Christian Piety and Political Power in America

Is faith in the Risen Lord a true shield against a growing political and cultural absolutism in America today?  If so,  it may explain why a growing number of Catholics feel the need not retreat from the public square even as they seem to lose struggles for the sacredness of marriage and life. Instead, Christians and other people of prayer engage marketplace of ideas with even greater vigor. In the meantime, young people are responding to the call to ministry and lives of prayer with greater courage and enthusiasm than ever  Even as our churches in America and around the world are burned down and unbridled hatred is unleashed on our brothers and sisters in the Lord with horrific brutality, we have good reason to fall to our knees and pick up this shield again in prayer.

The Catholic faith is about freedom because it is about the truth, the deepest truth about God and about our existence. It appeals to the deepest sanctuary of the heart. If it promotes social institutions, it does so to make space for the voice of conscience in human affairs. Whether it concerns the sacredness of marriage, or of motherhood, or of family, or of life itself, the Church has a responsibility to speak the truth in love.. The Risen Lord died that this voice might be made pure through the forgiveness of sin. All the baptized are obliged to propose hope with love, no matter how often it is rejected or how deeply it is despised.  It is about people being set free to thrive, to live life to the full, to come home to God where they most belong.

As it abandons Christianity, America is diminished under the weight of bad religion. We have enslaved ourselves by worshipping at the altar of political avarice. All too often, our leaders refer to God with manipulative sentimentality, cloaking with calculating hubris their hidden agendas with pious jargon. Our branches of government usurp the very place of God, desecrating the most sacred institutions of human existence, declaring as burdens and not blessings the dying, the unborn and the stranger. As a result, marriage, motherhood and family life are all vulnerable to the latest whims of the politically powerful while scoffing cultural thugs shame us into silence. 

Everyone is afraid of being called intolerant. But the greatest sin in America today is not intolerance. Indeed, intolerance toward Christians is heralded as a great social virtue. Fewer and fewer leaders find the courage to stand up for people of faith.  They are looked upon as a political liability, discussed as an unruly part of the political equation. It has long been the case that people of faith who question the wrong cultural conventions are deemed politically and intellectually anathema. To propose that there is another standard besides the whims of the powerful is a threat to popular convention and civil discourse. Christians find themselves compelled to propose just this and so they always find themselves as the special target of social hatred.  

True piety and humble prayer always take Christians into this beatitude. Real prayer leads us to question both ourselves and our conventions in the light of heaven. Such prayer is dangerous personally and socially for those who are attached to using others for their own projects and personal gain. Yet, for those who need a word of hope and a shield against tyranny, such prayer this kind of prayer is vital.

Prayer rooted in what God has revealed causes us to measure everything against the wonder of His love at work in our misery. Manifest in the very least of our neighbors, the glory of this Living God implicates us in the plight of the less fortunate and most vulnerable, because this is where He is. As a people without this kind of piety, without this loyalty to God for His own sake, we cannot find this standard of American greatness raised by our forefathers or provide the rest of humanity a sanctuary of true human liberty.

In this proclamation, our faith lives in the wonder of Divine Providence raising up the poor and lowly, and bowing down the powerful and self-satisfied. A piety rooted on this hidden truth purifies politics. It reveals those wolves that merely use people to gratify their will to power. It raises the most essential questions about the meaning of society and the proper role of government. Here, our faith protects what is most tender and noble about our fragile human existence.  

Christ crucified humbles us all.  Before Him we know that might does not make right, due process alone is not enough for justice, and even capitol punishment does not provide the last word about the truth. The earthly supremacy claimed by any court will pass away -- and He will remain. To Him, we will all render an account.

The greatness of the Christian religion, the power of the Cross, is how it raises us above ourselves and gives us the courage to seek and live by the truth. This is the freedom to question cultural convention and political powers, to renounce the absolute claims they make on our lives, to choose to live in the freedom of God's love. Under the shadow of the Cross, believers know that the land of the free and the home of the brave can be rediscovered in our time.  Under the shield of faith, we have every hope of finding the courage to defend those sacred institutions and values that make a nation great.

Archbishop Aquila's Call for Prayer and Action

An Open Letter from Archbishop Aquila:

Open Letter to Catholics in Northern Colorado

SB175: Pray and Act!

To all people of goodwill in Colorado:

I am writing to you today with a very important request. Weekends are busy for all of us, but I am asking you, as a believer in the sanctity of human life, to pray for 10 minutes and take one of the actions that I will mention at the conclusion of this letter.

If you haven’t yet heard, there is a very troubling bill being debated in the Colorado State Senate next week. Senate Bill 175, touted as the “Reproductive Health Freedom Act,” passed on a party line vote in committee this past Thursday. I am grateful to every person who showed up to oppose the radical bill.

This over-reaching piece of legislation would essentially shut down any attempt to pass life-affirming legislation in Colorado ever again. More than that, it enshrines the “right to abortion” into Colorado law. It’s being praised by anti-life organizations such as NARAL and ThinkProgress as “the first of its kind” in the country and “ambitious.”  It enshrines the culture of death into law and ignores science.

This bill would prevent lawmakers from enacting laws such as ultrasound requirements, which we all know—particularly from the work of the Knights of Columbus Ultrasound Initiative here in Colorado—have done so much to give mothers vital information about their pregnancy, and thus save countless children from imminent death.

It prevents common sense regulations like waiting periods, restrictions on abortion pills (particularly for minors), and parental notification policies. Advocates of this bill seek the absolute “right to abortion” for girls as young as 10 or 11 without a parent’s knowledge, guidance or advice. Parents are seen as unfit in the moral guidance of their children.

Pope Francis affirmed on April 11, support for parents to decide their children’s moral and religious education, while he rejected “any kind of educational experimentation with children.”

He further stated, “The horrors of the manipulation of education that we experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century have not disappeared; they have retained a current relevance under various guises and proposals and, with the pretense of modernity, push children and young people to walk on the dictatorial path of ‘only one form of thought.’”

This bill would protect the “only one form of thought” that Pope Francis warns against and undermine the freedom of one’s conscience to promote the dignity of human life and the unborn child.

Finally, this bill would eliminate abortion clinic health code regulations, which pro-abortion advocates label as “burdensome.” Remember Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, and the horrific images and stories of women nearly dying on the abortionist’s table? That is what an unregulated abortion clinic looks like! This bill is not good for the women and girls of Colorado!

I am prayerfully asking every person of good will to spend 10 minutes this weekend in prayer. Plead to Our Lord for His intercession on behalf of life in Colorado. Also, pray for our politicians on both sides of this issue, particularly for those who work tirelessly and often without recognition to promote life-affirming legislation in our State Capitol. Pray for the conversion of the heart and mind of those who support such irrational, unscientific, and a denial of conscience legislation.

But don’t stop there. As a conclusion of your prayer, ask Our Lord what action he wants from you. You are called to be a leaven for good and for life in society. 

Here are some ideas of concrete actions you can take this weekend.

Contact your Senator. It would be a beautiful testimony on the part of the people of Colorado who support life if each senator in Colorado would wake up on Monday morning with hundreds of emails asking them to oppose SB175.

Please contact the Colorado Catholic Conference to learn more about this bill or to get contact information for your Senator. Call 303-894-8808 or visit their website: www.cocatholicconference.org.

