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A New Story for a New America

Wed, 23 May 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Archbishop José H. Gomez delivered the 129th Annual Commencement Address at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. on May 12. During the exercises, the university awarded the archbishop an honorary doctor of fine arts degree for his contribution in advocating for immigrants. The following is adapted from Archbishop Gomez’s address.

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Mary, Foundress of America

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Earlier this summer, I led the first pilgrimage from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like many other immigrants to this country, I have a strong devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. I learned it from my parents when I was growing up in Monterrey, Mexico. Many summers, my mother and father would take my sisters and me on a 600-mile journey to visit our grandparents in Mexico City. And when we went, we would make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. My experience was not unique. In Mexico, many Catholic families try to make a pilgrimage to the Basilica at least once a year.

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Fortnight for Freedom: Why Now?

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:02:00 -0400

On June 21, the night before the Catholic Church traditionally remembers the martyrdom of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More at the hands of King Henry VIII, American Catholics will begin a unique two-week vigil of prayer, sacrifice, and public witness for the cause of religious liberty.

The “Fortnight for Freedom” was called by my brothers in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and it will conclude with the ringing of bells in churches all across the country on July 4, the memorial of our country’s independence. The bishops aren’t comparing the conditions of the American church in the early 21st century with that of Catholics persecuted during the English Reformation. We’re blessed in our country with a religious liberty that, sadly, most people in the world today do not enjoy. According to the Pew Center, three out of four people worldwide live in a country where the government doesn’t protect their right to worship and serve the God they believe in.

This global context puts the Catholic Church’s current conflict with the U.S. government in some perspective. But just because believers today aren’t executed for their beliefs and are free to go to church on Sundays, that doesn’t mean freedom of religion isn’t in jeopardy in America.

For our country’s founders”and for every American generation until now”freedom of religion has meant much more than the freedom to worship. Freedom of religion has meant the freedom to establish institutions to help us live out our faith and carry out our religious duties. Freedom of religion has meant the freedom to express our faith and values in political debates”and the freedom to try to persuade others to share our convictions.

In recent years, many have observed that our American consensus on religious liberty, conscience protection, and religion’s public role has been eroding. There are many causes for this. The first is the reality of religious indifferentism or “practical atheism””the fact that growing numbers of people in our society are living as if God doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to care about religious freedom if you don’t care about being religious.

But our freedoms are also being eroded as the result of constant agitation from de-Christianizing and secularizing elements in American society. In the public arena, we’ve seen relentless efforts to get Church agencies to go along with secular agendas that violate Catholic beliefs”from trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and sterilizations, to trying to coerce Catholic adoption agencies to place children with homosexual couples.

In our wider culture, Christian faith and values are increasingly portrayed”in the media, in the courts, even in comments from high government officials”as a form of bigotry. In our diverse, pluralistic society, it seems sometimes that Christianity is becoming the one lifestyle that can’t be tolerated to have a role in public life.

These same secularizing and de-Christianizing forces are at work in our current conflict with the federal government’s health insurance mandates. No one can credibly claim that this conflict with the government is about access to abortion and birth control, because unfortunately, both are widely available and affordable to anyone who wants them in this country, often subsidized by federal and state governments.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that our present conflict is part of a larger cultural struggle to redefine America as a purely secular society”a society in which religious institutions have no legitimate public role unless they are serving the government’s purposes.

This struggle to secularize America has been going on for a long time. What’s new is that our government, which is entrusted with the duty to protect religious liberty, has now taken sides against the liberty of the nation’s largest religious community. In this present conflict, our government is using the full weight of its powers to try to dictate the terms under which the Catholic Church and individual Catholics will be permitted to participate in our society. For perhaps the first time in our history, our government is acting as if our human rights don’t come from the hand of God, but are instead “benefits” that the government can bestow, define, and take away.

