Chaput calls for courageous missionaries

Chaput

San Antonio • The Catholic Church in the 21st century needs priests who are courageous missionaries on fire for Jesus Christ who aren’t afraid to preach the truth in the public square, one of America’s most outspoken archbishops declared in San Antonio.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap., of Denver, and the mentor of San Antonio Archbishop José H. Gomez, made that assertion Aug. 14 at a gala dinner marking Assumption Seminary’s 93rd year of service to the Catholic community of South Texas. The event raised $96,000 for the seminary.

Archbishop Chaput, who asked for Archbishop Gomez’s appointment as his auxiliary bishop in Denver eight years ago and has encouraged and supported his ministry as a bishop since 2001, said that while American culture often seems “Christian” on the surface, it is increasingly unfriendly to Catholic belief in its laws and political life.

“We need priests who will be missionaries and leaders; men who are on fire for Jesus Christ and have the courage to prove it with their own suffering; men who aren’t afraid to preach the truth of the Catholic faith wherever God leads them — including the public square,” the leader of Denver’s 300,000 Catholics stated.

Archbishop Chaput said American Catholic identity has become very weak. “The place of the Catholic Church in the United States is much more precarious than we like to think, and the large number of people who self-identify as Catholics is deeply misleading,” he said.

The trend applies especially in Colorado and other Western states, where the church is young and the environment is very secular. Archbishop Chaput’s northern Colorado Catholic population has about 350,000, although the largest religious group in the area, is only 20 percent of the total population. Also, Denver lies between the evangelical Protestant power center of Colorado Springs and the New Age mecca of Boulder, which presents a formidable challenge to Catholic proclamation of the Gospel.

“There is more hostility to the Catholic Church in more state assemblies today than at any time in the last 80 years. Nor will the influx of Latinos into our country automatically renew or sustain the church. The data show that Latinos in the United States abandon the Catholic Church at about the same rate as every other ethnic group,” the archbishop said.That means, he continued, that Catholic leaders must think of the church in America as a missionary church and every priest as a missionary priest.

The prelate said that Catholic leaders of his generation have done a bad job of forming and keeping people as Catholics and have been “seriously naïve” about the congeniality of American culture toward Catholic belief.
Sacramental practice and Mass attendance are declining, and young people are not stepping up to take leadership in the church the way their parents and grandparents did, he said.

In the secular world, the archbishop said, it’s the Catholic laity’s job to change the thinking of their political parties and animate public debate with Catholic values, but it’s the job of priests to give their people the necessary tools — to form them to think and act as disciples of Jesus in a manner guided by Catholic teaching.
“Catholic laypeople should be the leaven of Jesus Christ in the public square,” the Denver prelate said. “And priests need to be the leaven of Jesus Christ in the lives of their people.”

To illustrate the kind of commitment these priests must have, he cited the Acts of the Apostles. “It’s important to remember that the title of the book is the Acts of the Apostles — not the Good Intentions of the Apostles or the Excellent Plans, or the Plausible Alibis, of the Apostles, but their Acts,” the archbishop said. What makes the Christian faith convincing in any age is the zeal of everyday Christians. This is especially true of priests, he continued. The health of the church depends directly on the spirit of her priests.

Thus, he added, priests need to be more than simply honest or diligent or even faithful. They need to be carried away by their love for God, for the church and for the Catholic faith.

Catholic demography and the political environment are changing, and the church cannot count on continued financial health if its active Catholic population base diminishes over the next generation, which Archbishop Chaput said “already is happening.”

But he also noted that the Catholic Church is healthier at many levels in the United States than nearly anywhere else in the world. Thus, the American church has the freedom to do something about its problems, but it must be realistic.

Conflicts of the past decade — from abortion to immigration reform to marriage and family life — probably will continue, requiring an example of leadership to sustain the Catholic faithful and draw others to the church. That example must start with priests, the archbishop said.

Priests, he warned, will need at least three things: help in understanding and developing their inherent leadership skills, real fraternity with proper, intimate brotherly friendship and mutual support with other priests, and purification to make the radical choice that priesthood demands.

“Loner priests who find a safe spot within the eccentric limits and habits they build around their priesthood like a fort won’t survive,” he said. Neither will priests who get too comfortable to maintain their sense of purpose.
“The most urgent need for the church in our day is a rebirth of faith and the missionary spirit in her people. That will never happen, and it can’t ever happen, until we priests ourselves have a renewal of priestly life.”

Recalling Pope Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, Archbishop Chaput cited the Holy Father’s strength, simplicity and goodness as a pastor as an example. “He has the talent of being very frank about sin and calling people back to fidelity, yet at the same time, he illuminates fidelity with warmth in a way that reveals its beauty and disarms the people who hear him. He warned about the ‘silent apostasy’ of so many Catholic laypeople today, and even some clergy; and his warning has stayed with me because he said it in a spirit of love, not rebuke.

“For Pope Benedict, laypeople and priests don’t need to publicly renounce their Catholic faith to be apostates; they simply need to be silent when their baptism demands that they speak out, to be cowards when Jesus asks them to have courage.”

The Denver archbishop said the pope called on American Catholics to use their numbers, influence, creativity, generosity and fervor to enter the public square in an active, faithful and life-giving way, to bring Christian hope to the public debate, to be clear and united in their Catholic presence and to be a leaven in the nation’s public life.

Archbishop Chaput said Catholic leadership in the secular world properly belongs to laypeople, not to clergy or religious, and the priest’s role in political affairs normally should be small. It’s not his business, he said, to tell people to vote for John McCain or Barack Obama.

He said he worked for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign as a volunteer when he was a young priest, but today, he doesn’t think any faithful Catholic can feel completely comfortable today in either major political party.
While there are other important issues, abortion is the foundational issue at this point in American history and cannot be evaded or ignored.

“Cooperating with abortion or quietly tolerating it is a grave evil. We can incrementally seek to restrict and eliminate abortion, but we can never accept it as a so-called right. And if that truth inconveniences one or another political candidate, that’s their choice and their problem,” Archbishop Chaput said. “It’s not the fault of the church.”