Contact the media. Call your newspaper, your television station and your radio station. Ask them to cover this bill. Let them know that they are letting down the people of Colorado by allowing this bill to pass without a true public debate!

Spread the word. If you have a Blog, or are active on Facebook, Twitter or one of the other social networks, spread the word! Invite others who may not have received this letter to pray and act!

Be people of hope! Many of you have lost faith in politics, but remember that attitude is not of God and is of the evil one. The devil confuses people and discourages them.  Pope Francis in his April 11 daily homily reminded us, “The devil is here…even in the 21st century! And we mustn’t be naïve, right? We must learn from the Gospel how to fight against Satan.”

Christians are a people of hope! No action taken in defense of life is meaningless, particularly if it comes from a place of prayer and the Gospel.

I leave you with some thoughts on the importance of Christian witness in our times. Remember that Vatican II called every Catholic to serve as leaven in society and “work for the sanctification of the world from within.”

“Since they are tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs,” the document “Lumen Gentium” states, “it is their [the laity’s] special task to order and to throw light upon these affairs in such a way that they may … continually increase according to Christ to the praise of the Creator and the Redeemer” (LG, 31).

My brother bishops and I have sent a joint letter to all Colorado Senators, now I ask you all to do your part to sanctify society. Together we can make a stand for life here in Colorado!

May God bless each one of you abundantly!

Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila

Archbishop of Denver

Making Space for God in the Face of Grave Evil

How do we pray in the face of grave evil and personal disaster?  Often grave evil has a stifling affect on prayer.  One feels overwhelmed and helpless. In this despondency, the mind struggles to search for God's presence, if it struggles at all.  In the face of unexpected disaster, the crushing burden of difficult questions torments the soul.  Yet, the world in which we live and in which we pray has always been riddled with the mystery of grave and overwhelming evil.  How do we begin to pray when God's love seems so absent and the reason for our hope so difficult to affirm?

Sometimes it feels impossible to pray and prayer is reduced to its most essential and simple movement - the cry of the heart for mercy.  On this point, Pope Emeritus Benedict's Spe Salvi refers to Cardinal Nguyen van Thuan's experiences during his long internment in Vietnam (see #34).  Sometimes, there was nothing the Cardinal could offer from his heart and all he could do was repeats passages from Scripture or prayers he memorized.

I have also spoken to those close to death who complain about the same kind of difficulty in prayer.  They want to want to be able to pray - but there are no words, no thoughts, no feelings, nothing to intuit, nothing to imagine, nothing.  In such moments, God seems so absent and in effort to pray, if effort can be made at all, seems so wasted.  So they repeat simple short phrases they have memorized, "now and at the hour of our death" or else "our hope does not disappoint" or even "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…"  

In such cases, all that is left to the soul seems to be a sort of last vestige of prayer, a feeble desire to raise one's heart to God, a desire hidden in the overwhelming pain that, in this moment and under these circumstances, cannot realize fulfillment and yet chooses to hope anyway.  It is an effort to pray or to desire to pray baptized in heartbreak and dismay -- and in this annihilation, we have already entered deep into the infallible prayer of Christ Crucified.

Who is not reduced to this kind of prayer when the mystery evil crushes the innocent and vulnerable?  When we learn about a friend's daughter paralyzed after a fatal accident, when we learn about explosives killing people at a foot race, or when we learn about the horrific slaughter of babies who having survived callous attempts to abort them were subjected in the most inhumane brutality, it is difficult to pray - the heart is numb, but not our hope.  When the simple words of the Our Father, a Hail Mary, or even the whispered name of Jesus is all that can be offered -- this is what the Lord needs us to offer and this with what love we can muster: for even in the poverty of our prayer, the most frail effort to pray makes space in the world for God to act.  So we find the courage to pray.  The power of God is at work in so many hidden ways that, even when our conversation with the Him is reduced to nothing else than the most humble cry of the heart, the Lord unleashes anew that flood of hope that helps the world begin to see the triumph of good over evil even in face of heart-breaking circumstances.

A Letter to Governor HIckenlooper

Dear Governor John Hickenlooper, 

Since prayer in the Catholic Tradition is concerned about real life, as were the teachings of the ancient prophets, there are political events that have such spiritual significance they cannot be passed over.  In fact, the reality of Christian prayer extends to everything to which the dimensions of Christ's love extend - even the socio-politico.  I read Archbishop Aquila's statement in response to Senate Bill 11 which you plan to sign.  I have also read Bishop Sheridan's statement in the Colorado Catholic Herald.   It is disappointing that their concerns remain unaddressed. When my own local government seeks to impose inhumane values that are abusive of institutions so sacred as is marriage and the care of orphans and children in distress, I feel compelled to use this platform to make my voice heard in the public square and in the marketplace of ideas.   After having attempted to reach you by phone, I address you in this open letter today as we Catholics celebrate the solemnity of St. Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus Christ and protector of the Holy Family.

You plan to sign into law legislation, a so-called civil unions bill, that by design obscures the ancient meaning of marriage and penalizes those who are morally obliged to safe-guard sacred truths about humanity.  Indeed, those who have devoted themselves to works of mercy out of love for God must care for orphans and children in troubled family situations by divine decree.  By the action you are intending to carry out, you will rob them of the freedom they need to follow their consciences in trying to find good homes for those who do not have any.  

Those who have supported this bill have pitted themselves against people of good will, families, and children whose God given rights have already been brutally abused in this conversation.  Should you go through with what has been announced, more than catastrophically harming the very heart of our society (marriage and family life),  you will also define yourself as an enemy of the most fundamental liberties essential to the American experiment - including the religious rights of citizens to organize to provide orphans foster care or adoption into families that have both a mother and a father.   

As a life long student of the religious dimension to human existence, the legislation on your desk can only be seen as one more effort by government to seize divine power it simply does not have.   Whenever the politically powerful attempt to exercise such absolute tyranny over those whose rights they should protect, the dignity of humanity is always put at grave risk. In fact, should you make this legislation into law against the will of the people of Colorado who already rejected a similar referendum and amended our state's constitution to protect marriage, you will implicate yourself in a form of political idolatry that can only undermine our solidarity as a people and your credibility as a statesman.  This does not have to be the road you choose.  Appealing to your own desire that the citizens of our State might thrive, please remember that we come to enjoy the fullness of life when we make decisions mindful of that day of reckoning in whose merciful but exacting light your actions as governor and each one of us entrusted to your service will be scrutinized.

Respectfully,

Anthony Lilles

Prayer on the Eve of an Infamous Decision

January 22nd is a day of penance.   Bread and water, a little less sleep and comfort and a little more prayer and sacrifice, renouncing noise and diversion to embrace sober silence and heartfelt tears, waking from sluggishness of heart to take up works of mercy - all of this is appropriate.  Prayerful tears leading to radical conversion constitute the only adequate response one can render in the face of even one purposely induced abortion.  How are we to respond to the more than fifty million instances of heartless brutality that have poisoned these last forty years?  How can we feel anything but shame over the inhumane industry which developed in our communities as a result?   We bear together the unbearable burden of this social misery and only God can rescue our humanity from being crushed by its weight.

