As various magazines, periodical, and news items cross my desk, I frequently find that I do not have time at the moment to read them. So I put them aside to come back to them later. This past week, as I was going through some of my “Later to Read” stack, I came across two interesting articles: one, by Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., of Denver, entitled “Church and State Today;” the other by Irish Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick, entitled “The Secular Versus Religion.” They complement each other.
Archbishop Chaput makes this claim: “People often say we’re living at a ‘post-Christian’ moment. But our ‘post-Christian’ moment actually looks a lot like the pre-Christian moment.” In other words, the moral challenges of our day look very much like the moral challenges of the first Christians. The archbishop remarks: “Promiscuity is common and accepted. So are bisexuality and homosexuality. So is prostitution. Birth control and abortion are legal, widely practiced, and justified by society’s leading intellectuals.” These are conditions today; these were the conditions in the Mediterranean world of the first century A.D. Followers of Plato and Aristotle, like their masters, endorsed abortion and infanticide. Hippocrates’ followers, despite the Hippocratic Oath, condoned abortion.
The followers of Jesus changed these conditions by living their faith fully and without compromise. Today this will be the same solution to the moral dilemmas we face. But it seems that too many Catholics simply do not practice what they seem to hold as convictions.
The article by Bishop Murray takes a look at the claim of contemporary society that religion has no place in “the complexity and sophistication of modern life — in economics, politics, science, or technology.” The pagans of the early Christian centuries believed the same: There was no place for Christian beliefs in the culture of the ancient Roman Empire. It was either accept the gods and the divinity of the emperor or die. Christians chose death.
Today there is also a movement to get rid of religion. One of the leaders of the movement is the militant atheist Richard Dawkins. Bishop Murray quotes him: “It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, the ‘mad cow’ disease, etc., but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s greatest evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” Pagans of old would have echoed a similar thought about Christianity.
But there is today, I think, one movement that is not mirrored in the early days of Christianity: To accept a validity to religion but only in the private sphere and not the public. Bishop Murray notes: “Religion may be viewed benignly, provided it does not intrude embarrassingly into the ‘real world’…. A great deal of modern life proceeds as if the question of faith did not matter.” How true. There is an old ditty that conveys the same idea: “Mr. Business [you can put substitutes here] went to church, He never missed a Sunday. But Mr. Business went to hell, for what he did on Monday.” Too many people leave their religious and moral convictions at the door as they enter public and professional life. Their faith is not allowed to influence their professional concerns. How else to understand Catholics in high office who support abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage.
The only solution to the moral problems of our world is that of the first Christians — to live a full Christian life, to proclaim the faith, to make certain that both our private and public lives reflect truly the principles of Jesus. “Cafeteria Catholics,” “cultural Catholics,” eclectic Christians, pick-and-choose religious believers — these will not change society religiously and morally. We have heard this before, but it is good to be reminded again
Father John A. Leies, SM, STD, is president emeritus of St. Mary’s University and was formerly head of the Theology Department there.