Address to the Australian Catholic Students Association

by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Description

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput delivered this address to young Catholics on July 6, 2007 in Canberra, Australia during the 2028 Congress: the Church and the next generation, sponsored by the Australian Catholic Students Association.

Publisher & Date

Archdiocese of Denver, July 6, 2007

I have two tasks today. I want to talk about the Church in the next generation. And I also want to talk about you. You're already young adults. Some of you will be doctors, teachers or business leaders. Some of you will go into politics or the military. Many of you will have children. And all of you will be responsible.

What I mean by "responsible" is this. St. Paul tells us that, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (1 Cor 14:20). You're about to inherit the future of your country. Each of you has the talent, good will and energy to use that power well.

The problem is that much of the modern culture you and I share 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 choice. Will you engage the world with your heart and brains and faith? Will you 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; people whose survival depends on your service to the common good? Or will you wrap yourself in a blanket of noise 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.

I want you to remember the women and men I mention today. Remember them because, although they lived in Europe, they come from our own era, and they were your age when they made their own choices.

Edith Stein was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany in 1891. She lost her faith in God early in her life. But she had a brilliant mind and a hunger for the deeper questions about the world. So she became a student of — and then an assistant to — the philosopher Edmund Husserl. By the time she was 30, Stein was one of the most promising young intellectuals in Europe.

On a summer evening in 1921, she picked up a copy of St. Teresa of Avila's autobiography. She read it without stopping through the night. Later she wrote, "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Six months later she was baptized into Christ as a Catholic. She tried to enter religious life almost immediately. Her spiritual directors disagreed. They asked her to stay in the secular world. They encouraged her to use her intellect and teaching skills to bring others to Jesus Christ.

She did that until 1933, when the Third Reich barred anyone of Jewish origin from teaching. In 1934, she joined the Carmelite order, where she continued her research and scholarship. In 1939, as anti-Semitism became even more brutal in Germany, she wrote, "I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death . . . so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world."

In August 1942 the Gestapo arrested Stein and many other Jewish Catholics as a reprisal against Catholic bishops who had publicly condemned Nazi racism. She was quickly shipped to Auschwitz where she was gassed almost immediately. In October 1998, Pope John Paul II canonized her as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a confessor and martyr of the Catholic faith.

Stein chose to engage the world with her intellect, through persuasion and reason, and with her heart through prayer. Others made a similar choice using different skills. The young Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, organized a movement called the "Confessing Church" among German Protestants to resist Adolph Hitler. He had several chances to save himself by studying and teaching in America. But he returned to Germany to actively work against the Nazi regime. He was caught and eventually hanged just weeks before the end of the war.

He wasn't alone. Sophie and Hans Scholl — along with Christopher Probst and many other young German university students — were murdered by the Third Reich for their non-violent resistance work with the White Rose movement in 1943. The Scholls and Probst all came from active Christian backgrounds. Probst converted to the Catholic faith shortly before he was executed.

I have one final example. In Russia at the end of World War II, a young Soviet captain made the mistake of criticizing Josef Stalin in a private letter in 1945. For that crime he spent the next eight years in prison camps and three more years in exile. But his experience turned out to be a catastrophe for the regime that persecuted him. Out of his own suffering and the suffering of many other victims he saw in the gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn developed into one of the great writers of the 20th century. In fact, he is one of the great modern champions of human freedom.

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 murder of tens of thousands of Christian believers, changed him permanently.

Here's my point. People who take the questions of truth, freedom and human meaning seriously will never remain silent about them. They can't. They'll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. And that's the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but it can never be 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.

Certainly in the United States, suspicion toward religion is becoming its own form of intolerance. In fact, a kind of secular intolerance has developed in Western countries over the last 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. We eliminate the only thing that really guarantees the sanctity of the individual. If the 20th century taught us anything, it was that modern states tend to eat their own people. The only force stopping this is a resistance based in the human spirit but anchored in a higher authority — which almost always means religious witness.

I think there's an interesting reason why "spirituality" is so popular in developed countries today, but religion is so often criticized. Private spirituality can be very satisfying. But it can also become a designer experience. In fact, the word "spirituality" can mean just about anything a person wants it to mean. It's private, it's personal, and ultimately, it doesn't place any more demands on the individual than what he or she wants.

Religion is a very different creature. The word "religion" comes from the Latin word religare — to bind. Religious believers bind themselves to a set of beliefs. They submit themselves to a community of faith with shared convictions and hopes. A community of believers like the Catholic Church has a common history. It also has a shared purpose and future that are much bigger than any political authority. And that has implications. Individuals pose no threat to any state. They can be lied to, bullied, arrested or killed. But communities of faith do pose a threat. Religious witness does have power, and communities of faith are much harder to silence or kill.