On this day, we pray and fast but not without hope: Christian prayer offered with love and confidence has the power to overcome every form of violence and brutality.   This is because this kind of prayer, the prayer that flows from a broken heart, has the power to gain bold access to the Lord.  The Lord would not declare that those who sorrow are blessed unless He had committed Himself to comforting them by manifesting the transforming power of His mercy.

America needs Christians who care enough to pray with the blessed sorrow that alone brings Christ's healing comfort.  When the Supreme Court trampled the inalienable right to life, it burdened American life with the weight of violent uncertainties.  In a society where even the womb is exposed to the most heartless brutality and egregious atrocities, what hope is there that such a people will ever be able to grow together in authentic social concern or friendship?  And if any instrument of government believes itself invested with the authority to subjugate the sacred rights of the most vulnerable, how can the governed really have confidence in any kind of rule of law other than that which the politically and culturally powerful use to marginalize those whose rights are deemed inconvenient for the progress of society?  Not satisfactorily resolved, these perilous questions sink the whole American experiment into a pigpen of disingenuous political and cultural gamesmanship.

We must prayerfully grieve for our nation, for our communities, for our families.  American greatness is grounded in the humility that the light of faith reveals to those who seek God.  Only the faith of those who believe can help our society rethink again the gift of life under the rays of a kindly light.  Christian prayer magnifies this light under whose faintest glimmer true life, humility and greatness are together born.  But it can only do so with heartfelt tears (whether physical or not): God hears the contrite soul that pours itself out in humble need -- and for Christians offering such intercession is our greatest social responsibility.

If we would open our hearts to the the sorrow with which God aches we too would ache for the millions of babies, and children, and young people, and whole families which He willed to entrust to our care, but who are not here because of what we have willed.   We must weep over our own blind self-deception in believing that any decision regarding life is private affair.  We are all implicated in one another's decisions irrespective of whether we are male or female, friends or enemies, atheists or believers.  The decision not to welcome or protect life is always a social reality, the most inhumane form of social poverty that can inflict any family or community -- and God's heart can only weep over us for having fallen into such misery.

By prayer and fasting there is still the opportunity that we might be pierced to the heart.  It is still possible for us to know compunction over the fact that instead of protecting motherhood and supporting those whose desperate situations drove them to despair, we viewed their plight as an inconvenience that needed to be dispatched as efficiently as possible.   Sorrow can still drive us to the hope of prayer and by this hope to a new beginning.

If heaven is dismayed that we who have been blessed far beyond anything we ever deserved chose to be callous towards those who most needed our help, our encouragement, our love -- we still may yet be astonished by the mercy of God in which even the evil of our personal decisions finds its limit.  In prayer, the tears of faith access the power of God who in unimaginable mercy is waiting to heal the alienation and coldness of heart our own actions have brought on ourselves.   In such holy conversation with the One who knows the deepest truth of our hearts, baptized in holy tears of repentance and gratitude, the grace of a change of heart yearns to unfold and new possibilities that we cannot imagine await us.

A Culture of Life and Family Prayer

When Blessed John Paul II came to Denver over twenty years ago, he called on the young people of the world to build a culture of life and civilization of love.   He pointed to prayer, to an encounter with Christ, as the basis of this great undertaking.   One simple way to introduce prayer into our culture, one we have complete control over in the privacy of our homes, is the practice of family prayer.  Family prayer, no matter how informal or chaotic, is a moment of thanksgiving for the gift of life shared together, and a moment of love in which families learn how to bear with one another out of reverence for Christ and how to raise one another up to the Lord.  Genuine progress to life and love can only be realized by such prayer.

This is not to say that society has not been progressing without prayer -- but society without God only progresses through various circles of hell.  A loveless civilization has been progressing out of control for quite sometime, and in the process corrupting all that is holy and true about the American way of life.  Here, Obama Care and the HHS mandate to implement it are simply signs of another stage in the same evolutionary process that brought us Roe vs Wade.  Absolute power over life and death is a divine right, and our government has no fear of God in usurping this role.   A litany of court orders, executive orders, laws and regulations appeal to safety and security with emotive force and righteous indignation.  Each new invocation advances another lifeless and loveless cause, causes which if carefully marketed provide another pretext for the powerful to protect themselves from the dreams and aspirations of what they can only see as an unholy mob.

Prayer allows individuals to bind together as a people in freedom, prayerlessness allows a mob to bind the individual against his will.  The particular form of social progress we are currently enjoying in America goes hand in hand with the ever increasing cultural hostility to prayer we have accepted as a norm.  The more a society progresses down to a prayerless mob, the easier it becomes to manipulate.   Wihout prayer, the promptings of conscience which normally protect communities from implicating themselves in grave social evil are silenced.  This seems to be at work in our culture as we have moved away from prayer and pre-occupied ourselves with all kinds of political rancor and envy, news cycles and narratives.   Although abortion is not as popular as it once was, those we have invested with political or cultural power (for the lastest example, check out the efforts of the Governor of New York) are as adamant as ever about compelling the whole of society to participate in this evil, no matter the dictates of individual consciences.  In fact, compelling whole religious organizations to provide immoral services is now heralded as the next stage of social progress.

The less we pray, the more vulnerable we are to evil, and the weaker our witness to the greatness of our religion.  Like the criminals convicted at Nuremberg trials, people of faith are expected to act against what they know is right because the authorities have ordered them to do so.   When individual members of a society feel compelled to act against what they believe is noble and true, is it any wonder why that whole society should be burdened with every form of unhappiness and misery?  To live in such self-contradiction is to be damned.  No amount of convenience or luxury or diversion can address the weight of unacknolwedged guilt that haunts such a people or overcome the burning alienation from one another abusing and being abused by power causes.  If people of faith forsake prayer in the face of such evil, how can they offer a reason for their hope when such a word of hope is most needed?

For lack of prayer, the gift of freedom has become at risk in America.  A government, even if democratic, always progresses toward unholy forms of tyranny whenever it violates such basic goods as religious freedom, the institution of marriage, the rights of children to maternal and paternal love, and the right to life.  How can a society stand if it will not welcome and nurture the gift of life, if it will not reverence the holiness of marriage, if it will not allow people to follow their moral consciences?  And what kind of wealth does such a people possess if anxiety over it makes them afraid to take care of the most vulnerable and beautiful gifts God bestows?   As Mother Theresa once explained, it is a great poverty to think that a baby must die so that one might live as they wish. Yet a callous poverty is progressively robbing America of the noble destiny God has invited us to share.

Although many Americans have forgotten God, God has not forgotten America.   The noble calling He invites America to accept involves our becoming an even brighter beacon of human freedom than we have ever been before -- and this is possible even now under the current oppressiveness of our government.  Advancing a genuine freedom rooted in the truth demands that we not fear to seek and protect the dignity of the human person -- from womb to tomb.  This dignity can only be rightly seen and fully protected by prayer.

Prayer makes space for love.  This is true in the heart of each believer.  This is true in marriages.  This is true in families.  This is true in communities.   Love, in the form of social friendship, is the only foundation on which civility can be maintained. Real social friendship is not something innate or apriori in human nature.  It is something learned -- in fact it is the hardest thing to learn, because one cannot learn it except at the expense of his own life.  This is exactly why God sent his Son into the World - to show us how to love one another and God, and to give us His own power so that we might begin to relate to God and to one another in ways not subject to death.  Because family prayer (and the family rosary in particular) dispose parents and children to that unfathomable Divine Love Christ makes present in both our social and personal histories, the daily prayer of families together offers a remedy that may help America progress towards that culture of life and civilization of love God has called us to be in the world.

