The Anchoress

Counseling Kevin is a great site I don’t visit enough. Whenever I do, I find a gem. Today, I find a link and excerpts to this speech to college students by Archbishop Chaput of Colorado, and I gratefully share some with you:

But the problem is that much of American culture right now is built on an adolescent fiction. The fiction is that life is all about you as an individual—your ideas, your appetites, and your needs. Believe me: It isn’t. The main interest big companies have in your wants and mine is how to turn them into a profit. Part of being an adult is the ability to separate marketing from reality; hype from fact. The fact is, the world is a big and complicated place. It doesn’t care about your appetites. It has too many of its own needs, and it won’t leave you alone.

God made you for a purpose. The world needs the gifts he gave you. Adulthood brings power. Power brings responsibility. And the meaning of your life will hinge on a simple, basic choice. Will you engage the world with your heart and brains and faith, and work to make it a better place—not just for yourself and the people you love but also for people you don’t even know whose survival depends on your service to the common good? Or will you wrap yourself in a blanket of noise and toys and consumer junk, and stay a child?

God gave you a free will. How you use that gift is your choice—but it’s a choice you won’t be able to avoid. And that choice has consequences.
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What leaves the deepest impression about Solzhenitsyn’s work is his Christian spirit. He went into the gulag as an atheist. He was a Christian when he came out. What he saw in the Soviet prison camps, including the persecution and murder of tens of thousands of religious believers, changed him permanently.

Here’s my point. People who take the question of human truth, freedom and meaning seriously will never remain silent about it. They can’t. They’ll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. That’s the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but it’s never private. It always has social consequences, or it isn’t real. And this is why any definition of “tolerance” that tries to turn religious faith into a private idiosyncrasy, or a set of personal opinions that we can have at home but that we need to be quiet about in public, is doomed to fail.

The mentality of suspicion toward religion is becoming its own form of intolerance. I have seen a kind of secular intolerance develop in our own country over the past two decades. The modern secular view of the world assumes that religion is superstitious and false; that it creates division and conflict; and that real freedom can only be ensured by keeping God out of the public square.

But if we remove God from public discourse, we also remove the only authority higher than political authority, and the only authority that guarantees the sanctity of the individual. If the twentieth century taught us anything, it’s that modern states tend to eat their own people, and the only thing stopping this is a resistance based in the human spirit but anchored in a higher authority—which almost always means religious witness.
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Religious intolerance is a kind of blasphemy because it shows contempt for a person’s deepest search for meaning. And sooner or later, for most people, that search leads to God. The right to worship God, and the right to practice, preach, and teach what we believe without harassment—these rights are fundamental to the human person. They’re part of the foundation of human dignity. We can never protect those rights by kicking God out of our public institutions, or banning him from our civic vocabulary. Democracy depends on the free, respectful, and nonviolent competition of ideas, and even God has a right—in fact he has the primary right—to be heard in that discussion.

Read it all - it’s all good. Then move over to Closed Cafeteria to watch Gerald’s one-on-one interview with Cardinal Schoenborn. Yes…it’s a video!