Christ didn't leave us a book of instructions He left us a body, a family - a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn't be any freedom.

Faith is not a contract. Faith is surrender. If no other relationship in our experience is one of self-surrender, if it's all contractual, people won't know how to believe.

God always wants what's best for us, just as you want what's best for someone you really love. You put them before you, and God does that too. God puts us before His Son, who He sacrificed for our salvation. But the Son did it voluntarily because He has the love of the Father before us.

Religion doesn't start with a set of laws or rules and it doesn't start with a set of ideas. It starts with an encounter, with the living God and in our case, Christ risen from the dead. In that encounter you meet someone you can trust. That's faith: trust in truth.

From a Christian perspective, the answer to all of that is not power, as it is in the modern perspective. It's love. It's self-sacrifice. That's what love is all about. The marriage ceremony says it very well: sacrifice is difficult, but love can make it a joy.

The Church is our Mother, which means it is an internal voice. It is not a set of external rules. That's what isn't understood about Catholicism in this Protestant culture. It means that your conscience is formed by the Church, but in the end you're responsible for your own activities.

God's is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.

So, in every case if you really love someone there is an element of submission to them because you want what's best for them, and at times they're going to tell you what's best for them. Even if you have second thoughts about it, you'll probably still do it because you love them.

Love isn't blind. Love is reasonable. God is pure love, but He is also pure reason. If you separate reason from faith you'll end in violence. Either way, if you have a purely rationalistic scheme that is atheistic, for instance Communism was for social justice. Fascism was for the nation-state, which isn't automatically a bad thing.

The question about who God is is a very public question. We don't have the tools in this kind of political atmosphere to handle that, and maybe politics isn't the best place to answer that. It is a public issue.

The primary moral judgment on candidates and their positions is to be made in the light of their concern for protecting human life from conception to natural death.