This is why active Christian faith has always been so hated by every one of the big modern ideologies — whether it's Marxism, or fascism or the cult of selfishness and comfortable atheism that we see in Europe, the United States and Australia today. What we believe about God shapes what we believe about the human person. And what we believe about the human person has consequences — social, economic and political consequences.

Of course, the issue of religious tolerance isn't simply a question of religion's relationship with the state. It can also be a matter of different religious communities competing for the same souls in the same space. That creates a different set of problems. At their best, religious believers should understand that they have a duty to treat people of other faiths, or no faith, with justice and charity. The same God created both the faithful and the unbelievers. The same God guarantees the rights of both. But at their worst, believers have seen unbelievers or different believers as enemies who need to be punished.

Human history has a great many examples of religious prejudice. The record includes the Christian persecution of the Jews, the Muslim conquest of Christians, violence between Hindus and Muslims, and wars between Protestants and Catholics. History has plenty of guilt to go around. A lot of very different people from very different religions have used God as an alibi for doing evil things. That kind of wickedness in a pious disguise rightly drives people away from religion — but it doesn't debunk God. And it doesn't disprove religion. It reveals the weakness in each of us, and it shows our unwillingness to love. But understanding our sinfulness should drive us to live our faith more deeply and truly — not to abandon our faith.

Actually, I think the word "tolerance" itself is a kind of problem. Tolerance comes from the Latin words tolerare, which means to bear or sustain, and tollere, which means to lift up. It implies bearing other people and their beliefs the way we bear a burden or a migraine headache. It's a negative idea. And it's not a Christian virtue.

As Catholics we have a duty to treat all people, regardless of their beliefs, with justice, charity, mercy, patience and understanding. We're not asked to "tolerate" them, but to love them, which is a much more demanding task. Obviously, tolerance is an important democratic working principle. Much of the time, it's a good and vital thing. But tolerating lies about the nature of the human person is a sin. Tolerating grave evil in a society is itself an equally grave evil. And using "tolerance" as an excuse for not witnessing Jesus Christ in our private lives and in our public actions is not an act of civility. It's a form of cowardice.

We need to remember that courage is also a true Christian virtue. The Epistle of James tells us to be "doers of the Word and not hearers only" (1:22). James also says that, "faith without works is dead" (2:20). And Jesus Himself tells us to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." (Mt 28:19). Jesus didn't say, "unless you're a young adult" or "unless you're an Australian." He said, "make disciples of all nations," and He was talking to you and me. Right now, in our time.

That raises another question. How can a direct command like this from Jesus Himself coexist with an idea like interfaith peace? How can believers coexist with unbelievers? Here's the answer. Catholics who really understand and love their faith believe the following things.

First, every person has inalienable rights as a child of God made in His image. No outside power has the authority to violate those rights.

Second, we should respect every element of truth embodied in other religious communities, and even in honest unbelief. We have an obvious family bond with other Christians. We have a reverence for the Jewish people as our elder brothers in faith. We should also try to build mutual respect with Muslims, who claim their own descent from Abraham. But our good will should extend to every sincere expression of humanity's search for God — including the great religious traditions of the East, Buddhism and Hinduism.

Third — and we should never diminish this fact — while all religions have some elements of truth, all religions are not equal. Only Jesus Christ is Lord. Only Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one is saved except through Jesus Christ — even if other people don't know or accept Him by name. No other way to the Father exists, except through Jesus Christ.

Fourth, only the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ in its fullness. Therefore the Catholic Church teaches with His authority.

Fifth, the Church has the duty to preach Jesus Christ and propose the truth of God's revelation. But she can't coerce anyone to believe the truth without violating the rights of the individual person and betraying the message of the Gospel. In other words, every person is free to accept or reject the message of salvation.

Sixth and finally, every person has a right to freedom of conscience, and the duty to follow his or her conscience. But conscience never develops in a vacuum. Conscience is never just an exercise of personal opinion or preference. Every person has the obligation to form his or her conscience in the light of God's truth. And for all men and women, in every age and every culture, the truth about God and the human person is taught in a complete way only by the Catholic faith.

The choices we make about our religious beliefs matter not just in this world, but also in the next. God made us for heaven, but we get there by living the witness of Christ's love right here and now. We have a duty to pursue the truth, to live it and to preach it to others. That means we need to respect other people. We should work with them to build a more humane world. But we can never allow that to stop us from advancing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The only guarantee of real human freedom is God. The truest path to God is through the cross of Jesus Christ.

Earlier I mentioned the names of Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the members of the White Rose, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It can be tempting to think of them as heroes who lived in an extreme time, a different time, and therefore remote from our experience. But today is your time, and it isn't so very different.

