The interruption of a Protestant worship service by anti-ice protesters in Minnesota warrants serious consideration.
My concern here is far from the immigration debate, or from arguments surrounding the right to peaceful assembly. Rather, it arises from a deeper and more unsettling cultural development—namely, the growing assumption that religious worship may be interrupted in service of political expression. This assumption, I believe, marks a watershed moment in the moral and religious imagination of the American republic and Western world, because it reveals that worship itself has ceased to be understood as undeniably sacred, inviolable, and prior to every other human social activity.
Sacred Scripture presents worship of God as the first act of justice. From the beginning of salvation history, God calls man into a covenant bond with him, ordered toward worship. Abraham is summoned to sacrifice; Israel is liberated so that the people may worship the Lord in freedom; the Decalogue begins with God’s claim upon the human heart; and the prophets consistently link social disorder to corrupted worship, since disordered worship always precedes a disordered sociopolitical order.
Jesus confirms this order through his own life and teaching. He cleanses the Temple because Israel’s worship has become profane, and he teaches, according to Matthew 4:4, that man lives by every word that comes from God. He institutes the Eucharist on the night before his passion, establishing it as the sacrificial worship and center of the New and Eternal Covenant. The early Church, henceforth, gathers around the breaking of the bread even under threat, as Acts 2:42 records, demonstrating that, for the Christian, worship comes prior to safety, comfort, and political expediency and calculation.
The Catholic tradition expands upon this biblical vision. Germain Grisez explains the foundation clearly when he writes in The Way of the Lord Jesus, “God possesses perfect goodness and love, creates and sustains the universe through pure generosity, and humanity depends entirely upon him for any meaningful accomplishment. This foundational reality generates a binding duty: each person bears a strict obligation to render God the highest honor and worship him, considering both who God is and what he continually does for humankind” (vol. 2, 62). Worship, for the Catholic, overflows from the revealed truth of man’s duty before God rather than an expressive preference.
Grisez continues by clarifying the nature of worship: “Worship consists in recognizing this divine reality and humanity’s true relationship with God, willing to act accordingly, and performing concrete acts that express this recognition and commitment.” Why is this crucial? Because true and good worship orders the intellect, forms the will, and shapes even the body through visible acts of reverence in liturgy and in life.
The Church, too, expresses this union of duty and fulfillment in the opening words of the Mass’s Preface: “It is indeed fitting and right, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God.” Worship is therefore both an obligation and a gift for man. It forms the soul of man while also ordering society toward the common good.
Natural law reasoning attests to this truth. Every functioning society requires recognition of transcendental goods, prioritized over and above political power. In fact, positive law loses coherence when it is severed from a higher moral source. History has shown that authority expands destructively when no higher claim is allowed to restrain it. Hence, worship of God situates man properly within reality, reminding rulers and citizens alike that all power on earth remains accountable to God almighty. When worship is revered in society, political life remains limited, humane, and geared toward the flourishing of all. When worship is displaced, politics fills in as the new religion.
This exposition sheds light on that recent event in Minnesota and similar moments across the nation. The issue originates not in a particular ideology, but rather from a culture that no longer recognizes sacred space and sacred worship as untouchable. In such a sphere, Churches quickly become venues for ideological protests, and liturgies become assemblies to be interrupted in the interest of ideology. These assumptions reveal unbelievable spiritual amnesia. They also set the tone for the new religion of political and ideological expressive individualism to dominate even the sacred act of giving to God what man rightly owes him.
Catholic liturgical discipline addresses this matter concretely. The Church teaches that the Mass constitutes a single, unified act of worship that may never be fragmented or interrupted. The 2004 instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum states, “In the celebration of Mass, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist are intimately connected to one another and form one single act of worship. For this reason it is illicit to separate one part from the other or to celebrate them at different times or places” (60). If a Catholic priest were to leave the Mass because of a political protest or for discussion with a washed-up progressivist journalist, he would violate of the unity of the sacred act.
This discipline reflects the Church’s understanding, which Protestants do not share, of what occurs upon the altar. The priest offers the sacrifice in the person of Christ for the salvation of the world. The sacred species quite literally become the body and blood of the Lord. Hence, tradition holds that the priest is to continue the sacrifice, even under grave threat, since the offering belongs first to God, before whom any earthly threat must bow. The Eucharist commands the highest reverence of life and service, since Christ himself is present sacramentally. Sacred vessels, the altar, and the consecrated species remain set apart from all profane use for precisely this reason.
The Catechism affirms this reverence when it teaches, “In the liturgy of the Mass we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord.” This nature of rightful reverence is what forms the soul and instructs society concerning what deserves ultimate honor.
Liturgical reverence overflows from the Mass to shape culture beyond the walls of the church. Josef Pieper, in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, describes the cultural consequences of abandoning worship with remarkable foresight. He writes, “The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure. For one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost.” When a recognition of God in worship fades, rest becomes restlessness, and celebration of the liturgy becomes a burdensome inconvenience.
Pieper continues, “Celebration of God in worship cannot be done unless it is done for its own sake. That most sublime form of affirmation of the world as a whole is the fountainhead of leisure.” Hence, worship of God grounds man’s leisure by orienting the soul toward gratitude of God, away from a spirit of constant and ungrateful consumption.
Pieper concludes with a warning that bears directly upon modern society: “Separated from the sphere of divine worship and from the power it radiates, leisure is as impossible as the celebration of a feast. Cut off from the worship of the divine, leisure becomes laziness and work inhuman.” In short, culture collapses when worship of the one true God disappears.
Recent theological reflection has underscored this truth with renewed urgency, and thankfully so. Observers of the Minnesota desecration noted that public worship manifests the Church visibly before the world as the body of Christ offering praise to the Father. Disruption of that worship, therefore, strikes at the Church’s identity and mission more than merely disturbing a gathering.
A society ordered toward the common good requires citizens formed by reverence of all that is sacred and divine, and that reverence begins with the honor due to liturgical worship. Worship forms the conscience of all man, and rightly formed conscience restrains political power. When worship remains honored, political life remains virtuous. When worship becomes interruptible, everything else soon crumbles.
The Church therefore continues to proclaim this truth unabashedly at every Mass. On every altar across the world, the gifts are prepared, and the sacrifice of the Eucharist continues, because Christ is truly present. In returning to liturgical reverence, society may yet recover the order it seeks elsewhere, since the highest good that reorders all else has always stood waiting before us upon the altars of the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.