American hierarchy must revive love for Church, Archbishop Dolan tells USCCB

November 14, 2011

In his first presidential address to the members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York said that the greatest challenge facing the American hierarchy is “to renew the appeal of the Church, and the Catholic conviction that Christ and His Church are one.”

In a powerful speech to open the USCCB meeting in Baltimore, Archbishop Dolan reminded his colleagues of an exhortation to bishops by Blessed John Paul II: “Love for Jesus and His Church must be the passion of our lives!” He underlined the need to remember—and to tell the world—“that the Church is the bride of Christ, that the Church is the Body of Christ, that Christ and His Church are one.”

The secular world resists the message of the Church, the archbishop said—except on one point. He suggested that “the world wants us to forget every Church-teaching except for the one truth our culture is exuberantly eager to embrace and trumpet: the sinfulness of her members!” Without denying the need for repentance and reform, he said, the Church must continue to proclaim her message. He observed:

It is always a risk for the world to hear the Church, for she dares the world to “cast out to the deep,” to foster and protect the inviolable dignity of the human person and human life; to acknowledge the truth about life ingrained in reason and nature; to protect marriage and family; to embrace those suffering and struggling; to prefer service to selfishness; and never to stifle the liberty to quench the deep down thirst for the divine that the poets, philosophers, and peasants of the earth know to be what really makes us genuinely human.

To preserve the integrity of the Gospel message, Archbishop Dolan said, bishops should first “resist the temptation to approach the Church as merely a system of organizational energy and support that requires maintenance.” Second, he said, they must keep in mind that “since we are a spiritual family, we should hardly be surprised that the Church has troubles.” However, he said, the recognition of sinfulness should only confirm the need for the Church’s sacramental life. The Church, he said, points beyond the weakness of her members to the promise of her Savior:

Founded by Christ, the Church had her beginning at Pentecost, but her origin is from the Trinity. Yes, her beginning is in history, as was the incarnation, but her origin is outside of time.

Later in the opening session of the USCCB meeting, the members heard Bishop William Lori, the chairman of a newly created committee on religious freedom, address the growing problem of aggressive secularization in the political world. American Catholics, he said, must counter the efforts of those people whose goal is “establishing un-religion as the religion of the land and granting it the rights and protections that our Founding Fathers envisioned for citizens who are believers and for their churches and their church institutions.”

 

---

For all current news, visit our News home page.

---

 
Further information:

• Reclaim truth about Jesus' church, Archbishop Dolan tells bishops (CNS)
• Bishops: Secular forces attack religious liberty (USA Today)
• Catholic bishops prepare religious liberty fight (AP)