-
"When I was growing up in Kansas in the 1950s, Quebec was deeply Catholic; one of the most profoundly
Catholic cultures in the world. The province had 90 percent church attendance. Catholic education, health care and social services pervaded daily life....
"In 2014, barely 6 percent of Quebeckers attend Sunday services. Only 9 percent of high-school age young people identify as Catholic. About 38 abortions occur for every 100 live births.
"Nearly half of newborn children go unbaptized. And many of those who are baptized will grow up without seeing the inside of a church. In just 50 years since Quebec’s 'Quiet Revolution' of the 1960s, an entire Catholic culture has collapsed....
"for anyone coming from the United States for the first time, the wreckage of Quebec’s Catholic life – a once-great Church almost completely expunged from a people’s daily environment -- can be a shock. And that shock ties us to our theme tonight: In the developed world, more and more people of faith, people for whom God is the anchor of their lives, people who once felt rooted in their communities, now feel like strangers, out of place and out of sync in the land of their birth....
"We’re a people of worship first, and action second. That doesn’t excuse retreating from the world. It’s not an alibi for quietism. But for Catholics, there’s no real Christian political action, no genuinely Christian social service, unless it flows out of the adoration of God....
"On October 6, the Supreme Court declined to hear a variety of state appeals on the nature of marriage. In effect, the court has affirmed the validity of gay marriage, and I believe this creates a tipping point in American public discourse. The dismemberment of any privileged voice that biblical belief once had in our public square is just about complete....
"We...need to thank God for the gift of this difficult moment, because conflict always does two things. It purifies the Church, and it clarifies the character of the enemies who hate her. Conflict is good when the issues matter. And very few issues matter as much to the course of a nation as the nature of marriage and family....
"Looking back on the last 60 years, one of the Scripture passages that stays with me most vividly is Judges 2:6-15. It’s the story of what happens after the Exodus and after Joshua wins the Promised Land for God’s people. Verse 10 says that Joshua 'and all that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord or the work which he had done for Israel'....
"the biggest failure, the biggest sadness, of so many people of my generation, including parents, educators and leaders in the Church, is our failure to pass along our faith in a compelling way to the generation now taking our place....
"If we don’t radiate the love of God with passion and courage in the example of our daily lives, nobody else will -- least of all the young people who see us most clearly and know us most intimately....
"I’ve just given us a pretty hard diagnosis of our situation as believers, so why should we hope? We should hope because God loves us....
"I said earlier that we need to be people of worship first, action second. And it’s true. But we still do have a duty to act. We can start by returning hatred with love....how we treat those who disagree with us proves -- or disproves --what we claim to believe about God....
"For Catholics, we need to encourage the new movements and charisms in the Church much more vigorously. Groups like FOCUS, Communion and Liberation, the Christian Life Movement, the Neo-Catechumenal Way and so many others are filled with intelligent young women and men on fire for Jesus Christ and the Church. Efforts like the Augustine Institute in Denver; the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago; the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania; and an exceptional humanities program built by Thomas Smith and Kevin Hughes at Villanova University – in all of these things there’s tremendous goodness that makes it impossible to grow weary.
"We need to do a far better job of stewarding the Church’s material resources. Philadelphia is a textbook case of too many parishes and ministries artificially kept afloat with funding long after their effective life ended. We also need to put much more emphasis on evangelizing, catechizing and educating our young people, but not necessarily with our current aerodynamic drag of structures, bureaucracy and buildings.
"The same applies to the formation of our priests. We need families who form their sons in the habit of listening for a priestly vocation. And we need seminarians who have no interest in clerical privilege but a huge commitment to serving Jesus Christ. The pastoral terrain in the next 25 years will be drastically different from, and much less friendly than, anything the Church in the United States has seen in the past. We need priests prepared for that mission territory. We need parishes that are real antidotes to loneliness; real sources of mutual support, counseling, sharing and friendship – not just garrisons devoted to servicing the baptized pagan. We also need a Christian community much more receptive to Latino and other immigrants. The reason is obvious. They already comprise the invisible majority of the Church. And they embody her face of the future....
"If we ignore the poor, we will go to hell. If we blind ourselves to their suffering, we will go to hell. If we do nothing to ease their burdens; then we will go to hell. Ignoring the needs of the poor among us is the surest way to dig a chasm of heartlessness between ourselves and God, and ourselves and our neighbors.
