One of the lessons from last year that too many American Catholics still don’t want to face is that it’s OK to be Catholic in today’s public square as long as we don’t try to live our beliefs too seriously; as long as we’re suitably embarrassed by all those “primitive” Catholic teachings; as long as we shut up about abortion and other sensitive moral issues and allow ourselves to be tutored in the ways of “polite” secular culture by experts who have little or no respect for the Christian faith that guides our lives.
The reason Pope Benedict XVI will get no media honeymoon is simple. It’s the same reason he instantly won the hearts of committed Catholics, worried the lukewarm and angered the proud and disaffected. He actually believes that what Jesus Christ and His Church teach is true, and that the soul of the world depends on the Church’s faithful witness.
As one columnist bitterly observed, “the cafeteria is now closed.” Of course, for believers, it was never open.
This is why we love our Bishop. He is one of the major reasons why our seminaries are full and we are building more and trying to get money to support the number of young men who want to be priests. As Curt Jester points out, we have 1 in 4,000 young Catholic men who choose to be priests, vs. L.A.’s 1 in 65,000. Archbishop Chaput is the chief reason.
If you are an unmarried man and meet him, you can expect him to ask you if you’re ever thought about being a priest. He asks and asks, over and over, because he says if you don’t ask, sometimes people never ask themselves. Every week I ask my oldest son if he will go to mass with us, and ever week, he says no, but he’ll never not go because I failed to ask.
This is the way I believe God to be — always asking, never apologizing, never giving up.
