CNS STORY: Archbishop: Catholics serve nation best by living faith authentically

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SOCIAL-CHAPUT Oct-30-2007 (660 words) xxxn

Archbishop: Catholics serve nation best by living faith authentically

By Beth Griffin
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Catholics serve their country best in the long run "by remembering that we're citizens of heaven first," Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver said Oct. 26 at the 15th annual meeting of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.

"It's time for all of us who claim to be 'Catholic' to recover our Catholic identity as disciples of Jesus Christ and missionaries of his church," he said.

The social scientists convened at St. John's University School of Law in Queens Oct. 26-27.

"We're better Americans by being more truly Catholic (because) unless we live our Catholic faith authentically, with our whole heart and our whole strength," the archbishop said, "we have nothing worthwhile to bring to the public debates that will determine the course of our nation."

Archbishop Chaput said that the so-called "post-Christian" time in which we live and where Western nations have abandoned or greatly downplayed their Christian heritage "actually looks a lot like the pre-Christian moment."

"The signs of our times in the developed nations -- morally, intellectually, spiritually and even demographically -- are uncomfortably similar to the signs in the world at the time of the Incarnation," he said.

The challenges faced by American Catholics today, he said, are similar to those faced by the first Christians.

In Roman times, as now, the society was advanced in the sciences and arts, had a complex economy, a strong military and included many religions, practiced privately or through civic ceremony. Promiscuity, bisexuality, homosexuality and prostitution were common and accepted, he noted. Birth control and abortion were legal, widely practiced and justified by society's leading intellectuals, he said.

The early Christians successfully evangelized their culture throughout Western civilization in a relatively brief period of 400 years, Archbishop Chaput said. "If we can learn from that history, the more easily God will work through us to spark a new evangelization."

The keys to Christian success were both doctrine and action, he said. People's belief in the Gospel led to "a radical transformation. So radical they couldn't go on living like the people around them anymore," he said.

One of the areas in which early Christians rejected the culture around them was marriage and the family, said Archbishop Chaput.

"From the start, to be a Christian meant believing that sex and marriage were sacred," he said. "From the start, to be a Christian meant rejecting abortion, infanticide, birth control, divorce, homosexual activity and marital infidelity -- all those things widely practiced by their Roman neighbors."

Archbishop Chaput recounted that Christian reverence for the unborn "is no medieval development. It comes from the very beginnings of our faith."

"The early church had no debates over politicians and Communion. There wasn't any need," he said. "No persons who tolerated or promoted abortion would have dared to approach the eucharistic table, let alone dared to call themselves true Christians."

"The early Christians understood that they were the offspring of a new worldwide family of God," he said. "They saw the culture around them as a culture of death, a society that was slowly extinguishing itself."

Archbishop Chaput said, "Since we see similar signs in our own day, we need to find the courage those first Christians had in challenging their culture. We need to believe not only what they believed. We need to believe those things with the same deep fervor."

He said that believers must speak up "vigorously and without apologies" and be God's "witnesses on earth, not just in our private behavior, but in our public actions, including our social, economic and political choices."

Archbishop Chaput concluded, "If pagan Rome could be won for Jesus Christ, surely we can do the same in our own world. What it takes is the zeal and courage to live what we claim to believe."

END

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