I’ve had well-meaning people ask me: Why has this conflict become so important to the Church? Why won’t we just “compromise” and provide birth-control insurance to our employees? They want me to know that this would be a small price to pay for the greater good of the Church being able to keep serving the poor in her hospitals, schools, and charities.

I agree that this has been a needless and unprovoked distraction for the Church. Catholic institutions have been forced at many levels to divert time, energy, and resources better spent serving the poor to defending ourselves against this unwarranted threat to our freedom from our own government.

But the Church doesn’t serve the poor to please the government. We serve the poor because we are compelled by the love of Christ. This same love for Christ compels us to bear witness that life, marriage, and family are sacred and that preventing children from being born is immoral. So the “compromise” we’re being offered is no compromise at all. It’s capitulation. It’s the temptation to serve the government instead of God.

So what do we do now? We do what the Church and individual Christians have always done: We love our enemies and resist their evil with good. We live our faith with the freedom of the children of God, in season and out of season, with a love that serves and heals and inspires. We redeem the time and tell the world the good news that God is alive and that he is calling us to a great destiny of love. We keep working with men and women of good will to create a society of mutual sharing, reconciliation, and love, rooted in the sanctity of the human person and the family.

In short, we continue to be followers of Jesus. And in this fortnight of prayer and action, we should reflect on the beautiful example of the many saints who defended the faith to the point of shedding their blood. By their dying, they show us what we should be living for.

José H. Gomez is the Archbishop of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese. He writes regularly at www.facebook.com/ArchbishopGomez

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Faith and our Fathers

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:00:00 -0400

Some years back, Stephen Gabriel’s A Father’s Covenant, a book aimed at young fathers, came out. The book consists of a series of aphorisms and promises for fathers to meditate on to help them grow in their relationships with their children, their wives, and God. These promises range from the solemn to the funny, and one made me laugh out loud: “I will play Chutes and Ladders with enthusiasm!” It reminded me of my childhood; it was a game my father used to play with my sisters and me all the time. But there is real wisdom in that promise.

It’s a promise to be faithful to the vocation of being a father. Even after a long day of work, even if he’d rather be doing something else”instead he will smile and laugh and take delight in spending time and playing games with his kids. Because that’s what fathers do. They keep their promise to love.

This Sunday is Father’s Day, when again we celebrate the beautiful reality of fatherhood and the importance of our fathers and grandfathers in our lives. But we also realize that we’re living increasingly in a “fatherless” culture where many fathers are absent from their children’s lives. Almost half of all American children are now born to mothers who are not married to the child’s father. More than a third of our children aren’t being raised in the same home as their fathers. These trends are part of a broader skepticism in our society toward traditional ideas of the family and the human person.

There are strong forces at work that would have us reimagine and reengineer the basic meaning of human nature. They want us to believe that whether one is a man or a woman is just an “accident” of birth, and not intrinsic to who we really are. They want us to believe that motherhood, fatherhood, and marriage aren’t natural realities, but just arbitrary “social constructs.”

This drift in our society has deep pastoral implications for our religious communities and for the Church’s duty to evangelize, because the Gospel that we are called to live and proclaim is the good news of God’s “family plan””for history and for each one of our lives.

There is a reason that the history told in Scripture begins with the marriage of the first man and woman and ends with the wedding of Jesus and his bride, the Church, at the end of time. In salvation history, the human family proves time and again to be the vessel through which God’s blessings are poured out on creation. It begins with his promise to make Abraham the father of a multitude of nations and to bless all the families of the earth by his descendants. Indeed, Jesus was born as a “son of Abraham” in a mother’s womb and nurtured in a holy family, with a mother and a father. And the good news that Jesus came to announce is that God is our Father who loves us as his sons and daughters and who desires us to live as brothers and sisters.

For Christians, the crisis of fatherhood and the family makes it much harder for the Church to tell the world this good news and to lead people to God our Father. How are people supposed to understand these beautiful realities if they’ve never had any contact with their fathers or if they’ve never known any experience of traditional family life? I’m more convinced than ever that our mission to proclaim the Gospel requires the Church to work to restore a “family culture” in our society.