A New Liberty for Humanity

God loves to work through human freedom -- the freer humanity is, the more freely God manifests His Glory.  To help us find this spiritual liberty, John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way of the Lord.   His message was a very simple call to act justly and honestly.  The effort to live our lives morally upright levels the pathway for the Messiah.  What was true in that historical coming of Christ is true in the spiritual ways He continues to come into our hearts: the Lord is able to more freely come into the world when we devote ourselves to doing what is right and to overcoming evil with what is good.

We have a great advantage over those who heard the preaching of the Baptist.   They did not know that the promise was already fulfilled in a manner that surpassed all expectation:  the Son of God had come into the world.  They repented of sin and lived justly based solely on the promise that He would come -- without fully understanding just who "He" would be.

Yet their faith in the shadow of so great a reality was enough for them to begin to get ready, enough for them to repent, enough to realize they needed salvation, to begin to love and respect one another again.  We have an even greater reason for this kind of living faith - for we do not live in the shadow of a promise, but we live in communion with the fulfillment of that promise: the Living Image of the Invisible God continually comes by mystery into the broken and impoverished places of our lives because He has already come into history and loved us in poverty - the poverty of a babe in swaddling clothes.

Faith in Christ brings a new liberty to humanity.   By infusing our poverty, our weakness, our voids, our failures, our inadequacies with His Presence, all these things that would otherwise impede our efforts to love are now infused with an even greater love - God's love.   Renunciation of a hidden sin that no one might notice, renunciation of amusements that do not give glory to God, renunciation of a little comfort at the end of a long day, renunciation of the need to win an argument, renunciation of the need to be noticed - whenever we make these little renunciations out of love for Jesus, we discover our poverty and in discovering our poverty we open ourselves to the coming of Life, the coming of Truth, and this in a greater Way than we have ever known before.  This is the new freedom, the spiritual liberty, that the Christ child comes to bring humanity.

Prayer In the Face of Evil

Evil threatens humanity on both social and personal levels, and, against this threat, prayer in the face of grave evil takes on a particular importance.  It is in the face of grave evil that our faith in the Lord is most tested, especially when that grave evil involves innocent children.   It is nearly impossible to pray when heartless brutality robs of us of those we love and steals all sense of security from our communities.  How do we pray when the actions of the violent seem to eclipse all that is good, noble and true about humanity and our life together?

It is normal to be dismayed before irrational malice and it is also normal to want to find some kind of explanation when we are dismayed.  We want to understand and we want to do something, anything to prevent the pain violence causes in the future.   Some of the resolutions we make at such moments might even be very good.  Yet, the deeper cause of evil, whether physical or moral, does not admit of an explanation, at least not of one that is fully satisfactory, and the suffering evil causes cannot be addressed, at least not adequately, by anything that is under the command of our own cleverness or natural capacities for problem solving.

As we approach the mystery of Christmas, I have no words that could possibly comfort those who have suffered the unimaginable distress that has befallen so many families in so many different ways.   The only comfort that is real comfort cannot be contained in human words, but true comfort is entrusted to us by the God the Father.  He whose heart is broken over the evils of this world speaks His Word into our suffering and his Word cries out in our flesh, wrapped in swaddling clothes: this is God's living prayer to humanity.  Prayer in the face of evil is a living mystery where the tears of man mingle with the tears of God.     

Denver Bishops Call for Prayer

Denver Bishops Invite Catholics to Pray for Nation

 

Archbishop Samuel Aquila and Auxiliary Bishop James Conley are inviting the faithful of the Archdiocese of Denver, and all people of faith, to pray for our nation ahead of the November 6 presidential election.

The bishops are also encouraging parishes throughout northern Colorado to organize rosaries and holy hours, beginning this weekend.

 “As Americans,” stated Archbishop Aquila, “we have a civic responsibility to vote and to participate in the political process. As Catholics, we have a moral duty to vote with an informed conscience, and to pray for wisdom and guidance as we head to the voting booth.”

 “Join me in praying for our great nation, beginning this weekend and through November 6,” he added. “Let us ask God to bless us with the courage to live in the truth, and for leaders who are dedicated to protecting the rights of the unborn and religious liberty.”

The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception will expose the Blessed Sacrament from 7:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., and from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 6.

All people of faith are encouraged to pray the following prayer ahead of the election.

 Prayer for America, by Cardinal Francis Spellman

God of our Fathers, Shepherd of Thy people, Lord of free men's souls, bless Thou our nation with a valiant, Godly spirit, with a vision to see, with the courage to try, with the power to achieve, that, marching behind Thee, Thy people shall not perish.

God, bless our America! Hear our prayer for our united peoples, grant guidance to our leaders, protection to our sons, and teach each of us Thy way of life in good will and peace. Amen.

Consciences Inflamed with Love

We must follow our consciences, but the heart frozen to a cause instead of warmed by the truth is not free to love.  Catholics who act against human dignity in the voting booth often justify themselves by claiming that they are following their consciences and that they did everything they could to form their consciences in accord with the Church.  They reason, but their reasoning is callous and this cold indifference is revealed by the degree to which their actions rob others of the dignity that is owed them.  Only the chill of darkness can form the heart so cold.

Although humbly presenting the truth is always a moment of actual grace that may solicit conversion, it is a mistake to presume that this kind of moral failure results from a simple lack of information.  Often such souls have stuffed themselves with all kinds of data and statistics.  In one hand, they hold vast array of "facts" at their command like weapons in an arsenal.  In the other, they are so weighed down with so many individual data points (all of which are proved by science we are told) that they cannot see the forest for the trees - and so they are lost in it.  Our efforts to find a way of this jungle of muddled thought are only fruitful to the extent they are drenched in prayer. 

The cause of bad judgment is most often not merely informational.  Better information technology cannot even remotely address the primordial ignorance against which humanity struggles.  This ignorance numbs the depths of one's conscience.  It consists in the diminished capacity to grasp the truth, to see through the facts to reality itself, to behold situations for what they really are. Until the blindness of ignorance is addressed with something more than the merely factual, individual judgment is subject to what is socially convenient and acceptable - standards easily manipulated by corrupt cultural and political powers.

This blindness is the effect of sin.  The guilty ego is like a star that has collapsed into itself.   The absence of light that ought to be there creates a distortion field between the soul and reality - especially the reality of the neighbor who has been entrusted to my care.   

No matter how much information we gather and data we organize, as long as we are plagued with this cold darkness, we never adequately understand those to whom we bear the responsibility to love nor can we clearly see what they are owed.  This is no private, individual or esoteric experience.  Because so many consciences are frozen in this darkness, pre-born babies, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped and all the other most vulnerable are no longer safe in our society while we entertain ourselves with violence, brutality and all kinds of sexual aggression.

Truth is not a data point or the product of my cleverness, the truth is what is: verum est ens.  Ultimate truth is knowing ultimate reality - and such knowing is transformative because ultimate reality has a claim on the human heart.   This is because ultimate truth is filled with the eternal love.  With this true love, the human heart was made to be animated.  By this loving light, the heart was fashioned to behold the wonders of what God has done.

