What follows is only an excerpt of a longer talk that you can read at the link above.\u00a0AND<\/b>\u00a0I recommend you read the entire text!<\/i><\/p>\n
In 1929, as the great totalitarian murder-regimes\u00a0began to rise up in Europe, the philosopher Raissa Maritain wrote a forgotten\u00a0little essay called “The Prince of This World.” It is worth reading. We\u00a0need to remember her words today and into the future.\u00a0 With no trace of\u00a0irony or metaphor, Maritain argued:<\/p>\n “Lucifer has cast the strong though\u00a0invisible net of illusion upon us. He makes one love the passing moment\u00a0above eternity, uncertainty above truth. He persuades us that we can only\u00a0love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he\u00a0interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man\u00a0brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil’s victories is to\u00a0have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable\u00a0collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and\u00a0soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he\u00a0reign in this world.”<\/p>\n If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later\u00a0we will not believe in God.\u00a0 We cannot cut Lucifer out of the ecology of\u00a0salvation. Satan is not God’s equal. He is a created being subject\u00a0to God and already, by the measure of eternity, defeated.\u00a0 Nonetheless, he\u00a0is the first author of pride and rebellion, and\u00a0the great seducer of man.\u00a0Without him the Incarnation and Redemption do not make sense, and the cross is\u00a0meaningless.\u00a0Satan is real. There is no way around this simple\u00a0truth.<\/p>\n Let me underline that even more strongly. Leszek Kolakowski, the\u00a0former Marxist philosopher who died just last year, was one of the great minds\u00a0of the last century.\u00a0 He was never a religious person in the traditional\u00a0sense.\u00a0 But Kolakowski had few doubts about the reality of the\u00a0devil.\u00a0 In his essay\u00a0Short Transcript of a Metaphysical Press Conference\u00a0Given by the Demon<\/i>\u00a0in Warsaw, on 20th December 1963, Kolakowski’s devil indicts\u00a0all of us who call ourselves “modern” Christians with the following\u00a0words:<\/p>\n “Where is there a place [in your thinking] for the fallen angel? … Is Satan only a rhetorical figure? . . . Or else, gentlemen, is he a\u00a0reality, undeniable, recognized by tradition, revealed in the Scriptures, commented\u00a0upon by the Church for two millennia, tangible and acute?\u00a0 Why do you\u00a0avoid me, gentlemen?\u00a0 Are you afraid that the skeptics will mock you, that\u00a0you will be laughed at in satirical late night reviews?\u00a0 Since when is the\u00a0faith affected by the jeers of heathens and heretics?\u00a0 What road are you\u00a0taking?\u00a0 If you forsake the foundations of the faith for fear of mockery,\u00a0where will you end?\u00a0 If the devil falls victim to your fear [of\u00a0embarrassment] today, God’s turn must inevitably come tomorrow.\u00a0\u00a0Gentlemen,\u00a0you have been ensnared by the idol of modernity, which fears ultimate matters\u00a0and hides from you their importance<\/i>.\u00a0 I don’t mention it for my own\u00a0benefit – it is nothing to me – I am talking about you and for you, forgetting\u00a0for a moment my own vocation, and even my duty to propagate error.”<\/p>\n We\u00a0live in an age that imagines itself as post-modern and post-Christian.\u00a0 It\u00a0is a time defined by noise, urgency, action, utility and a hunger for practical\u00a0results.\u00a0 But there is nothing really new about any of this. I think\u00a0St. Paul would find our age rather familiar.\u00a0\u00a0For all of the rhetoric\u00a0about “hope and change” in our politics, our urgencies hide a deep\u00a0unease about the future; a kind of well-manicured selfishness and despair. The world around us has a hole in its heart, and the\u00a0emptiness hurts.\u00a0 Only God can fill it.\u00a0 In our baptism, God called\u00a0each of us in this room today to be his agents in that work. Like St.\u00a0Paul, we need to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas 1:22). We prove what we really believe by our willingness, or our refusal, to act on\u00a0what we claim to believe.<\/p>\n But when we talk about a theme like today’s\u00a0topic – “Priests and laity together, changing and challenging the\u00a0culture” –\u00a0we need to remember that what we do, proceeds from who we\u00a0are.\u00a0Nothing is more dead than faith without works<\/b>\u00a0(Jas 2:17);\u00a0except\u00a0maybe one thing: works without faith<\/b>.\u00a0 I do not think Paul had management\u00a0issues in his head when he preached at the Areopagus.\u00a0 Management and\u00a0resources are important – but the really essential questions, the questions\u00a0that determine everything else in our life as Christians, are these:\u00a0 Do I\u00a0really know God?\u00a0 Do I really love him?\u00a0 Do I seek him out?\u00a0 Do\u00a0I study his word?\u00a0 Do I listen for his voice?\u00a0 Do I give my heart to\u00a0him?\u00a0 Do I really believe he’s there?<\/p>\n For more than 30 years, first as a\u00a0bishop and now as the successor to St. Peter, Benedict XVI has spoken often and\u00a0very forcefully about the “culture of relativism” that guides today’s\u00a0developed world, breaks down human community and intimacy, and drains the\u00a0meaning out of human activity. That culture flows out of the “new\u00a0Areopagus” John Paul II described in\u00a0Redemptoris Missio<\/i>\u00a0–\u00a0a culture formed\u00a0by radically new technologies and methods of communication; a culture with a power\u00a0that reshapes how we think, what we think about, and how we organize our\u00a0personal and social lives.<\/p>\n We have\u00a0an obligation as Catholics<\/b>\u00a0to study and\u00a0understand the world around us.\u00a0 We have a duty not just to penetrate and\u00a0engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ. That work belongs to all of\u00a0us equally: clergy, laity and religious. We are missionaries. That\u00a0is our primary vocation; it is hardwired into our identity as Christians.\u00a0God calls each of us to different forms of service in his Church.\u00a0 But we\u00a0are all equal in baptism. And we all share the same mission of bringing\u00a0the Gospel to the world, and bringing the world to the Gospel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Someone who “gets it” is Capuchin Franciscan\u00a0Archbishop Charles Chaput, archbishop of Denver. Whether it be culture, beauty, healthcare, abortion, immigrant rights, education, politics, preaching, I think the archbishop is a clear thinker and renders a fine and helpful assessment of Christian life and a Christians involvement in the world. Recently, Archbishop Chaput was in Rome … Continue reading Challenging the well-manicured: Archbishop Chaput takes a look at our cultural engagement<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,38],"tags":[2306,1778,1749],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25322"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28756,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25322\/revisions\/28756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n