+Chaput on the New Evangelization

Archbishop Charles Chaput is the very smart and politically-active shepherd of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. At a recent conference in Mexico City, His Excellency gave a talk about the New Evangelization, recognizing that the time of continental drift, to use his analogy, is over. This is a time of earthquakes, of tremors and upheavals, and if the New Evangelization is not a method to speak to this time of "civilizational change that throws down the old and elevates the new with indifference," the project will fail. The whole talk is highly readable and highly recommended. I excerpt some choice selections here - all emphasis mine:


  • Poverty is an acid that destroys human kinship.  It burns away the bonds of mutual love and obligation that make individuals into a community.  The United States is the richest, most powerful nation in history.  But one in every six persons in my country now lives below the poverty line.  And poverty always, inevitably comes with a family of other ugly issues: hunger, homelessness, street crime, domestic violence, unemployment, human trafficking.
  • None of this subtracts from the economic and political progress made across the continent in recent years.  But it does reveal to us another kind of poverty.  I mean the moral poverty that comes from an advanced culture relentlessly focused on consuming more of everything; a culture built on satisfying the self; a culture that runs on ignoring the needs of other people.  That kind of poverty, as Mother Teresa saw so well, is very much alive in my country.  It’s like a parasite of the soul.  It leaves us constantly eating but constantly hungry for something more – all the while starving the spirit that makes us truly human.
  • Real human development takes more – muchmore – than better science, better management and better consumer goods, though all these things are wonderful in their place.  Human happiness can’t be separated from the human thirst for meaning.  Material things can’t provide that meaning.  Abundance can murder the soul as easily as scarcity can.  It’s just a different kind of poverty.
  • [W]hen I spoke at the Special Assembly for America 16 years ago, I spoke from a moral consensus in the United States that was still largely Christian.  Today that is no longer the case.  I do know that the mass media of the United States shape the appetites, beliefs and prejudices of much of the rest of the world – including Catholic young people -- and with few exceptions, these media are no friend to the Catholic faith...And I do know that millions of Catholics in my country and Canada are baptized and even catechized, but they don’t know Jesus Christ -- and therefore, for many of them, the language of Catholic Scripture, Catholic worship and Catholic moral reasoning is incomprehensible.
  • [P]rograms and techniques don’t convert the human heart.  Only the witness of other people can do that.  We can’t give what we don’t have.  If we as bishops don’t have a passion for Jesus Christ, a zeal for his Church and humility about our own weaknesses, then we’ll never be able to set others on fire with the Gospel.  Our own tepid hearts and pride will block the way... The past is important.  We need to remember and revere it.  It anchors us in the on-going story of the Church and gives us our identity.  But the past cannot be allowed to capture us.  The past too easily becomes a kind of aerodynamic drag; an enemy of the nimbleness and radicalism we need in touching the lives of other people with our Christian witness.
  • In our day, God calls us to build a new “New World” – a world of mercy, justice, patience and love...The biggest obstacle to that new “New World” is not the enemies who hate us, and not the unbelievers who revile the Church and the Gospel.  The biggest obstacle is the Old World that lives in our own hearts, even in those of us who are bishops, and maybe especially in some of us who are bishops: our pride, our cowardice, our lack of trust in the promises of God.

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