law. He is the burden that we must receive, not another. And so we could do worse than to offer, as a kind of daily reminder, the traditional vesting prayer that the priest says when he puts on the chasuble: O LORD, who hast said, My yoke is easy, and My burden is light, grant that I may so bear it, as to merit Thy grace. Amen.
Image: J.D. Vance. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.