Fellow Christians in America: "The go along and get along times are over"

For us American Catholics, these truths about baptism, and all the articles of our faith, have been easy to learn, easy to affirm, and too often easy to forget, for the last six decades. The Church in our country has enjoyed a fairly free and comfortable life for a long time. And a great deal of good has been done. It’s still being done by good people in every American diocese and parish. We should be grateful and proud for all that God has made possible, and our place in it. But if the hatred unleashed by the recent Dobbs decision teaches us anything, it’s that our comfortable times – the go along and get along times – are over. We need to think and act accordingly. We need to recover the spine and the missionary nature of our baptism.

There’s a curious irony in our culture’s use of words like “enlightenment” and “woke-ism.” Both words suggest a waking up from the past to a future of reason and light when, in practice, they often create just the opposite – a surplus of conflict and darkness, here and now. No technology, no “ism,” and no special knowledge can ever replace man’s need for God. Idolatry, whatever form or name it takes, always betrays us. Only God is God, and Jesus Christ is his Son and our Redeemer. We need to remember Romans 8:31. We need to burn that Scripture verse into our brains and carry it in our hearts: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” A life lived in fear, a life spent seeking some kind of concordat with ideas and behaviors that are truly wicked and celebrated now in so much of our culture, is never the path for a Christian. It’s always a destructive lie.

If Václav Benda, and others like him, could speak and work for the truth, with far fewer resources and in circumstances infinitely harder than our own . . . then surely we can do at least as much, no matter how difficult our own world becomes. So this isn’t a bad time to be a Christian. It’s exactly the best time, because it’s our time to prove that we really do believe what we claim to believe, by preaching it with the witness of our lives.