Addressing a gathering of European church officials on March 4,
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver warned that many contemporary
Christians have reduced their faith to a convenient “form of paganism,”
which cannot compete with the widespread “idolatry” of modern consumer
culture.
Archbishop Chaput offered his observations at a conference in Paris
honoring the late Cardinal Archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jewish
convert to Catholicism who was the Archbishop of Paris from 1981 to
2005.
The Denver archbishop described Cardinal Lustiger as “an
unsentimental realist” who dared to speak about disturbing trends in the
Church and society – including a lack of faith among professed
Christians, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by other “gods” such
as sex and money.
“Lustiger named lukewarm Christians and superficial Christianity for
what they are: a congenial form of paganism,” said Archbishop Chaput.
“The Church needs a great deal more of his medicine.”
He recalled Cardinal Lustiger's prophetic warnings against “creating
alibis and escaping the implications of our faith.”
In a passage cited
by Archbishop Chaput, the cardinal wrote that “many Christians,” through
evasions and misunderstandings, had “reduced the God of the Covenant to
a mere idol.”
“The main crisis of modern Christianity is not one of resources, or
personnel, or marketing,” Archbishop Chaput asserted. “It is a crisis of
faith. Millions of people claim to be Christian, but they don't really
believe.”
“They don't study Scripture. They don't love the Church as a mother
and teacher. And they settle for an inoffensive, vanilla Christianity
that amounts to a system of decent social ethics.”
“This is self-delusion,” he warned, “the worst kind of phony
Christianity that has no power to create hope out of suffering, to
resist persecution, or to lead anyone else to God.”
Archbishop Chaput said that these weakened forms of Christian faith
would not be able to compete with the many modern cults of instant
gratification and success.
Cardinal Lustiger, he recalled, had “warned that one of the deepest
and oldest instincts of man is idolatry.”
The Denver archbishop said he
sees that instinct taking on several forms today.
“There are no real atheists in America – quite the opposite,” he
said. “We have a thriving free market of little gods to worship. Sex and
technology have very large congregations.”
“I was especially struck,” he noted, “by Lustiger's description of
the modern state 'as one of the strongest forms of idolatry that exists;
it has become the most absolute substitute for God that men have been
able to give themselves . . . and it is a tyrant god, feeding itself on
its victims.'”
But the Archbishop of Denver said that these human tendencies,
leading to the worship of objects and of oneself, could not be driven
out by the mere exercise of authority.
“The Christian remedy to these idolatries,” he explained, “can never
simply be coerced from the outside, by stronger statements from stronger
bishops.”
He quoted Cardinal Lustiger's insight that these forms of
idolatry “must be exorcised from the inside … To uproot them, we must be
converted in depth.”
He also indicated that Cardinal Lustiger's unique perspective was
just as important for U.S. Catholics today as it was for European
Catholics during his lifetime.
The cardinal's work, Archbishop Chaput
noted, “continues to influence our seminary formation” at Denver's St.
John Vianney seminary.
“He is a Jew who discovers Jesus Christ … His mother is murdered at
Auschwitz. He survives the most horrific war in history, but he refuses
to hate and despair. Instead, he turns to God more deeply and gives
himself to the priesthood.”
“Most of the young men I meet hunger for examples of manliness,
confidence, courage and faith,” Archbishop Chaput noted.
“Cardinal
Lustiger's personal story is itself a catechesis – an invitation to
pursue God heroically.”