In practice, this means resisting the anti-family forces in our society. It means defending the rights of children to grow up in a home with a mother and a father who give them life and who promise to share their lives forever.

But more than that, as a Christian community, we need to do everything we can to restore the vital sense of what Pope Benedict XVI and Blessed John Paul II called the “human ecology.” We need to promote the truth that motherhood and fatherhood are truly Christian vocations of service and love. We need to do more to celebrate our mothers and fathers and to support families in individual parishes and schools. We need to talk about the beauty of marriage to our children”from a very young age.

Perhaps most of all, in our homes we need to make sure that we are spending time and showing dedication and love to our children. We need to make that promise”that we will play Chutes and Ladders with enthusiasm.

José H. Gomez is Archbishop of Los Angeles. He writes regularly on Facebook .

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A Time for Catholic Action and Catholic Voices

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Last Thursday in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a remarkable address to a group of visiting American bishops. He praised America’s founders for their commitment to religious liberty and their belief that Judeo-Christian moral teachings are essential to shaping citizens and democratic institutions. The Holy Father warned that our heritage of religious freedom faces “grave threats” from the “radical secularism” of political and cultural opinion leaders who are “increasingly hostile to Christianity.”

Last Friday, the day after the Pope’s address, our federal government issued a ruling that confirmed his worst fears about our country’s anti-religious and anti-Christian drift. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a final decision to mandate that every U.S. employer must provide health insurance coverage that makes birth control, sterilization, and even abortion-causing drugs available to its employees free of charge.

The government rejected the U.S. bishops’ efforts to negotiate an exemption for faith-based employers”including Catholic hospitals, charities and colleges”that are morally opposed to abortion and contraception. Instead, the government is giving us until August 2013 to obey or suffer the consequences”fines so large they could drive some Catholic employers out of business. It is hard not to see this new mandate as a direct attack on Catholic consciences and the freedom of our Catholic institutions.

The mandate does not promote any civil liberties and it does not advance any significant public health goals. The government justifies the mandate by arguing that employers who do not provide these services are discriminating against women. But access to free contraception has never been a basic human right. And there is no evidence that birth control has any effect on women’s health; pregnancy is not a disease for which “preventive medicine” is required.

The Health Department justifies denying exemptions to Catholic charities, hospitals, and colleges because it says they are not really “religious” institutions. This may be the most troubling part of this new mandate. In effect, the government is presuming it has the competence and authority to define what religious faith is and how believers should express their faith commitments and relationship to God in society. These are powers our government has never before assumed itself to have.

In this case, the government is imposing a narrow, radically individualistic idea of religion”defining religion as only worship and moral teaching. As many have noted, under this definition, much of what Jesus Christ did would not qualify as a “religious” ministry. The fact is that everything the Church does is “religious.” All our ministries and institutions are motivated by our love for God and our mission to the spread the Gospel. We don’t do these things because we are social workers or philanthropists. We do them because we are disciples.

The Catholic Church is the only visible religious group in American public life that holds consistent beliefs regarding the morality of life issues, including abortion and contraception. And Catholic institutions make a major contribution to our social fabric”healing, educating, and caring for the needs of millions of our fellow citizens, especially the poor. So it is hard to escape the conclusion that the government is singling out the Church with this new mandate.

But the issues here go far beyond contraception and far beyond the liberties of the Catholic Church. They go to the heart of our national identity and our historic understanding of our democratic form of government. In his address last Thursday, Pope Benedict gave us some prophetic advice for these troubling times:

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Defending Our First Freedom

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:10:00 -0400

We are slowly losing our sense of religious liberty in America.

There is much evidence to suggest that our society no longer values the public role of religion or recognizes the importance of religious freedom as a basic right. As scholars like Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon and Michael Sandel have observed, our courts and government agencies increasingly treat the right to hold and express religious beliefs as only one of many private lifestyle options. And, they observe, this right is often “trumped” in the face of challenges from competing rights or interests deemed to be more important.

