Archbishop Chaput ~ God Will Demand An Accounting

 A friend shared this link with me and the words of Archbishop Chaput are timely and inspiring. Think you will agree...

"Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others, and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics. God will demand an accounting. 

Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs, or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly, or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting. 

And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life. God will demand an accounting. 

As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long—but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

....Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in—not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now—is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

....As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral—the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called—is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.


...My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

...Changing the course of American culture seems like such a huge task; so far beyond the reach of this gathering today. But St. Paul felt exactly the same way. Redeeming and converting a civilization has already been done once. It can be done again. But we need to understand that God is calling you and me to do it. He chose us. He calls us. He’s waiting, and now we need to answer him.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, is the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This essay is adapted from a lecture Archbishop Chaput delivered this past weekend at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life.
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Let's PRAY for this brave shepherd who speaks the words so many of us want to hear from our Catholic leadership. For speaking the Truth he/we will face persecution...God is calling all His faithful to live in these times and be a witness for Him.