Respect Your Local Commissar/Gauleiter

Brian's excellent post on why Catholics and the Church should not be over-concerned with popularity amongst secular society (http://catholiccitizenamerica.blogspot.com/) has sent me back to my last but one post - Where are You Coming From?

Some more thoughts:

Saint Paul in Romans 13: 1-7 enjoins respect for and obedience to the magistrates, their authority being derived from God. Considering what went on under the Roman Empire, I find his view startling, even though his missionary journeys were no doubt, made much easlier by the Roman provision of good roads.

An attitude possibly acceptable to Catholics might be:

1. Not to shrink from obeying a wise and just law, just because it was made by someone or some people of whom one disapproves. (Eeyore: "A thing Rabbit made!" Jumps on sticks.) After all, a good law should prescribe or forbid something we would willingly do or not do from conscience. We should be our own magistrate and police.

2. Not to shrink from disobeying an unjust, wrong-headed, evil law. Such action, performed circumspectly and with due regard for the possible penalties for infraction, is not merely a duty but a pleasure.

3. Where the institution or government which made the law is intrinsically evil (Nazism, Soviet Communism), frustration of the law, subversion, sabotage directed at the authorities and their supporters (not at the innocent public) can be morally justified, so that even if the law in question is not in itself unjust or unacceptable, but its infraction may weaken, destabilise, or frustrate such a governemnt, then such law-breaking is justified.