These are among the reasons the U.S. Catholic bishops recently established a new Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. My brother bishops and I are deeply concerned that believers’ liberties”and the Church’s freedom to carry out her mission”are threatened today, as they never have been before in our country’s history.

Catholics have always believed that we serve our country best as citizens when we are trying to be totally faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Church. And since before the founding of the American Republic, Catholics”individually and institutionally”have worked with government agencies at all levels to provide vital social services, education, and health care.

But lately, this is becoming harder and harder for us to do. Just last week, the federal government declined a grant request from the U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services agency. We are not really sure why. No reason was given. Our agency has been working well with the government since 2006 to help thousands of women and children who are victims of human trafficking.

Recently, the government had been demanding that our agency provide abortions, contraception and sterilizations for the women we serve. We hope our application was not denied because we refused to provide these services that are unnecessary and violate our moral principles and religious mission.

And this is not an isolated case. Right now, the federal government is also trying to force private employers to provide insurance coverage for sterilizations and contraception”including for medications that cause abortions. This not only violates the consciences of Catholic business owners, it also undermines the religious autonomy of Church employers.

For several years now, it seems that whenever there is a merger or expansion involving a Catholic hospital, some legislator or government agency tries to block it unless our Catholic hospitals and doctors will start providing abortions and sterilizations. So far, these efforts at coercion have failed. What’s troubling is that these efforts continue, without regard to the historic contributions of Catholic health care or to the First Amendment.

More recently, the push to legalize “same-sex marriages” has posed a new set of challenges to our freedoms. Church adoption and foster-care ministries have already been forced to shut down rather than submit to government demands that they place children with same-sex couples or provide benefits for same-sex employees.

And in an ominous development, the U.S. Justice Department went on record this summer as saying that those who defend the traditional definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman are motivated by bias and prejudice.

Of course, that is our ancient Catholic belief, rooted in the teachings of Jesus and also the Jewish Scriptures. It is a belief held by many Protestants, the Orthodox, and also by Jews and Muslims, among others. But scholars like Princeton’s Robert P. George warn that this belief might now be labeled as a form of bigotry and lead to new challenges to our liberties.

We are also concerned about the signals the federal government is sending in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC . Experts say that if the government’s case prevails, it will have broad new powers to regulate the inner workings of Church institutions”even to possibly interfere in areas of Church practice and doctrine.

All of this is troubling and represents a sharp break with our history and American traditions. Religious liberty has always been “the first freedom” in our Bill of Rights and in our national identity. Our country’s founders recognized that religious freedom is a right endowed by God, not a privilege granted by government. And they respected that what God has given, no one”not a court, a legislature, or any institution”can rightly deny.

In our history, religious freedom has always included the rights of churches and religious institutions to establish hospitals, schools, charities, media outlets, and other agencies”and to staff these ministries and run them, free from government intrusion.

And religious freedom has always included the churches’ rights to engage in the public square to help shape our nation’s moral and social fabric. We see this throughout our history”from the abolitionist movement, to the civil rights movement, to the pro-life movement.

America’s founders understood that our democracy depends on Americans’ being moral and virtuous. They knew the best guarantee for this is a civil society in which individuals and religious institutions were free to live, act, and vote according to their values and principles. We need to help our leaders today rediscover the wisdom of America’s founding. And we need to help believers once more understand the vital importance of this “first freedom.” At stake are not just our liberties but also the future character of our democracy.

José H. Gomez is the Archbishop of Los Angeles.

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To Live Each Day with Dignity

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:23:00 -0400

The euthanasia movement in our country is gaining strength and momentum. The reasons for this are complicated, but at its root, this movement is driven by fears that many of us share. The fear of pain, suffering, and death. The fear that one day we might lose our mental capacity or bodily functions. The fear of becoming a burden on others. Or of being left alone to die in some institution, hooked up to expensive machines.

