Courageous Priest

The Simple Truth,
If You Do Not Believe In Satan,
Then You Will Not Believe In God!

Read this edited version revealed by Archbishop Charles Chaput to the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission.  Full Version Here

Satan Tempting Jesus

It is very odd that in the wake of the bloodiest century in history – a century when tens of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity – even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil. In fact, it is more than odd. It is revealing. Mass murder and exquisitely organized cruelty are not just really big “mental health” problems. They are sins that cry out to heaven for justice, and they carry the fingerprints of an Intelligence who is personal, gifted, calculating and powerful.

The devil is only unbelievable if we imagine him as the black monster of medieval paintings, or think The Inferno is intended as a literal road map to hell. Satan was very real for Jesus. He was very real for Paul and the other great saints throughout history. And he is profoundly formidable. If we want a sense of the grandeur of the Fallen Angel before he fell, the violated genius of who Satan really is, we can take a hint from the Rilke poem The Angels:

. . . when they spread their wings
they waken a great wind through the land:
as though with his broad sculptor-hands
God was turning
the leaves of the dark book of the Beginning.

This is the kind of Being – once glorious, but then consumed by his own pride — who is now the Enemy of humanity. This is the Pure Spirit who betrayed his own greatness. This is the Intellect who hates the Incarnation because through it, God invites creatures of clay like you and me to take part in God’s own divinity. There is nothing sympathetic about Satan; only tragedy and loss and enduring, brilliant anger.

In 1929 the philosopher Raissa Maritain wrote.

“Lucifer has cast the strong though invisible net of illusion upon us. He makes one love the passing moment above eternity, uncertainty above truth. He persuades us that we can only love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil’s victories is to have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he reign in this world.”

If we do not believe in the devil, sooner or later we will not believe in God. We cannot cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. Satan is not God’s equal. He is a created being subject to God and already, by the measure of eternity, defeated. Nonetheless, he is the first author of pride and rebellion, and the great seducer of man. Without him the Incarnation and Redemption do not make sense, and the cross is meaningless. Satan is real. There is no way around this simple truth.

We live in an age that imagines itself as post-modern and post-Christian. It is a time defined by noise, urgency, action, utility and a hunger for practical results. But there is nothing really new about any of this. I think St. Paul would find our age rather familiar. For all of the rhetoric about “hope and change” in our politics, our urgencies hide a deep unease about the future; a kind of well-manicured selfishness and despair.

The Emptiness Hurts

The world around us has a hole in its heart, and the emptiness hurts. Only God can fill it. In our baptism, God called each of us here today to be his agents in that work.  Like St. Paul, 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 what we claim to believe.

You Are Being Called

We have an obligation as Catholics to study and understand the world around us. We have a duty not just to penetrate and engage it, but to convert it to Jesus Christ. That work belongs to all of us equally: clergy, laity and religious. We are missionaries. That is our primary vocation; it is hardwired into our identity as Christians. God calls each of us to different forms of service in his Church. But we are all equal in baptism. And we all share the same mission of bringing the Gospel to the world, and bringing the world to the Gospel.

The Real Issue is a Crisis of Faith

Our real issue is a crisis of faith. Do we believe in God or not? Are we on fire with a love for Jesus Christ, or not? Because if we are not, nothing else matters. If we are, then everything we need in order to do God’s work will follow, because he never abandons his people.

God calls us to leave here today and make disciples of all nations. But he calls us first to love him. If we do that, and do it zealously, with all our hearts – the rest will follow.

Archbishop Charles Chaput

St. Thomas Aquinas pray for us and our Priest.

This is what Courageous Priest is all about.  Catholic Priest willing to stand strong for the Faith.

By James Tillman

PHOENIX, AZ, October 20, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) — In remarks delivered to the Phoenix Catholic Physician’s Guild on October 16, 2009, Archbishop Chaput of Denver condemned moral indifference in the face of the culture of death as dishonesty towards God and ruinous to America.

The archbishop began by discussing a single facet of our society: its attitude towards children with Down syndrome.

“Currently about 5,000 children with Down syndrome are born in the United States each year,” he said.  “They join a national Down syndrome population of roughly 400,000 persons. But that population may soon dwindle.  And the reason why it may decline illustrates, in a vivid way, a struggle within the American soul.”

“That struggle will shape the character of our society in the decades to come.”

Prenatal testing for Down syndrome, he continued, rather than helping parents prepare to care for their child, has become a reason for parents to kill their child.  “Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome now get terminated in the womb.”

But this statistic, he continued, is but a symptom of the sickness that has spread throughout America.  The choice that the parents of an infant with Down syndrome make is the same as the choice society faces as a whole.

“The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear,” he said. That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience.  And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

“Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs; in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned or homeless – each one of these persons is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of his love.  How we treat these persons – whether we revere them and welcome them, or throw them away in distaste – shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.”

“Religion is Not Private Thing”

Catholics can no longer excuse themselves from combating this disease by saying that their religion is private and separated from every other area of their life, he continued: religion is not simply a private thing.

“Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics.  God will demand an accounting.”

“God will demand an accounting”

“Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly; or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting.

“And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life.  God will demand an accounting.”

But the maintenance of public morality is not merely a duty to God but also to our nation, he continued.

“It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots: the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, [and] of the social over the individual … Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism … It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for.”

“And its achievement may be summed up thus:  It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.”

The Archbishop ended, therefore, by urging men truly to act as Catholics and thereby to change the world.

“Be the best doctors, nurses and medical professionals you can be,” he said.  “Your skill gives glory to God.  But be the best Catholics you can be first.”