I hope that the Catholic press in your dioceses will speak loudly on the cowardice, which seems to be getting displayed by our supposedly pro-life, Catholic house majority leader, senate majority leader, and governor (and ourselves too, for that matter)....
- "Real faith always bears fruit in public witness and public action. Otherwise it’s just empty words....
"our religious freedom ultimately depends on the vividness of our own Christian faith–in other words, how deeply we believe it, and how honestly we live it....The worst enemies of religious freedom aren’t 'out there' among the legion of critics who hate Christ or the Gospel or the Church, or all three. The worst enemies are in here, with us–all of us, clergy, religious, and lay–when we live our faith with tepidness, routine, and hypocrisy....
"we need to change the way we live–radically change, both as individual Catholics and as the Church....
"The habits of Catholic culture run very deep in the Philadelphia region. Our Catholic health [Hmm?] and social services, and our Catholic school system, are among the largest and best in the United States....
"Too many ordinary Catholics have been greedy, losing themselves in America’s culture of consumerism and success. Too many have been complicit in the dullness–the acedia–that has seeped into Church life, and the cynicism and resentment that naturally follow it....
"We’re becoming a nation where, as Ross Douthat describes it, 'a growing number [of us] are inventing [our] own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke [our] egos and indulge, or even celebrate, [our] own worst impulses.' And it’s happening at a time when the Church is compromised by her own leaders and people from within, and pushed to the margins or attacked by critics without....
"If we don’t press now and vigorously for our religious liberty in the public arena, we will lose it. Not overnight and not with a thunderclap, but step by step, inexorably....
"From the cross at San Damiano, Jesus said to Francis: Repair my house, which is falling into ruin. Those same words fill this room tonight. How we respond is up to us" (Archbishop Chaput, 6/21/12)