With our American population getting older and people living longer, we are already starting to see economic pressures to ration health care among the elderly and the terminally ill. This, in a culture that already too much judges a person’s “worth” on the basis of what the person can “produce” economically.

So people are afraid. Their fears are legitimate and they need to be addressed.

But euthanasia advocates are exploiting these fears”in legislatures and courtrooms, in ad campaigns and in the popular media. They use deceptive language to present euthanasia as a humane solution for individuals and a sensible policy option for the common good of society. We need to be clear. What they call “death with dignity” means basically giving people the permission and the means to kill themselves by a lethal overdose of prescription drugs.

Euthanasia advocates want to answer people’s fears by killing the person who is afraid. And if they succeed in their efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide, they would effect a significant change in American society.

Legalized euthanasia would involve doctors and nurses”healing professionals”in helping to kill people. It would lead to a society in which the government”in the name of maximizing health care resources”would essentially decide which lives are worthy of living, and which people would be better off dead.

Already in America, legalized abortion has made it “routine” for physicians to kill unborn children. About a million babies are killed this way each year. That is scandal enough. We cannot now allow the killing of the elderly, terminally ill, and disabled people to become “routine” also.

That’s why the U.S. Catholic Bishops have published a new statement on the euthanasia movement, “To Live Each Day with Dignity.” It is a good statement of our moral principles and offers clear guidance on addressing the fears underlying this debate:

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A Heroic Witness to Holiness

Mon, 02 May 2011 23:01:00 -0400

Blessed John Paul II was a witness to the power of holiness in history.

He showed us the beauty and heroism possible in the human person redeemed by Jesus Christ and living as a child of God.

Holiness is the key to understanding his witness for our times.

He was a poet, a philosopher, and playwright. But most importantly, Blessed John Paul was a priest. He once said: “Holy Mass is the absolute center of my life and of every day of my life.”

The Eucharist flows from the cross and resurrection. And the cross and resurrection were at the heart of Blessed John Paul’s appeal to the modern world.

That is the meaning behind those famous first words he spoke from the window of the papal apartment in St. Peter’s Square on October 22, 1978: “Be not afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power!”

He addressed these words to the entire human family, and to each one of us personally, with all the troubled questions we hold in our hearts.

These are Easter words.

These are the first words that Jesus Christ spoke to his disciples when he met them on their way back from the empty tomb. “Be not afraid! Go and tell my brethren . . . they will see me!”

Blessed John Paul made us confront the promise of our resurrection ”and our responsibilities before the risen Christ.

There is nothing to fear now that death itself has been conquered. Blessed John Paul told us again and again: “The power of Christ’s cross and resurrection is greater than any evil which man could or should fear.”

He wanted us to hear the good news in a new way. That Christ has freed us to love and to live for the greater things that God created us for.

He often quoted the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”): By revealing the mystery of God’s mercy and love, Christ “fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

Blessed John Paul called all of us to this “high standard of ordinary Christian living.”

He called us to accept the vocation given to each person in baptism. He said this meant living for God’s glory and for the love and service our neighbors. He wanted us to join him in seeking the Kingdom, in building a civilization of love and a culture of life.

These were not original ideas. They are the essence of the Gospel. Blessed John Paul’s gift was to make the Christian ideal seem new again.

He lived the Gospel with passion and intelligence. He made the Christian way of life look so beautiful, so attractive. People wanted to follow him, to know the joy that he knew.

He became a true spiritual father for our times.

As a poet and playwright and he saw the Church and the world in those terms.

The call to holiness, he believed, was a call to responsibility before God and history.

The real drama of history is always beneath the surface of human events, he told us. This drama is theological. It plays out in the human heart. The “plot” turns on whether we will say yes to God’s plan, his loving will for our lives.

In speaking to young people, especially, he stressed that God has a plan for every person. He challenged all of us to realize we have been born for a reason, that each of us has a destiny in this great drama of salvation.

