Q-99 - Should a Catholic Government Minister offer a moral compass to a civil government in the framing of decisions of the Downing Street Cabinet?

Spiritually, a very very difficult Question and one that has of late become overladen with more and more urgency in the national run of things. This Question comes from a retired 007, somewhere in Wales, though probably they never retire like you or me, as they can always and often be re-activated in times of great crisis say whenever the nation is in peril of losing its faith in the democratic process for example.

It would seem so in the current line of work. As the Fables of Aesop can relate for us, in the Land of the Blind, Cyclops is still nevertheless king, since one eye is better than no eyes at all. This might bode well and true also for civil Cabinets, that they sometimes might need the superior foresight into the future that only spiritual men and women can offer. So the argument runs. Rishi next door has his little lights of Diwali, and he too might expect that any spirituality is better than none at all. This is even true of the world of economics where it is humankind in all his or her moral choices that is most properly the subject of the economic transaction - the economy is more and more a bionomic reality. Rishi might concur.  

BBC guided churches and movements of the spirit of mankind often speak of the Catholic Church as "Auntie Over-Seas" much like an ecclesial version of an avuncular Royal Over Seas League, and so be it, some respect for the Catholics there, the more so since GBN launched with the wise and prudent Brazier, so maybe the Church Abroad acts like an osmosis on such local and national governments, again very privately and ever discreetly. We shall see.

Compasses rarely exist, even the Golden Compasses of Pullman, especially in a secular pluralistic society, particularly compasses that give clear uncomplicated answers to moral dilemmas, but some spiritual sight into the affairs of men and women is often desired. So a Spiritual Compass is what is maybe better required for these jobs at the head of the pack, for Leaders of the Pack.

Others in Parliament and in a typical Cabinet also have the pale lights of Human Reason, so there too something can emerge with a little clarity and munificence from the soft and disparate lights of the human conscience when seeking the good, the true, the beautiful in the many decisions of the political process either in common in Parliament or individually as per the Cabinet. Human Reason - rare.

Catholics though like soft understated Catholic 007s, as per the Bond figure in Skyfall, make good agents of the modern democratic state, since they neatly bifurcate in their minds the obligations of state from the obligations of the free civil liberties guided individual. They are freer than most and they can teach others about their inner freedoms. Chesterton reminds us of this that the frame around the Faith is a kind of frame that an artist needs - it helps him vision in the particulars of the sense impressions of the artist. The frame paradoxically invites freedom within by posing an end to things.

But any Prime Minister would maybe say especially in recent times that he does not need moral compasses as such since all have sinned and fallen short of the Morning Glory of God and all are more and more subject to Original Sin the more and more they resist getting the vaccines of the Christian cult of Baptism. Baptism as vaccination. Designed maybe not to remove or erase sin as a virus altogether from the moral and personal lives of politicians of  a civil kind, since that would be to erase the free faculty of free will, but power is an aphrodisiac and we are all subject to sin, and at least it might stop us from needing permanent hospitalisation and stop us from death, in the sense that we might not always be subject to some of the ongoing effects of Original Sin. So spiritually, those who are baptised are like those who are vaccinated, they are expected to be a little more prudent than most, not just throwing away the caution of wearing face masks for instance in the world which are very effective in the fight against Covid, but rather they are expected to be somewhat focussed on the issues at hand. Baptism should crystallise the political mind. If Catholics are present in a Cabinet, their glowing Futurism should help the parties concerned in some of the projections for the future, since as the old adage from cinema goes, Chance favours the Prepared Mind. And Article 51a of the Usa Baltimore Catechism reminds us that Catholic believers accept that other civilisations exist in the universe and these too can be learned from in the fullness of time. Those civilisations might help us understand our own, especially if they are more advanced, and say involve more robotics, whatever the glorious light of Elon Musk adds about AI.   

Consequently, answering the Question above from a 007, we might say that a Catholic Government Minister is in no way obliged to offer the light of the guidances of the Catholics to a civil pluralistic Cabinet. Spiritually he might so do, but only if he is brave and yet maybe a little foolish, since many voices of politics compete for the attention of a Cabinet. But if he chooses to do so, then he must clarify under what Ts and Cs his advice is given, and also that it is given with a view to achieving some insight into the future and not to moral choices about the past, since politics is the art of the possible, and not the art of the desirable - it is not full of specious idealisms.