Mary should be our model for a religion that fights for the truth even when it is unpopular, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said last week.
He illustrated the point by referring to a medieval image of the Blessed Virgin punching the Devil on the nose.
Speaking at the University of Notre Dame, Archbishop Chaput said: “If we want to reclaim who we are as a Church, if we want to renew the Catholic imagination, we need to begin, in ourselves and in our local parishes, by unplugging our hearts from the assumptions of a culture that still seems familiar but is no longer really ‘ours’.
“This is why Mary – the young Jewish virgin, the loving mother, and the woman who punches the Devil on the nose – was, is, and always will be the great defender of the Church,” Archbishop Chaput said.
“She doesn’t rebuke him. She doesn’t enter into a dialogue with him. She punches the Devil in the nose.”
Archbishop Chaput said that according to CS Lewis: “Christianity is a ‘fighting religion’ – not in the sense of hatred or violence directed at other persons, but rather in the spiritual struggle against the evil in ourselves and in the world around us, where our weapons are love, justice, courage and self-giving.”
Too many politicians, priests and laypeople had slipped away into apostasy without publicly renouncing their baptism, the archbishop went on. “They simply need to be silent when their Catholic faith demands that they speak out, to be cowards when Jesus asks them to have courage; to ‘stand away’ from the truth when they need to work for it and fight for it,” he said.
The archbishop said that while we should always try to bring tepid Catholics back into the Church, “we should never be afraid of a smaller, lighter Church if her members are also more faithful, more zealous, more missionary and more committed to holiness.”
He said it was easy for Catholics to forget that prayer is indispensable.
“Technology gets results. Prayer, not so much – or at least not so immediately and obviously,” he said. “So our imaginations gradually bend towards the horizontal, and away from the vertical.”
And so we slip into a culture where “talking about heaven and hell starts to sound a lot like irrelevant voodoo”, he said.
Christian nursing home must allow assisted suicide
A Swiss court has ruled that a Christian nursing home must either permit assisted suicide on its premises or give up its charitable status.
The nursing home, which is run by the Salvation Army, the UK-based Christian charity, lost a legal challenge to new assisted suicide rules.
The regulations, introduced last year, compel charities caring for the sick and elderly to offer assisted suicide when a patient or resident requests it.
The nursing home objected on the grounds that the law violated the core religious beliefs of the Salvation Army and that it represented an affront to freedom of conscience.
But the Federal Court rejected the complaint of the home, which is situated in the canton of Neuchatel, and ruled that individuals have the right to decide how and when they would like to end their lives.
According to a report on Swiss Radio in English, the judges said the only way the home could avoid its legal obligations to permit assisted suicide was to surrender its charitable status.
This would put the home outside of state control but it would also involve the loss of state subsidies.
Anger at far-right leader’s ‘God’ slogan
The Catholic Church is among critics of the far-right candidate in Austria’s presidential election for using the phrase “so help me God” on his election posters.
Protestant Church officials said that it is inappropriate for the Freedom Party’s Norbert Hofer to introduce God into the election campaign .
But a Freedom Party official said the phrase “comes from the heart” of Hofer, a practising Protestant, and “is in no way a misuse of the concept of God”.
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