He refused to accept the false premise that Christian faith makes us indifferent or complacent in the face of injustice and human needs.

“Intense prayer,” he once wrote, “does not distract us from our commitment to history. By opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God’s plan.”

He held up as examples saints and martyrs who changed the times they lived in and the lives of those they lived around. He reminded us that Christ calls all of us to be saints. And that we too are called to shape our lives and the history of our times according the purposes of God.

During the preparations for the jubilee Year 2000, he reminded us that Christianity once transformed the world. Not by violence, but by the simple force of men and women living the teachings of the faith with joy, courage and hope.

That’s what his call for a new evangelization was all about. Remaking the world once more in the image of Christ and his Gospel.

He presumed a starting point similar to the situation the early Christians found themselves in. We too live in a world filled with ancient religions, new spiritualities and ideologies, and all sorts of obsessions and substitutes for true faith.

He knew that large sectors of modern society now operate as if God does not exist. And he knew that the Christian message was just one of many “messages of salvation” to be found in a global marketplace of ideas.

He proposed a high and beautiful vision of Christianity. He proclaimed Jesus Christ as the answer to every human question.

As he proposed it, the new evangelization is always personal. It means individual Christians sharing the gift of faith, heart to heart, with the men and women of our time.

But the new evangelization also means evangelizing the culture. It means bringing the Church’s teachings into dialogue with contemporary thought.

He recalled how St. Paul preached the Gospel at the Areopagus, the center of the cultural elite in ancient Athens. Christians today, he said, must take the Gospel to all the “Aperopagi” of modern culture.

He called us to infuse Gospel values into every area of our civic life. He told us to pay special attention to those areas where elite attitudes and opinions are formed and expressed”science, politics, business, the arts, philosophy, higher education, popular entertainment, the media.

In his last book of poems, Roman Triptych (2003), Blessed John Paul wrote:

If you want to find the source,
you have to go up, against the current,
Break through, search, don’t yield . . .

Blessed John Paul taught us to seek the source of our lives in Jesus Christ. He taught us to go up against all the currents in our culture of cynicism, indifference, and flight from God. He taught us to break through every line of resistance in our hearts and in our society ” to seek the things that are above, to search for the face of God.

He went ahead of us to show us the way, to show us how to follow Christ.

He would quote the great Polish poet Cyprian Norwid: “Not with the cross of the Savior behind you, but with your own cross behind the Savior.” These words, he told us, “express the ultimate meaning of the Christian life.”

He preached nothing that he did not practice. This is important to remember.

Pope John Paul has been beatified, not for his accomplishments in the Church or on the world stage. He has been beatified because he cooperated with God’s grace and lived a holy life.

He proposed with new vitality the ancient Gospel teaching. That God desires our sanctification; that each of us is called to be a saint; that with his grace we can imitate Christ and be made perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.

“The ways of holiness are many, according to the vocation of each individual,” he said.

He showed us that we have to strive for that holiness, that pure love of God and neighbor, in everything we do”at work or in school; in our homes; and in all our actions in society and the political arena.

Even in his final years when his health deteriorated , he continued to show us what it means to carry our cross behind Christ. He showed us the redemptive power of suffering embraced for the love of God and for the love of others.

At the heart of his witness to holiness was the Eucharist.

“Nothing means more to me or gives me greater joy than to celebrate Mass each day,” he said.

He lived the mystery he celebrated with joy each day. And he taught us how to live that way too. He gave us a beautiful vision. To love as Christ loves. To make our lives into a gift that we offer to God and for our brothers and sisters

Again, these were old ideas, as old as the Gospel.

Blessed John Paul had a way of making us see all things new.

Archbishop Gomez is the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese. He was named a bishop by Pope John Paul II in 2001 and named an archbishop by him in 2005.

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To Seek God in the Spirit of Truth

Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

This essay is adapted from a commencement address delivered on May 16, 2008, to the students of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio.

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