Every day, Chicago residents can see vast numbers of people at work
in the diverse fields of business, politics, culture and science.
In his
new book “God in Action,” Chicago's Cardinal Francis E. George holds a
magnifying glass up to those areas to show how God is at work.
“God is at work in American society because God is at work in the
world he created,” the cardinal and former U.S. bishops' conference
president told CNA on May 19.
“That's the first part of the book, where I set out the philosophical
basis of God as an actor – because a lot of people, it seems to me,
don't reflect enough on how God is free, and acts in ways that we don't
always understand.”
“But it's our job to try to discern how he's acting,” Cardinal George pointed out, “so that we can be free too.”
Released on May 3, “God in Action” seeks to fill a gap that the
cardinal sees between God-centered books on personal spirituality, and
books about the public role of religion that focus mostly on ideas and
human action.
Religion itself, as Cardinal George noted, “is a relationship to God”
– who is not distant and uninvolved, but constantly seeking to draw
human beings into his creative and redemptive activity.
“God in Action” brings Catholic social teaching to bear on a series
of modern challenges, in an effort to find God is at work in the public
arena. The book's ultimate goal is to bring public life into alignment
with God's will.
Immigrants in God's image
One prominent public concern that the cardinal hopes to present in a
God-centered perspective is immigration. His chapter on the subject
begins with the statement that “the migrant is first of all a gift and
not a problem.”
Cardinal George said he understands some U.S. citizens' tendency to
see an influx of immigrants as an “invasion,” but he urged believers not
to elevate the civil law above the Gospel.
“These so-called 'foreigners' are still creatures made in God's image
and likeness,” he observed. “However, in this country your legal
situation determines who you are, more than our sense of being created
by God.”
Cardinal George believes that an awareness of God's personal love for
immigrants can change the tone of the public conversation, allowing lay
people to shape a “just social policy” through their actions and votes.
The process begins, he said, with seeing that immigrants are “worthy
of respect – as fellow believers, and also as creatures of God.”
God's will in war and peace
The cardinal also sees war and peace as a central theater of God's
action. It is often difficult to determine God's will when military
conflict beckons, and Cardinal George noted that new situations call for
refinements of the traditional “just war” criteria.
“There are two challenges to just war theory as we have it now,” he
explained. “The first is terrorism, which doesn't fit into a just war
theory that presupposes sovereign states invading sovereign states.”
The second challenge is a matter of especially urgent concern, as the
U.S. and other Western powers deepen their involvement in the conflict
between Libya's government and rebel forces: “How do you protect
citizens from their own government, when it's oppressive?”
Cardinal George said that the United Nations, despite serious flaws,
is “the best means we have” to “act in the name of humanity as such.”
He observed that humanity's rights derive from God “long before there
are any governments established, as we ourselves say in the Declaration
of Independence.”
“God's job is to forgive”
The cardinal's reflections on war in his new book address the value
of mercy, as well as justice. “Forgiveness,” he said, is also “a
condition for being free.”
He said that events such as the death of Osama Bin Laden showed that victory was not simply a matter of defeating evil.
“The challenge to us is: how do we make peace?” he asked. “How do we,
in defeating him, nonetheless try to create a more peaceful world,
rather than just going from one war to the next?”
“That's where forgiveness comes in,” Cardinal George noted. “You may win, but you're still not free unless you forgive.”
He explained that this act of forgiveness, which binds Christians
whether in war or peace, is an invitation to cooperate with God.
“God's job, in a sense, is to forgive. That's what he does again and
again,” he reflected. “You can be free only by acting with God.”
Profit and the gifts of God
The Archbishop of Chicago also hopes that businesses can find new
ways of placing God first in economic decisions, in ways that Pope
Benedict XVI sketched out in his 2008 social encyclical “Caritas in
Veritate.”
“Is there a way,” he wondered, “in which the sense that 'everything
is gift,' which we believe in faith, can enter into the economy itself?”
It's a difficult question that relatively few business people have tried to pose, perhaps for fear of appearing “unrealistic.”
But others may wonder, given the economic crash that coincided with
the Pope's letter, whether a n economy that has no room for God is
itself “realistic” in the long run.
“You have to make a profit or you're bankrupt, you go out of
business,” Cardinal George acknowledged. “There's nothing wrong with
making a profit. The question is, how do you make it and what do you
consider profitably?”
Companies already give away portions of their profits through
philanthropy. But the vision of Pope Benedict and Cardinal George is
different. “What if they factored gifts into the whole operation
itself?”
“There is a concern, if you start that way, for something besides
profits when you get to the bottom line,” he explained. “What form that
would take is something that we don't know yet. It's a challenge for us
to work on it.”
“Something greater than ourselves is at work”
“God in Action” challenges believers to see the “secular” world with
new eyes, finding possibilities that only exist because God is at work
there.
Cardinal George explained that Christ's resurrection, remembered
especially throughout the Easter season, gives believers a blueprint for
what God will accomplish in seemingly hopeless areas of both public and
private life.
“When you see certain consequences, then you have a sense of God's
original activity – to bring life out of death, as in the resurrection,”
he noted.
Without God's grace, he said, “we can bring evil out of good, and
evil out of evil. But if there's good coming out of evil, something
greater than us is at work in that.”
“When there is hope in the midst of a despair that we ourselves have
caused,” he reflected, “then something greater than ourselves is at work
there, as a cause.”
To read Cardinal George's full interview with CNA, click here.
Father Don Hying, rector of St. Francis de Sales Seminary since 2007,
has been named by Pope Benedict XVI as the Archdiocese of Milwaukee's
new auxiliary bishop, the archdiocese said Thursday.
Vatican officials have released a book of preparatory teaching
documents for next year’s Seventh World Meeting of Families.
Bishop Donal McKeown, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Down and
Connor has written this personal reflection on the visit of Queen
Elizabeth II to Ireland. 
President McAleese and Queen Elizabeth had the
conviction and humility to be leaders, bringing their increasingly
secular societies to a place which they could not reach on their own.
They demonstrated that 'spiritual intelligence' which can take the
rubble of the past and make it into foundations rather than a weapons
cache. Could I even suggest that their personal faith convictions were a
huge asset in developing the reflective and sacred dimension of the
Dublin events at the Garden of Remembrance and the Irish National War
Memorial Park. These became symbolic events which effected in many
people's hearts what they proclaimed in gesture and silence. This was
ritual taking us beyond the limits of language to the unchartered edges
of meaning. 
THE Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s new global head, Archbishop
Sviatoslav Shevchuk, is the ideal man for the job, according to Perth
Ukrainian community leader Bohdan Mykytiuk who has had extensive
experience working with him.
A lack of vocations must lead to the examination
of the priorities of the Catholic community itself, said the Archbishop
of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, reports the Catholic Weekly.
