Vatican newspaper pays tribute to Archbishop Chaput talk

November 29, 2012

L’Osservatore Romano has paid tribute to “Renewing the Church and Her Mission in a Year of Faith,” a recent address by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.

“The real religion of vast numbers of American young people is a kind of fuzzy moral niceness, with a generic, undemanding God on duty to make us happy whenever we need him,” Archbishop Chaput said in the portion of his talk devoted to pastoral realities. “This is the legacy – not the only part of it, but the saddest part of it -- that my generation, the boomer generation, has left to the Church in the United States.”

“If young people are morally and religiously ignorant by the millions, they didn’t get that way on their own,” he continued. “We taught them. They learned from our indifference, our complacency, our moral compromises, our self-absorption, our eagerness to succeed, our vanity, our greed, our lack of Catholic conviction and zeal.”

“We need to impress on their hearts that salvation is not just a pious fiction, but a matter of eternal consequence: a gift that cost God the life of his own Son,” he added.

 

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Further information:

• Renewing, the key word for the Year of Faith (L’Osservatore Romano)
• Archbishop Chaput: Renewing the Church and her Mission in a Year of Faith (Archdiocese of Philadelphia)