What if politics began at the altar? What if the Eucharist, rather than ideology or activism, was the real engine of social renewal? It is time to reclaim the public meaning of the liturgy amid the collapse of liberalism and the rise of competing post-liberalisms.
For the early Christians, worship was never a private retreat from the world but the inbreaking of heaven within it. To adore the Lamb who was slain was to participate in His sacrifice and to learn a new way of being human—one that subverts empire without violence, builds community through communion, and heals division through love.
The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity reminds us that the lay vocation is precisely “penetrating and perfecting the temporal order through the spirit of the Gospel.”1 The Eucharist forms that spirit. In receiving the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, we are trained in self-giving love. We are not called to sanctify politics through control or coercion, though these have their place in prudential actions amidst temporal affairs, but to infuse all worldly concerns with grace through a martyriological relation to the other.
As Sacrosanctum Concilium teaches, “The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time, it is the font from which all her power flows.”2 Worship and mission are one movement: adoration overflowing into action.
Worship as the Pattern of Politics
Perichoresis, the divine dance of Father, Son, and Spirit, is not merely a theological curiosity; it is a political vision. The early Christians understood that to be baptized was a public act of allegiance to Christ the King. This was inherently political, for it claimed a higher sovereignty than Caesar’s. As William T. Cavanaugh shows, the modern nation-state often imitates the Church, presenting itself as the body that saves. But it cannot save. The state promises peace through power, while Christ offers peace through the cross.
Liberalism, for all its achievements, asserts unity and peace at the expense of man’s deepest obligations to God and truth. It offers a false peace, built on neutrality and a detachment detached from charity. The Eucharist, by contrast, offers true peace: the Body and Blood of Christ, transubstantiated from the work of human hands into the gift of divine life. It alone reconciles unity and difference, the local and the universal, subsidiarity and solidarity.
Under the Kingship of Christ, cultures need not be erased to be redeemed. To live eucharistically is to live perichoretically: giving without losing, receiving without consuming. The divine exchange becomes the pattern of our social life.
Faith as the Purification of Politics
Politics concerns the just ordering of society, but it cannot be morally neutral. Every law and institution either promotes or undermines the good of the person and the common good. As Gaudium et Spes teaches, a political community “must be founded on truth, built on justice, and animated by love.”3 Pope Benedict XVI adds in Deus Caritas Est that “justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics.”4
Here faith and reason meet. Faith purifies reason from blindness caused by power and special interest. The Church’s social doctrine does not seek to dominate the State but to illuminate its moral horizon. She reminds the world of what justice and charity truly mean.
The laity, therefore, bear direct responsibility for ordering society in charity. Their task is not to withdraw but to engage, shaping economics, culture, and politics with a conscience formed by the Gospel. This is what the Church calls social charity, the love that animates all our public activity.
Christ the King and the True Order of Peace
To understand politics eucharistically, we must look to the source of charity. Charity is not an abstraction; it is grace in action, the person of Jesus Christ whose power was revealed in His self-offering on the cross. When we proclaim Christ the King, we acknowledge not only His majesty but His paradoxical reign: power manifested as service, kingship revealed through sacrifice.
As Pope Pius XI wrote in Quas Primas, Christ “came to reconcile all things, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, who, though Lord of all, gave Himself as a model of humility, and with his principal law united the precept of charity.” True peace comes when individuals, families, and nations allow themselves to be governed by this charity. Then, and only then, will swords be turned to plowshares.
Communion Against Fragmentation
The divine dance of charity takes flesh in the bonds of friendship that form the foundation of a just society. The love of God is the soul of true unity, even as governments and cultures change with time. Liberal neutrality, technocratic control, and tribal purity all isolate; they generate anxiety and eclipse both God and neighbor. Only the Church’s life of prayer, the living circulation of divine love, can offer a unity that respects both diversity and subsidiarity.
In this age of post-liberal confusion, the fiat of Mary must become the pattern of our own. The Church’s mission is communion: not ideology, not control, but sanctity made visible in social life. Public holiness does not arise from clerical empire or nostalgic Christendom, nor from activism severed from the altar. It arises from faithful citizens whose charity renews structures precisely because it flows from worship. Worship repatterns the heart. From that renewed heart, the world is transformed.
Conclusion: The Politics of Heaven on Earth
The Eucharist is the politics of heaven enacted on earth. Every Mass proclaims: Jesus is King, and His reign begins in bread and wine. To live eucharistically is to resist the politics of despair and to build a culture of hope, one faithful presence at a time.
The Church’s mission is not to micromanage the temporal order but to sanctify it from within. The laity are called to do all things for the glory of God and the good of their neighbor. When worship becomes the pattern of life, the Church becomes what she celebrates: crushed grapes, kneaded dough, a humanity offered and transformed for the life of the world.
To begin politics at the altar is to begin where love conquers fear, where peace is not imposed but received, and where the world is renewed, not by power, but by the Presence that abides.
1 The Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam Actuositatem § 3.
2 The Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium § 10.
3 The Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes § 26.
4 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est § 28.
Evan Collins
Evan Collins is a husband, father, lay ecclesial minister, teacher, writer, and speaker. He is the co-editer of "The Conversation" for the Cristero Party, alongside the founder, Chris Plance. He has a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry. Evan is proud to live in the Midwest with his growing family.