God has called us into communion with Him and being vulnerable to this call through faith in Jesus Christ as the Lord of Life changes everything about our lives.  The cold world needs the warmth of this saving light.  It is this saving knowledge which ought to form the conscience -- aflame with truth, the heart can judge rightly about the circumstances and intentions that surround every moral act: it has the warmth and light it needs to love.

Is Prayer an Escape from the Real World?

Some think that prayer is an escape from the real world.  To these, I say that there are prisons from which it is good to escape.   Lots of people banally exist imprisoned in what we call "the real world." Locked up in the fantasy land of adults and the culturally and politically powerful, they are not free to live life to the full.

All the same, I cannot agree that prayer is an escape from reality.  It is rather the opposite.  Those who do not pray are sometimes trying to escape basic truths about our existence - after all, life is short and eternity long, the way to salvation is as narrow as the path to perdition is wide, and divine justice will hold us accountable if we will not hold ourselves responsible before divine mercy.   Prayer is about facing this reality, this truth about our lives and about the world.

Those who ignore the impulse deep in our nature to cry out to God, those close their ears to all the ways God cries out to us every moment of every day, those who shut their eyes to the glory that is breaking in around us -- what they call "the real world" is an enchanting escape and hiding place from reality.  The problem is there are lots of dehumanizing traps in "the real world."  Anxious occupation over whether we are as comfortable, safe, successful and influential in our careers as we want is not a motivator toward excellence or the fullness of life -- it is to live imprisoned by fear.

There are self-appointed jailers who would rather that we never had this freedom.   They encourage us to grasp for and cleave to material bliss -- even as they know that this does not answer the pain in our hearts. They know this because they suffer from it too, even if they are very good at pretending they do not.   These are the culturally and politically powerful whose only joy is outweighed by the fear that it will be lost in an instant.  In their despair, they are inclined to keep our hopes locked up in some bright future that never comes or else shackled down with nostalgia for a past that was never as good as they suggest.

Christian prayer offers an escape from such oppression for the humble.  This prayer lifts up the heart and places it in the hands of the One who conquered death.  An ongoing conversation with Christ, this prayer teaches us to submit every thought to Him so that He can lead us into freedom - not in the future, but right now, in this present moment.  There is no earthly or celestial or under-worldly power that can come between us and the love of God.

Breaking with all manner of imprisonment prayer stands, prayer battles, prayer rises and this prayer professes the creed by which weak humanity is endowed with divine freedom.  Prayer stands on reality itself, the deepest truth of all that is, the Reality from which all other reality comes and to which it goes.  Prayer battles for all that is noble, good, holy, true and most vulnerable about humanity -- because our Savior would have us do no less.  Indeed, we are only following His example.  Prayer rises up like incense bringing to the suffering of earth into the glory of heaven - hoping with every reason to hope that it will be on earth as it is in heaven.

Our jailers are afraid to allow us to stand on our own in real prayer - prayer that expresses itself in all kinds of real works of mercy - because they do not understand the ground under our feet. They hate what our creed demands - so they mock while we must stand fast by the truth.  They cannot bear the bold stands we take in the public square - so they deride while we must appeal to their humanity. They do not want to deal with the truth - so they interrupt while we must try to make our case.  They fear our freedom to love the most vulnerable, so they concoct laws to take it away and then deny with aggrieved indignation that they have harmed us in any way.

But despite their efforts, the freedom that we know by prayer cannot be denied.  In the last century, ideologues tried to destroy the Christian faith - those cultural and political powers are no more.  But Christian prayer remains a reality in the real world, a sign of hope for those who most need one.  If anyone should want to break out of banal existence to live life to the full, including the jailers themselves, the Deliverer is just a prayer away.

Of Prayer and Politics

There are many who pray for a political end.   There is nothing wrong with this at all.  That is why it is good for people of faith to speak out on political matters.   Their views are often informed by the wisdom gained by engaging God in prayer.   They have something to contribute to the conversation and they have a stake in its outcome -- to which the Lord is not indifferent.  God, however, cannot be used as a tool for someone's political agenda.

Some who pray for a political end as if it were their ultimate end.  Having cloaked themselves in moral rectitude, their agendas and schemes become the standard of righteousness.  In a world where the end justifies the means, they shamelessly approach God demanding that He take their side.  Insofar as they are doing this, whatever they say they believe, they do not worship God - they worship politics.  And we cannot serve both God and mammon.  Such souls need our prayers.  Politics is a heartless god who is not kind to the integrity of his adherents.

 In prayer, God demands openness to the truth.  If we ask Him for something, He expects us to listen to Him, to let Him enter our hearts and speak to our consciences.  This means, among many other beautiful but difficult things, we need to take stock of His concerns when we ask Him about ours.   He does not care much for our agendas or power struggles.  He is concerned that societies thrive.  He is concerned that cultures develop in a way that builds up and protects all that is good, noble and true.  He is especially concerned about the most vulnerable -- the dying, the unborn, the foreigner, the hungry, the jobless, the homeless, the addict -- He implicates Himself in all these situations and He expects human society to do the same.

To help us understand God's expectations for our political prayers and action, the USCCB has put out Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.  The USCCB also responds to Catholics in public life who have abused their position and not spoken truth.  At a debate last week, the vice-president, a long time public servant and Catholic, grossly misrepresented the impact of the HHS mandate on the Catholic Church, its organizations and the faithful who try to live their their life in accord with its moral teachings.  In so doing, he has put at risk the religious freedom of all Americans and provided grave scandal.  The USCCB has spoken out about this as well. 

Politics a very difficult and those who have dedicated their lives to public service are owed our respect and deserve our prayers - even when we disagree with them.  We also need to pray for one another and our discernment during these days - because in America we all bear responsibility for public life.  Lets pray for those who vote and for those who are unable to.   By prayer and our faithfulness to God in the political arena, we will make space for God to help us build a culture of life and civilization of love.  

Living Faith and Freedom to Live the Faith

Why do those who pray need to express their faith by acts of mercy, by speaking the truth, and by working for the common good?  It is because their faith is a living faith, a faith animated by friendship with God.  In such faith, God is present in a real, personal and particular way.  This faith glimpses how much God has implicated Himself in human affairs and it desires to implicate itself in divine affairs.   In such faith, the heart is open, completely vulnerable to the Lord who has made Himself vulnerable to us.  In love animated faith, His love for humanity becomes the passion of our hearts.  This heart to heart is meant to hold up each moment of our lives, but it reaches a special note of intimacy only in the silence of prayer.

Those who know this divine love yearn for the freedom to share that love with the whole world.  They are compelled to be concerned about the things that concern His Heart.   God really is concerned about humanity, about our lives together, about the most vulnerable and about the truth.   So God's friends, those who have dedicated themselves to living faith, they want to make their voices heard and work for a society that is ordered to the truth - the truth about who God is, who we are before Him, and the truth about how we are to live together in love.   This means being able to protect and promote all that is good, holy, tender, authentic and noble about sacred and frail humanity.

