Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver encouraged a gathering of
pro-life University of Notre Dame students to be courageous in fighting
for their beliefs and to always remember what being Catholic really
means.
“(W)e need to learn that not from the world; not from the tepid and
self-satisfied; and not from the enemies of the Church, even when they
claim to be Catholic; but from the mind and memory of the Church
herself, who speaks through her pastors,” he said in an April 8 speech
at the university.
Chaput noted how the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski stressed the
reality of evil. Though not an orthodox religious thinker, Kolakowski
talked about Satan “not as a metaphor or legend or the figment of
neurotic imaginations, but as a living actor in history.”
The devil, the archbishop said, “works in the present to capture our
hearts and steal our future. But he also attacks our memory; the
narrative of our own identity.”
This is because our memory of history
conditions our thoughts and choices in our daily lives.
Archbishop Chaput encouraged his audience to participate in politics,
saying, “Christ never absolved us from defending the weak, or resisting
evil in the world, or from solidarity with people who suffer.”
Catholics cannot exclude their religious beliefs from guiding their
political behavior, because God sees that this “duplicity” is a kind of
cowardice. This lack of courage wounds Christians’ individual integrity
and also discourages others who try to witness publicly to their faith.
Christians should act on their beliefs always with humility, charity and prudence, but also always with courage, he emphasized.
“We need to fight for what we believe,” he said. “Nothing we do to
defend the human person, no matter how small, is ever unfruitful or
forgotten. Our actions touch other lives and move other hearts in ways
we can never fully understand in this world. Don’t ever underestimate
the beauty and power of the witness you give in your pro-life work.”
The archbishop also described abortion as “the foundational human rights issue of our lifetime.”
“We can’t simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing
of unborn children. We can’t build a just society, and at the same time
legally sanctify the destruction of generations of unborn human life,”
he added.
Abortion is no longer the only major threat to the right to life,
which now faces a range of challenges including physician-assisted
suicide, cloning, genetic screening, genetic engineering, and
cross-species experimentation.
He noted that people are discussing the need to return science to its
“rightful place” in human life, warning that this can become a slogan
to justify unethical research. Citing the Jewish bioethicist Leon Kass,
he said the present day is an age of “salvific science” in which a
“scientific savior” supposedly takes away the “sin of suffering.”
Yet science accountable to no moral authority outside itself leads to
“a hatred of imperfection” in real human persons, and the simplest way
to deal with imperfections is to eliminate the imperfect.
Science and technology are “enormously powerful tools” but they can
undermine human dignity just as easily as they can advance human
progress.
“Virtue does matter,” the archbishop said as he finished his talk.
“Courage and humility, justice and perseverance, do have power. Good
does win. And the sanctity of human life will endure.”
The sanctity of life will endure, he said, because young men and
women like those in his audience will remember that “God so loved the
world that He gave his only Son” and “it’s worth fighting for what’s
right.”