"And lest we forget: The poor include the unborn child....There’s no way to contextualize or diminish the evil of a law that allows the killing of innocent, unborn human life. Nor is there any way for any Catholic to accept or ignore that kind of legalized homicide when it comes to decisions in the voting booth or anywhere else.
"As to marriage and the family: I think we’d be foolish to assume that the gay marriage debate is over, even though many believe we’ve lost it – at least for now. The struggle is not over. The issue now becomes how aggressive gay issue activists will be in punishing and discriminating against those with traditional views. Tactics can easily include denying licensure and accreditation, revoking tax exemptions, imposing liability under public accommodations statutes and employment anti-discrimination acts, closing access to government contracts and grants, and other such acts. Given the bitterness driving much of gay issue activism over the past decade or more, religious freedom will be a growing area of conflict....
"It's hard to see how a priest or bishop could, in good conscience, sign a marriage certificate that merely identifies spouse A and spouse B. This dramatizes, in a concrete way, the fact that we face some very hard choices in a new marriage regime. Refusing to conduct civil marriages now, as a matter of principled resistance, has vastly more witness value than being kicked out of the marriage business later by the government, which is a likely bet. Or so the reasoning goes. I don’t necessarily agree with this approach. But in the spirit of candor encouraged by Pope Francis, I hope our nation’s bishops will see the need to discuss and consider it as a real course of action....
"We were made by God to receive love ourselves, and to show love to others – love anchored inthe truth about the human person and the nature of human relationships. That’s our purpose. That’s why we were created. We’re here to bear each other’s burdens; to sacrifice ourselves for the needs of others; and to live a witness of love for the God who made us – not only in our personal lives, but in all our public actions, including every one of our social, economic and political choices.
"And if that makes us strangers in a strange land, then we should praise God for the privilege"
The Strange Case of Quebec Province
"Out with the old and in with the new" was the strategy for many in Quebec province, where the historic Catholic influence is still apparent in the name of every locale and street. Yet, what's happened with respect to abortion and marriage/family suggests Catholic influence to be "out" - part of a bygone era:- "The province-wide rate of church attendance, which, prior to the 1960s ranged between 80 to 90 percent, has now plunged to below eight percent....The decline of church authority is also reflected in the province’s record-low birth rate, increased abortion rate, single parent homes, divorce rates, and reluctance to marry" (Robert J. Galbratith).
- "Canada is in fact a 'land without restrictions' with respect to abortion. In Canada abortion is completely legal, at any stage of pregnancy for any reason. Minors do not need parental consent and most parents don’t know this" (Daniel Caza).
- "Statistics show roughly 90 per cent of young people say they'd like to marry, but that fewer Canadians actually are. The fastest growing relationship form in Canada is cohabitation" (Andrew Mrozek).
Montreal, Quebec Province
Notre Dame Bascilica
Notre Dame de BonSecours Chapelle
St Joe's Oratory
Quebec City, Quebec Province
Notre Dame des Victoires - the oldest church in North America
St Zéphirin’s Church (2011) and in Hitchcock's "I Confess"
St. Anne de Beaupre (Quebec Province)
So, what happened to "Catholic Quebec" and what can we learn?
"No two times and no two places are entirely alike, and no time and place was very much like Quebec in the 1960s....the 'Quiet Revolution' ( Revolution tranquille) began as a reaction against the almost total synthesis of Church, culture, and state.... For the most part, the Church willingly, even eagerly, retreated....
"The state of Catholicism in Quebec today is grim. Sociologists describe it as a free fall. To be sure, 80 percent of Quebecers say they are Catholics, and many still expect certain services from the Church, but their relationship to the Church is much like their relationship to the company that provides gas and electricity....
"Thousands of parish churches, many of them bereft of people, are physically maintained by the provincial government under its 'heritage' program....
"Long before the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, the great majority of priests said there was no problem with the pill and other contraceptives. By 1968, the Church’s teaching on this question, and almost everything else, was a dead letter.
"Key to the Quiet Revolution was contempt for the past....Those who marched under the banner of 'renewal' and 'reform' too often exhibited a contempt for the fervent piety and frequently heroic labors of prior generations. There was a desperate eagerness to distance themselves from the 'immigrant' and 'ghetto' Catholicism of the past" (Rev. Richard John Neuhaus).
No comments:
Post a Comment