In the United States today this freedom is gravely threatened by those who do not understand God's love and who view living faith as an impediment to progress.   Such ignorance and misunderstanding is not fundamentally political or cultural problem, it is spiritual, a problem in the heart.  Only prayer and real dialogue - dialogue radically rooted in the truth - can change hearts.  Only the truth can set us free.

God delights in all that is genuinely human.  He delights in just laws and fairness.   He is always at work in the hearts of those with good will and in the events of life to help us enjoy what He enjoys.  He loves us this much.   Thus, as we work against unjust laws, not only here in America, but all over the world where ever people are not free to live by living faith, we must proceed confident in his love and providence.  Here, more than anything else, prayer opens up the space for Him to bless our solidarity with one another.  With divine blessing, we discover the freedom to delight in what God delights in when He gaze on us and the courage to do what needs to be done so that those we love might have this freedom too. 

Where Religious Civil Liberty Touches Spiritual Freedom

Religious liberty and spiritual freedom embrace in the desert of difficult trials. When the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, the initial elation about being free from slavery faded in the wilderness. As their hardships increased, the people murmured that their new found freedom was more difficult and less comfortable than had been their bondage. They questioned why they had stepped out of subjugation. The political and cultural powers to whom they had been bound provided safety and comfort: their hardships made choosing liberty appear rash.

Similarly today as we strive to protect our religious civil liberties, there are many people of faith who are uncomfortable with the Church speaking out against unjust laws supported by the culturally and politically powerful.  They would prefer that the Church would just go along with the dominant value system and they do not understand why we simply do not adjust our principles and practices to what those in power deem acceptable. This is like longing for the fleshpots of Egypt.

Spiritual freedom is the soul of religious civil liberty.   For Israel to come to prefer slavery over freedom gives us insight into how difficult spiritual freedom is to attain - chased by enemies, hungry, thirsty, not confident about what God had promised them, and afraid to listen to his voice, they spent many years learning the spiritual freedom their new religious freedom required. We must learn this spiritual freedom too.

The freedom of the people of faith cannot be won by just going along with everyone else. True freedom to love requires suffering all kinds of hardship, opposition, false judgment, slander, and other forms of persecution.  This is the desert into which the Lord leads us.

 God has not offered us freedom to make us comfortable but to provide us the opportunity to do something beautiful for Him.  Giving up this freedom for the merely culturally comfortable is hell - and there many who suffer hell in this life. They do not want to be imposed on by God because what God asks is uncomfortable - the wilderness where freedom is forged is always uncomfortable.

Spiritual freedom requires constant renunciation of our desires for security, power, and reputation. This renunciation does not mean that these things are bad in themselves. To renounce such things means to put the interests of God first, before these other interests, no matter the cost.

To what great purpose does the Risen Lord want us to use our freedom?  God is interested in our marriages, our families, and our babies -- as Catholics we need the civil liberty to put these divine interests before every other human interest and the freedom from any mandate that would require us to act otherwise.  We also need the interior freedom which knows it is not intolerant to say this or to live it.  The Lord is concerned with vulnerable, poor, lonely and sick - if they come first for Him, we need the religious liberty to take care of them and not leave them in their hour of need.  We also need inner freedom which knows it is not mean-spirited to serve them in accord with the Gospel of Christ.   The freedom of the children of God is the freedom to put God first - not just in Church on Sundays or in the privacy of our homes, but also in our work and our public life, and especially in our hearts.  This is not an impediment to society, but a nation's greatest blessing.

God frees us for a great purpose - to reveal his love to the world.  To realize this purpose takes true freedom and the courage that goes with it.   This is a purpose worth speaking out for against political and cultural interests who are afraid of the truth and what might happen if the God-given capacity to love were unleashed in society.  The desert is where these fears are revealed and where spiritual freedom is born - it is where our civil right to religious freedom becomes animated with the love of God. 

Prayer and Action in the Night of Freedom

The Catholic Bishops have asked us in these days leading up to July 4 to pray for our most cherished freedom - religious freedom.  This is freedom not only to go to Church and pray, but also to provide works of service and love to the vulnerable in society, to tell the truth about human dignity and the sanctity of life to governmental powers and commercial interests who tend to treat persons as merely the means to an end rather than an end in themselves, and to share the Gospel of Christ in the public square.  This great freedom is not free and from childhood we learned songs about fighting through the night for what is most sacred about our way of life.  So this Fortnight of prayer is a kind of battle, an expression of opposition to those who would try to prevent us from rendering unto God what belongs to Him alone.

In this world, the religious liberty that belongs to humanity is always threatened.  Every generation must speak out and struggle for its right to serve God anew - or what is holy in humanity is lost.  While making our political voices heard is essential in this struggle, this sacred civic freedom is only truly protected by learning to pray in true spiritual freedom.  For indeed, our struggle is never really against human foes but spiritual ones against whose tactics and stratagems Christ has promised victory.  In this struggle for freedom, every threat can become by our prayer and love the revelation of the glory of God.

In this Fortnight of Freedom, the Lord invites us into a beautiful night of spiritual freedom, a true interior liberty St. John of the Cross describes as a search for God in a dark night. For those under trial, burdened by extra projects and afflicted with all kinds of discouragement, St. John of the Cross teaches that the Lord is at work in secret, hidden ways accomplishing something that we do not understand.  He describes this unseen work as producing spiritual freedom. True freedom he has in mind is the ability to love when we do not feel loved, the ability to appreciate when we do not feel appreciated, the ability to understand when we do not feel understood.

St. John of the Cross is suggesting that trials become beautiful when we allow the Lord to teach us this kind of freedom.  This kind of freedom of heart is so precious, so sacred because it is precisely with this same divine freedom that God loves us. If this is the case, we can call our struggles and difficulties and hardships a Night of Freedom, and our greatest contribution to America during this Fortnight of Freedom is to keep the light of our faith by prayer and action burning bright.

Standing Firm on our Principles

We seem to be going from crisis to crisis, at least according to the dominant voices of our culture.   There is a reason for this.  In the midst of a crisis, we are usually told that the end justifies the means.  In other words, a state of crisis is often used by the unscrupulous to manipulate and to silence people of principle. Here is the battle in which we are tested.  The principles we believe, those propositions of our faith as Christians, those things to which we boldly adhere, our Creed itself is what is under assualt.  No matter the crisis, the principles of the Christian faith are infallibly true and in this battle, our faith is being made pure and strong if we stand firm. 

Faith is a contest that involves courage, struggle and constant effort.  Today more than at any time in history we face a constant onslaught of all kinds of trials, hardships and persecutions against Christians in general and the Catholic Church in particular.  We confront all kinds of evil both from within and from outside the Church.   In each scandal that rocks the People of God, in every governmental assault on the consciences of faithful, in the endless cultural attacks by the entertainment industry on all that is good and wholesome in our way of life; in all of this, the principles of the Christian faith are tested again and again. 

It is a grave mistake to see this test from only a human level or to try to overcome it by human cleverness alone.  In fact, we must persevere against principalities and powers not only for our own sakes, but especially for the sake of those who have made themselves our enemies.  Love for them demands our fidelity to the truth - such fidelity may help not only our enemies but us ourselves to rethink our hostility to one another and rediscover the dignity we share together.  Such humanzing fidelity is rooted in a radical trust in God - our faithfulness to Him flows from the fact that He is always more faithful to us.