When I visited China two years ago, two things struck me. The first was the incredible growth of the Christian faith in that country. And the second was the remarkably skillful and subtle persecution of religion carried out by the authorities. The world can be a very difficult place for people who truly seek the face of God. A country like North Korea has nearly wiped religious believers out of the population. It's a gangster state without even a pretence of freedom and the rule of law. In Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, Bangladesh, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Christians have faced discrimination and persecution for centuries, and it hasn't stopped. It's happening right now, today, while I'm speaking.

In Europe, Pope Benedict XVI has warned of a growing culture of self-apostasy and cynicism that robs "human nature [of] its inherent value-oriented and idealistic dimensions" and denies Christians "the right to intervene in public debates."

And even in the United States, where we take our freedoms for granted, the climate is changing. America is a country that could not have been imagined by her Founders without an understanding of God and man that was shaped deeply by the Christian faith.

But if you read the New York Times and other big American newspapers, and listen to some of our academic or political leaders, you'd never know that. And if you take a stroll through any local video store in the United States, you'll find dozens of movies that cast Christian believers in general — and Catholics in particular — as fools or hypocrites or worse.

Maybe the environment is different in Australia, but I doubt it. If this kind of cheap bigotry doesn't make you want to defend your faith, maybe you need to take an honest look at how Catholic you really want to be. This isn't a time for lukewarm believers. If you claim to be Catholic, then you need to live it all the way.

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 non-violent competition of ideas, and even God has a right — in fact He has the primary right — to be heard in that discussion.

If you want to serve the common good and build a better future for your country, you'll never do it by hiding your Catholic faith in the closet. You'll never do it by being Catholic in private and something else in public. History is made by people with convictions — and the courage to live those convictions. We need to live our Catholic faith more deeply and passionately, not less. You belong to God first. You belong to His kingdom first. If you first live your Catholic faith with all your heart, then you will necessarily live your citizenship with a Catholic conscience and character, and your country will be richer because of your integrity.

Before I finish today, I want to give you an assignment. There won't be a test, but I think you'll find it interesting.

I have a friend back in Denver who's a big fan of videogames. He's in his 50s and has kids, so I won't embarrass him by using his name. As I was working on my thoughts for today, he gave me a copy of a game called Defcon. You can find it on the web at www.everybody-dies.com. Defcon is exactly what it sounds like; a computer game about global nuclear war. All you need to know about Defcon is right there in the marketing tag line: "Nobody wins, but maybe — just maybe — you can lose the least."

Defcon reminded me of a novel written exactly 50 years ago in 1957, by Australia's Nevil Shute. It's called On the Beach. And that brings me to your assignment.

Some of you probably know that On the Beach is a very bleak book. A nuclear war poisons the air. In the end, everybody dies either from radiation or suicide. On the Beach is not easy reading. It's also not a Christian story. But it does have something very useful to teach.

Sometime over the next year I want you to read the book. Then I want you to watch the 1959 film with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. And then watch the television movie made in 2000 with Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward. Something subtle but very striking happens between 1957 and 2000. The story is the same in all three versions. But the portrait of the individual characters and society at large is much darker and much more callous in the 2000 television movie than it is in Shute's original novel — despite the fact that the Cold War has been over for many years.

The power of Shute's 1957 novel is that the characters act with understatement, self-control, kindness, fidelity and integrity even in the face of extinction. They never unravel into despair or hatred. They never lose their humanity.

But over the past 50 years, times have changed. It's obvious from the way the 2000 television version tells the story. We don't see ourselves quite the same way anymore. We've lost some sense of our uniquely human dignity. We've become more comfortable but less human; more technologically powerful, but less able to hope. I think there's a reason. Hope is only possible when we believe that our lives have a meaning larger than ourselves. We can't invent that meaning on our own. Humanity's purpose comes from God. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. The more we forget God and push Him out of our public discourse and away from our personal lives, the harder we find it to hope.

God didn't create and redeem the world only to abandon it. God made you for a reason. He loves you. But He also — in a very real sense — needs you, because He has put the future of His Church and His creation into your hands. The world has a reservoir of joy, truth, beauty and goodness that are worth fighting for. But somebody has to accept that task. Somebody has to fight for the soul of the world. And if you young Catholic men and women won't do it, then who will?

The great French Catholic writer, Georges Bernanos, once wrote that, "The future is something which one achieves. One doesn't submit to the future. One makes it." Those are the words I want to leave you with today. Make a future worthy of your vocation as God's children. Make a future that answers God's love with lives of Catholic faith, justice, charity, courage and solidarity.

That's a future worth fighting for. That's why you were born. That's why you were baptized. That's why you're here.

© Archdiocese of Denver

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