7th Nov. 2013
The role of the Church is to be Church in the midst of the changing situations in which people live; its function is to bring hope and a message of salvation and restoration in the midst of the worst crises.
The role of the Church does have political implications, but it is not the calendar of the society around her that defines the objectives and methods, but the objectives of the Kingdom of God. It is not society that sets our political agenda as Church, but God’s call to be agents of change.
Christians are citizens of the Kingdom of God, our citizenship and our loyalties –above our legitimate cultural and political feelings– belong to the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom of God is a transnational, transgenerational and transcultural organism where all the distinctions that separate us here –national loyalties, gender, ethnicity, economic capacity, etc.– have been broken down to become one in Christ. The Church is here to plead society for reconciliation with God, so the Church must live as a reconciled society. The witness of a Church constitutes a model of relationships for the whole of society.
We see with concern the way in which some Christians express themselves in political matters and especially in sensitive issues such as the territorial ordering in Spain. We note with dismay how some Christians express themselves in ways totally apart from the grace and mercy that Jesus showed to those who rejected him, and resort to a verbal disqualification that has more of a “hooliganization” than a discrepancy expressed “with grace and seasoned with salt” (Col. 4:6).
We would like to call on you to consider that, whatever happens in the present and in the future, nothing will change the relationship of Christians in the different territories. We must not allow society, political decisions or geopolitical changes to mark the kind of relationships we will have as Christians. We are the people of God and this brotherhood is a bond that is above any differences and we share it with Christians all over the world.
