The idea of Sanctuary in churches goes back deep into the history of western civilization. Much can be said, but essentially there was a consensus agreement that armed civil authority would not enter sacred space without the consent of keepers of that space. In its purest form Sanctuary bought time to negotiate a more humane outcome for the person being protected under this agreement from the age’s most brutal civil punishments. Most of the time the person being held was simply banished from the community by mutual agreement. The point here is the civil authority recognized wisely that there were other authorities at play in human community. As Jesus taught, Caeser got Caeser’s and God got God’s. Roman rulers could be brutal, mean, and arbitrary, but they were also often intelligently pragmatic and tended to do very little to disguise their faults. 

We got a new hero this week in the Bishop who pleaded with the current civil authority to show mercy to certain populations almost certain to be subject to punishments that may be technically legal, but way out of proportion to any crime and far from merciful. Sanctuary is vague in the formal legal sense which is to say it is not directly written into the public authority. That said, the idea of stopping any civil agent being sent into a sanctuary to enforce a civil law has been respected by wiser rulers for much of the span of our current civilization. Saints and pragmatics have held back from violating the sanctity of a religious establishment if for no other reason they believed in God. The entering of a church that has called for Sanctuary strikes me as an implicit denial of any God by the civil authority and denying the connected authority of that religion’s teaching, including Christianity.

I suspect Good in this case is the careful, respectful enforcement of existing civil authority with the wise humility of our previous nation’s respect for religious authority and teachings.  This Project believes Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde calls for mercy are not a sign of softness but rather a courageous decision on her part out of a sense of good to be a servant leader giving to Caeser what is Caeser’s and to God what is God’s.