In the midst of a battle this fierce and prolonged, it is easy to lose heart and to be gripped with all kinds of insecurities.   A lack of confidence thwarts many who otherwise would do something beautiful for God.   This is why we must not only be faithful to God, but we also must encourage one another by both words and prayer.   The battle of our faith is a personal struggle for freedom but it is also a battle for communion, true communion with God and one another.  The battle is won when our love for one another is built up deeper and stronger in friendship with God.

The battle of faith is won by standing on the principles that live in our hearts, the truths we know are true.  The articles of our faith handed on and entrusted to us by the Church: this is the firm ground of our hearts, the battlefield where we take our stand.  Our weapons are prayer, fasting and works of mercy.  If we stand firm, our victory is assured.  This is because by believing what we profess in the Symbol of our Faith, we have access to the Lord Himself -- He is our courage even when we feel no courage at all. 
With Him and through Him, all things are possible, even victory in the face of overwhelming and oppressive force.   For indeed He has already won this victory and we are only extending the fruits of his triumph into our own lives when we stand firm in prayer and refuse to lose heart. This is the substance of our hope - the living presence of the Risen Lord who never abandons us and to whom we have bold access in faith.  

For Greater Glory

Over the weekend, I saw For Greater Glory (Cristiada), a movie about the Cristero wars in Mexico (1926-1929).  Until I saw this movie, most of what I had heard about this war was from Graham Greene's Power and the Glory, a few short biographies from some of the martyrs who were beatified and canonized, and word of mouth stories from migrant workers with whom I worked in California, New Mexico and Texas.  I never was able to put together all these different sources.  The movie was deeply moving to this end, especially at this time when religious freedom is being threatened all over the world.  Now I cannot wait to read the book by Ruben Quezada.

For our time and for those who are beginning to pray, the movie helps us think about the connections between faith and culture, religion and society, personal conversion and social change, and holiness and the authentically human; all of which ought to be part of our personal conversation with God.  Humble prayer informed by these considerations helps us discern what it is we are to render unto God, to summon the courage to be good citizens, and to find the joy we need to share the Gospel of Christ.  Here are my thoughts on the Cristeros, their struggles and their witness, thoughts I hope to develop for many years to come.

To God, what belongs to God.  The movie depicts how government overreach incited the Cristeros.  Although it is the teaching of the Lord that we must render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, the claim of Caesar is not absolute.  There are things to be rendered unto God to which Caesar has no right.  With the battle cry "Viva Cristo Rey!" the Cristeros were affirming that the demands of faith in Christ do not admit of compromise.

Unjust laws are a threat to what is authentically human in society, especially for the poor and the powerless.  The movie shows an escalation in violence proportionate to the attempts of governmental power to suppress people of faith. Sadly, throughout history and throughout the world today, governments have shown a propensity to lay claim to what pertains to the innermost sanctuary of the human person -- and the fruits of this oppression always undermine and destabilize society.  Whenever state power encroaches on obligations of conscious to God, it is always to the detriment not simply of religious institutions but rather of the whole of society.   As has been the case throughout history, the movie depicts the poor and the powerless bearing the brunt the social aggression which results from all sides.  Indeed, the development of a more humane society is thwarted until unjust laws subverting religious freedom are repealed.

Witness to the true freedom of our faith through responsible social participation.  The movie shows bystanders who try to avoid conflict by compromise but end up subjecting the most vulnerable to harms way.  Whenever the followers of Christ have been shamed or bullied into silence, it is always disastrous for the rest of society, but especially for those who most need a voice.  It is cowardly to be a bystander when the rights and dignity of the most vulnerable in society are on the line. Religious freedom is not only about one's own freedom to live one's own faith in private but it is about the responsibility to promote this freedom to build up the common good.  Rendering unto God what belongs to God and to Caesar what belongs to Caesar converge on the responsibility Catholics have for social participation.  We must not be silent in the marketplace of ideas or in the debates that take place in the public square when something so precious as religious freedom is at stake.

Be proud of the Gospel.  The movie puts together in a wonderful tapestry the stories of both the saints and sinners who comprised the Cristero movement.  Among the sinners, we see a purification of faith in the lives of the Cristeros as they come to grips with what it is they are fighting for and why they are fighting for it. At  the same time the movie develops the gradual realization among the secularists of the insufficiency of violent oppression as a means for securing social stability.  Among the saints, the martyrdom of both Blessed Jose Sanchez del Rio and Blessed Anacleto Gonzales Flores are depicted.  By making sure to include their stories, For Greater Glory helps us see that there is no greater glory than to live for Jesus Christ and that even in the worst circumstances if we are faithful to the hope that comes from God victory is assured.      

Does Real Marriage have a Prayer?

In a world gone mad, does real marriage have a prayer? The hostile attacks of the government of Colorado on the institution of marriage as well as the wavering of the world’s most powerful leader on the same issue make it appear as if the demise of traditional marriage is inevitable.  Indeed, the matter is no longer discussed as one in which intelligent people might have principled disagreements.  Instead, anyone who supports marriage as an institution between a man and a woman ordered to family life is now branded by the media as either a coward or else prejudiced bigot. 

But this is nothing new.  It was not so long ago when a governor of Colorado called Cardinal Stafford sophmoric for defending the dignity of marriage.  Yet just as the sacred institution of marriage between a man and a woman cannot be destroyed by unjust laws and the irresponsible comments of those in power, those who defend marriage are not bigots, cowards or sophmoric.  Indeed, traditional marriage not only has a prayer, it is an answer to prayer, a God-given sign of hope in the midst of societal insanity.

Those who fearlessly protect the dignity of marriage and family life today are arguably our greatest heroes, the real champions of our society, the true leaders of our time.  Mostly normal people simply trying to live normal lives, they are being attacked and ridiculed  for no other reason than they have dared to have the courage to stand up for what is right and just.   Though they are thought to be despised, the teachings of Christ indicate that these ordinary people persecuted for the sake of righteousness are extraordinarily blessed.  The truth is marriage will always have a prayer, and so will those with the courage to stand for it. 

The best defense of marriage is for every husband and wife to renew their dedication to one another.  Faithfulness to the unique friendship made possible in traditional marriage protects life and love in society like no other institution of society can. Conversely, when the sacred bonds of this kind of love are made vulnerable to any kind of infidelity or selfishness, the rest of society suffers. When the pledges of husband and wife are forsaken, an anti-culture rooted in hubris and arrogance emerges. Neither life nor love are safe when the ancient death-wish that thwarts the proud takes hold in family life or the life of a civilization.  Steadfast fidelity to the vows of love of those God has joined together keeps hope alive not only for the man and woman who choose such a friendship, but also for the whole world.

When man and woman publicly and solemnly bind themselves together in an indissoluble sacred friendship, they reveal something of the communion which God desires to share with creation, a mystery that lives in the very heart of the Holy Trinity. Because of its particular radical openness to love's fecundity and fidelity, no other natural form of friendship is capable of signifying this divine mystery of love the way marriage does. Marriage reveals not only to the married couple but to the whole world dimensions of God’s love we cannot live without if we are to be fully human and fully alive.

