“Renewing the Church and Her Mission in a Year of Faith.” Four of those words warrant some attention: renewing, Church, mission and faith

Renewing the Church and Her Mission in the Year of Faith

by ARCHBISHOP CHARLES CHAPUT  

Address at the Catholic Life Congress in Philadelphia on Nov. 17.

My comments today will be simple. I want to focus on just three points. The first point is where we are as a Church and as individual Catholics, given the current environment of our country. The second point is what we need to do about it. And the third point is who we need to be, or become, to live the kind of witness God wants from us. Before we get to that, though, I want to offer a few preliminary thoughts.

Language matters. It both expresses and shapes our thinking. Vulgar language suggests a vulgar soul. Obviously, lots of exceptions exist. A peasant can have a rough vocabulary and still lead a saintly life. And a political leader can have a golden tongue and still be a complete liar. But, in general, words are revealing. They have power because they have meaning. So we should take care to understand and use them properly.

The words of the Nicene Creed are the defining statement of Christian identity. They’re the glue of the Catholic community.  Jews are Jews by virtue of being born of a Jewish mother. But being a Christian has nothing to do with blood or tribe or ethnicity or national origin. Christian identity comes from the sacraments, sacred Scripture and the Creed. What we believe and profess together to be true as Catholics is the foundation and the cement of our unity. 

Every word in the Creed was prayed over, argued over and clarified by decades of struggle in the early Church. The words are precious and uncompromising. They direct us toward God and set us apart from the world. When people sometimes claim that Islam and Christianity have so much in common, they need to read, or reread, the Creed. Catholics pray the Creed every Sunday at Mass as the framework and fundamental profession of our faith. Devout Muslims reject nearly every line of it.

Over a lifetime, a Catholic will recite the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed thousands of times. But if we’re honest, we need to admit that we often mumble the words without even thinking. That has consequences. The less we understand the words of the Creed and revere the meaning behind them, the farther away we drift from our Catholic identity and the more confused we become about who we really are as Christians. We need to give our hearts to what we hear and what we say in our public worship. Otherwise, little by little, we become dishonest.

Here’s my purpose in saying all this. The theme we’re here to talk about today is “Renewing the Church and Her Mission in a Year of Faith.” Four of those words warrant some attention: renewing, Church, mission and faith.

............................

Read more: www.ncregister.com