lent" "
As every year in Lisbon Cathedral, from 5 March and for all the Sundays of Lent, Cardinal Josè da Cruz Policarpo, Patriarch of Lisbon, is giving a cycle of catechesis inspired by the Ten Commandments, concluded by solemn vespers. In his last catechesis in March, the Patriarch urged that “the Christian faith be expressed in the totality of existence, in the simplicity of a divine plan that is manifested as a call to vocation and holiness”. Speaking on the theme “The law of God and the law of man”, Cardinal Policarpo explained the distinction between religious law and civil law, and the separation between Church and State that flows from it, as follows. “No one in the Church today claims to impose the religious law as civil law he said -. By respecting the autonomy of the State, the Church respects its legislative independence. But this cannot prevent the Christian faith, which has an inevitable moral component, from continuing to inspire the conduct of believers and claiming primacy over the civil laws, when these conflict with Christian morality”. There are, according to the Patriarch, “worrying symptoms in the laws already approved, in others being drafted and in those announced, that they do not respect the universal human law contained in the natural law”. Laws of this type, he explained, require citizens to make a clear discernment: “Not everything that is legal is moral”. It follows that it is legitimate for Christians to use the means of conscientious objection.