Human society needs this most sacred of all forms of natural friendship. We see in the prophets of Israel as well as in the histories of Ancient Greece, Carthage and Rome, great civilizations, cultures and individuals advanced on the basis of having realized this or came to their ignoble end to the extend they failed to protect it. The married friendship of man and woman, in fact, is imbued with values the dynamism of which do not admit of being violated by political or cultural powers without grave consequences to the whole of society.

True married love is fully open to divine gifts which bless all of humanity when both husband and wife realize how precious the brief time they have together actually is.  In the daily struggles to be of one heart and one mind in this present life, both husband and wife begin to discover the true meaning of their lives and the deepest truth about love. By their bonds of love, married couples learn to be fully human and fully alive, even (especially) in the most heart rending of circumstances. Through all the hardships, sorrows and sacrifice that indissoluble fidelity in love and complete openness to fecundity demand, they catch glimpses of the splendor of God otherwise unknown in this world. It is in this context of mutual devotion that the gift of life is meant to be bestowed because only in the midst of these fires of love is the family hearth, in all its sacredness, forged.

Frail and embattled though the sacred pledges of man and woman in marriage might be, true married love judges the nature of a society, not vice versa. Other kinds of relationships might try to ape this kind of tender fidelity and radical openness to another's gift of fertility. Confused governmental authority might try to call all kinds of social bonds by the same name. A cynical entertainment industry might sneer at those who believe in real marriage and try to live it. Desperate political forces may well marginalize those who attempt to defend it. Yet against all these things that will most certainly perish, the truth of marriage endures for ever.

The life long bond between husband and wife points to a love stronger than death. Because of the mercy of God, the victory of those who are faithful to this gift and who stand firm in defending its dignity is assured. This is true even though dark days are ahead. This road to hope, is it not also the very pathway of every great marriage? Fidelity and confidence which pass through the Cross of Christ always discover anew the Way for true spousal love to advance in society, in families, and especially in one’s own life.

Marriage has a prayer because the fidelity for which husband and wife strive comes from prayer. Like marriage, prayer is also a pledge of friendship. It is a divine gift meant to indissolubly link God and humanity as friends forever. Unlike the bonds of marriage in this world, the extent of the friendship to which the bond of prayer opens us goes well beyond this world.  Yet earthly marriage needs this heavenly help.  On the basis of the fidelity of God discovered in prayer, marriage discovers the power of its fidelity and fecundity. Indeed, because of prayer, this most tender and yet embattled of all loves in our day unleashes divine power in a hostile world, the only power on which a culture of life and civilization of love can be sustained.

Religious Freedom and Prayer

Beginning to pray is closely tied with religious freedom.  In fact, prayer is the font of all freedom, but religious freedom in particular.  Once God has touched one's heart, it is not enough to privately worship Him.   One is compelled by love to live this new freedom in public; to share the joy of faith not only within the family but also in the marketplace - indeed from the rooftops.  It is this faith filled witness to freedom that opens up new possibilities in a society, new and previously unimaginable opportunities to deepen the dignity of the human person.

At the same time, there have always been those who have opposed freedom and who fear humanity's religious aspirations.  For these political and cultural forces, religion is something especially to be controlled by manipulation and oppression.  They will not only use widespread cultural and commercial power to stifle the freedom that God gives, but they will also abuse even legal means to promote their bigotry.  Yet they can never attain their end without robbing a society of its hope, of that which is most genuinely noble about our lives in this brief time we have together in this passing world.  That is why when governments fail to respect the religious freedom of their citizens, such efforts must be resisted.

The U.S. Catholic Bishops released an important statement today asking from us a fortnight of prayer starting on June 21.  They are concerned about a number of issues where religious liberty has been co-opted in the United States, including the Health and Human Services Mandate for contraception, sterilization and abortion inducing drugs.   This is an example of another grossly unjust law which is aimed at not only coercing the religious freedom of Catholic Hospitals, Schools and other social services, but also the freedom of anyone who out of love for God is morally opposed to providing what this law requires.

Against this and other unjust laws of its kind, the U.S. Bishops do not call for the right to merely conscientiously object to government mandated religious discrimination.  There is no accommodation to be made with bigoted tyranny. Because such laws attack the fundamental civil liberty on which our free society is based, they must not be complied with at all.  Because more and more people of faith are facing persecution and having their rights to religious freedom denied them, this is an important battle to win not only for ourselves but for all those whose freedoms are being denied.  The Bishops call upon all people of good will to support them in this fight, every way they can.

The most powerful weapon in this fight is prayer.  This is why I am asking you to pray for religious freedom, not only in the United States, but around the world.  This is not the first time people of faith have had to work together and pray against unjust laws.  History is full of failed attempts, even recent ones, to oppress the free exercise of our faith in the public square.  The U.S. Bishops, in their statement, refer to the experience of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

In his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. boldly said, "The goal of America is freedom." As a Christian pastor, he argued that to call America to the full measure of that freedom was the specific contribution Christians are obliged to make. He rooted his legal and constitutional arguments about justice in the long Christian tradition:

I would agree with Saint Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all." Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.11

It is a sobering thing to contemplate our government enacting an unjust law. An unjust law cannot be obeyed. In the face of an unjust law, an accommodation is not to be sought, especially by resorting to equivocal words and deceptive practices. If we face today the prospect of unjust laws, then Catholics in America, in solidarity with our fellow citizens, must have the courage not to obey them. No American desires this. No Catholic welcomes it. But if it should fall upon us, we must discharge it as a duty of citizenship and an obligation of faith.

A Heart on Fire - What America Needs

America needs hearts on fire with the Gospel of Christ-- and not just America, but the whole world.   Our faith is not merely about a moral ideal or the mastery of a body of information.   It is about a relationship with the Risen Lord and out of that relationship, a transformed way of life.  Christ dwelling in us by faith gives us victory over evil in our lives.  Freed from self-indugelnce and anxiety, Christ offers the possiblity of conforming ourselves to his perfect love.  But we must believe -- really believe.  There is a steep cost in true discipleship -- and God is never outdone by our generosity. Here Christian piety does not operate on the level of a nice feeling or a pleasant thought.  The very substance of our hope requires that we make room for Christ Crucified in our hearts.  Such living faith requires real repentance, ongoing conversion, renunciation, sacrifice, constant vigilance, endurance of all kinds of trials, and continual effort to patiently bear with one another - or else we have robbed our faith of the power of the Cross.  Archbishop Charles, in his just released ebook, diagnoses this great spiritual problem which has dampened the flame meant to ignite the world:

"The 'next america' we now see emerging--an America ignorant of or cynical toward religion in general and Christianity in particular--shouldn't really surprise anyone.  Its a new America, but its made in America.  We can blame the mass media, or the academy, or science, or special interest groups for creating the environment we now face.  But we Christians--including we Catholics--helped shape it with our eagerness to fit in, our distractions and overconfidence, and our own lukewarm faith. 

"Too many people who claim to be Christian simply don't know Jesus Christ.  They don't really believe in the Gospel.  They feel embarrassed by their religion and vaguely out of step with the times.  They may keep their religion for comfort value.  Or they may adjust it to fit their doubts.  But it doesn't reshape their lives because it isn't real.  And because it isn't real, it has no transforming effect on their personal behavior, no social force, and few public consequences...Whatever it once was, now it's dead."

A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness in a New America is a easy read -- but tough medicine good to pray over in these final days of Lent.