The following are some highlights from a recent speech of Archbishop Charles Chaput...
* "God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some increase of cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of the past, consumer greed, little genocides posing as 'rights' like the cult of abortion, and a basic confusion about what – if anything at all – it means to be 'human.'"
* "While many people in the developed world still claim to be religious, their faith – in the words of the Pontifical Council for Culture – is 'often more a question of religious feeling than a demanding commitment to God.' Religion becomes a kind of insurance policy for eternity. Too often, it is little more than a convenient moral language for daily life."
* "Much of modern technology isolates people as often as it brings them together. It attacks community as easily as it builds it up. It also forms the human mind in habits of thought and expression that are very different from traditional culture based on the printed word. And that has implications..."
* "It is very odd that in the wake of the bloodiest century in history – a century when tens of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity – even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil. In fact, it is more than odd. It is revealing."
* "This is the kind of Being – once glorious, but then consumed by his own pride - who is now the Enemy of humanity [the devil]. This is the Pure Spirit who betrayed his own greatness. This is the Intellect who hates the Incarnation because through it, God invites creatures of clay like you and me to take part in God's own divinity. There is nothing sympathetic about Satan; only tragedy and loss and enduring, brilliant anger."
* "If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later we will not believe in God. We cannot cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. Satan is not God's equal. He is a created being subject to God and already, by the measure of eternity, defeated. Nonetheless, he is the first author of pride and rebellion, and the great seducer of man. Without him the Incarnation and Redemption do not make sense, and the cross is meaningless. Satan is real. There is no way around this simple truth."
* "We live in an age that imagines itself as post-modern and post-Christian. It is a time defined by noise, urgency, action, utility and a hunger for practical results. But there is nothing really new about any of this. I think St. Paul would find our age rather familiar. For all of the rhetoric about 'hope and change' in our politics, our urgencies hide a deep unease about the future; a kind of well-manicured selfishness and despair. The world around us has a hole in its heart, and the emptiness hurts. Only God can fill it."
* "...but the really essential questions, the questions that determine everything else in our life as Christians, are these: Do I really know God? Do I really love Him? Do I seek Him out? Do I study His word? Do I listen for His voice? Do I give my heart to Him? Do I really believe He's there?"
* "We have an obligation as Catholics to study and understand the world around us. We have a duty not just to penetrate and engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ."
* "The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. That is the nature of the God we preach. A God so great in glory, heat, light and majesty that He can populate the heavens and call life out of dead space; yet so intimate that He became one of us; so humble that He entered our world on dirt and straw to redeem us. I think we can be forgiven for sometimes running away from that kind of love, like a child who runs away from a parent, because we simply cannot understand or compete with that ocean of unselfishness. It is only when we give ourselves to God that we understand, finally, that we were made to do exactly that. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. We should not be afraid to believe and to love; it took even a great saint like Augustine half a lifetime to be able to admit, that 'late have I loved thee, Beauty so old and so new; late have I loved thee.'"
[1/28]
Posts
