Chaput: Look toward church’s future with optimism, not sense of defeat

April 1, 2019
Catholic News Service
 
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said that although people have good reason to feel anger toward the Catholic Church and fear for its future, those emotions can be viewed as signs of hope, depending on how the church responds to them.
 
“If our Christian faith really grounds and organizes our lives, then we have no reason to fear and we have every reason to hope,” he said in an evening address March 27 at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus. “Hope depends on faith. It can’t survive without a foundation of passionate belief in something or someone higher and greater than ourselves.
 
“Without faith, ‘hope’ is just another word for the cheap and cheesy optimism the modern world uses to paper over its own, and our own, brokenness.”
 
The archbishop delivered the seminary’s annual Cardinal Pio Laghi memorial lecture. Cardinal Laghi, who died in 2009, was a former prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education and apostolic nuncio to several nations.
 
He said he titled his talk “Facing the Future With Hope and Joy” because “it sounds better than facing the future with confusion and anxiety – and anger, for that matter, because I’m tempted to feel all three of those things a couple of times a week.”
 
“There are days when everyone in the church seems angry,” Archbishop Chaput said. “Laypeople and priests are angry with their bishops for the abuse scandal, which never seems to end. Bishops are angry with priests for their bad example. And many bishops are also frustrated – to put it gently – with Rome for its unwillingness to acknowledge the real nature and scope of the abuse problem.
 
“Clerical privilege is not the problem,” he continued. “Clericalism may be a factor in the sexual abuse of minors, but no parent I know – and I hear from a lot of them – sees that as the main issue. Not naming the real problem, for what it is – a pattern of predatory homosexuality and a failure to weed that out from church life – is an act of self-delusion.
 
“My own frustration over the past few weeks has been fed by German bishops who seem willing to break what remains of church peace and unity with bad ideas about sexual morality and an impressive array of other issues. But that’s a topic for another day,” Archbishop Chaput said.
 
He was referring to March 14 by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops’ conference, who said the Catholic Church in Germany was at a point where serious debate – including on priestly celibacy and the role of women – and openness to doing things in a new way must be encouraged.
 
The archbishop said the two main points he wanted to make were that “much of the anger in the church today is righteous and healthy” and that “Scripture tells us again and again to fear not.”
 
The present moment is not a “dark time” but a return to night before the Resurrection, he said.
 
“The night passes and we already know how the story ends. ... This is a moment of privilege and opportunity, not defeat. Reverence for the past is a good thing, but clinging to structures and assumptions that no longer have life is not.”