My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

One of the most vexing questions we must face is how to deal with a real, apparent or potential conflict between the moral law established by our Creator and the civil laws posited by governmental authorities. How are we to view laws and judicial opinions that we consider to be unjust or at least wrongly decided? What is the proper relation between the public laws that govern all people and the rich understanding of justice that comes to us as members of the church and heirs of the Catholic intellectual tradition?

These are not new questions, nor are they only for lawyers and jurists. We live in a culture that seems increasingly hostile to many of our traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and values, as seen in laws and court decisions that threaten marriage and family life, permit euthanasia of the terminally ill, and allow abortion on demand, even in the gruesome procedure known as partial-birth abortion.

Examples of legal decisions disconnected from justice abound:

• In March 1857, in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, the United States Supreme Court declared that all blacks — slaves as well as free — were not and could never become citizens of the United States.

• Similarly, in January 1973, in the case of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court decided that an unborn baby is not a person deserving of the right to life under the United States Constitution.

• Of course, examples of injustices perpetrated under color of law also abound outside of our courtrooms. We must remember that the government of Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany was legally elected and his program of extermination was carried out under the guise of legality.

What each of these unjust legal regimes (slavery, abortion and Nazi Germany) have in common is that, in order to be binding on the consciences of men and women, the law must embody the transcendent truth that every human being, made in the image and likeness of God, is entitled to dignity and respect from the moment of conception until natural death.

Many learned and distinguished persons have voiced their opinion on the subject of how we should relate to bad laws. The Catholic position was articulated succinctly by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, in 1891: “Laws bind only when they are in accordance with right reason, and hence with the eternal law of God.”

The basis for this view of law goes back to the time of the early Christians. We read in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter and the other apostles were arrested for preaching about Jesus and were ordered by the highest court of justice at Jerusalem “never to mention that man’s name again,” Peter and John replied, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight for us to obey you rather than God” (Acts 4:17-19).

So how do we reconcile conflicts between the laws of God and the laws of men, between moral imperatives and civil law?

Thomas Jefferson gave his answer to this question when he wrote, “A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”

St. Thomas More assiduously used his legal training and the wits of his mind to see if there was any way that he could sign the King’s Oath of Supremacy over the Church in England without violating his conscience. When he saw that he could not, he maintained a prudent silence, invoking the maxim of the law, “Qui tacet consentire videtur,” (“He who keeps silent seems to consent”). In the end, this was not sufficient, and so there are times when the only option left is to pay the price of martyrdom to preserve the priority of God’s law. Yet even in giving up his life in allegiance to God’s law, Thomas More never gave up on the human authority for whom he had toiled, saying as he went to the gallows that he “died the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Following this magnificent example, we too can try to address the imperfections of our legal system without compromising our Catholic faith, by recognizing that positive laws are made by human beings, and positive laws are imperfect because we are imperfect. To give up on our legal system would be to give up on the people who comprise our legal system. To give up on imperfect people is to give up on the imperfect world in which we live. Unjust laws, acts of terrorism, and natural disasters may tempt us to give up, but that would be to give in to the sin of despair.

Rather than despair, we are called to continue the struggle to shape this world as best we can to conform to the divine reality of pure Love, pure Truth, pure Justice, which can only be known in their totality in God’s kingdom. In short, we are called to the virtue of hope.

As our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has written, “The only thing which remains forever is the human soul, the human person created by God for eternity. ... Let us go then to the Lord and pray to him, so that he may help us bear fruit which remains. Only in this way will the earth be changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.”

May God give us this grace. Amen.