Posted on 09/19/2012 12:44:11 AM PDT by Cronos
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said that Catholics must take responsibility for the evangelization of the country, and pursue this goal through humility and spiritual discipline.
“The task of preaching, teaching, growing and living the Catholic faith in our time, in this country, belongs to you and me. No one else can do it,” he told the crowd..
“The future depends on God, but he builds it with the living stones we give him by the example of our lives.”
During his remarks, he said Christians must rediscover God’s joy, “radiate” God’s word, and make their Christian witness “frank and contagious.”
He noted Christianity’s historical rise from a “fringe” religious group to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. However, he warned that Christianity can decline into corruption and has even become extinct in some regions, like some areas conquered by Islamic expansion.
.. “We need to discipline ourselves to be ready for God’s grace,” he said.
“If our hearts are cold, if our minds are closed, if our spirits are fat and acquisitive, curled up on a pile of our possessions, then the Church in this country will die. It’s happened before in other times and places, and it can happen here.”
“Jesus said the gates of hell would never prevail against his Church, and his word is good. But he didn’t promise anything about our local real estate and institutions,” the archbishop said.
“The Pope’s answer to this crisis doesn’t scold the culture,” Archbishop Chaput said. “Instead he turns to us, to the Church.”
“He’s asking us to tear down the cathedral we build to ourselves, the whole interior architecture of our vanities, our resentments and our endless appetites, and to channel all the restless fears and longings of modern life into a hunger for the Holy Spirit.”
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnewsagency.com ...
God asks all Christians to live a life of “honesty, holiness, heroism and sacrifice,” the archbishop concluded.
May there be a springtime for the Church in the USA.
It will take missionaries from other countries, countries that at one time WE SENT to do missionary work to what I call, “light the fire” of faith witness.
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