"Jesus never said that we didn’t need a spine."

St. George and the dragon from The Roving Medievalist

We most truly serve the common good by having the courage to be disciples of Jesus Christ. God gave us a free will, but we need to use it. Discipleship has a cost. Jesus never said that we didn’t need a spine. The world doesn’t need affirmation. It needs conversion. It doesn’t need the approval of Christians. It needs their witness. And that work needs to begin with us.

Archbishop Charles Chaput gave a speech in Philadelphia last week about religion and the common good and boy, howdy, what a speech it was. I read it through twice. He ranges from Nietzsche’s Will to Power Bars to Georges Bernanos to Frank Sheed to Flannery O'Connor and yet always stays on target in this powerful speech.

I usually copy the text from long posted pieces and dump them all into a text file that I print out and take home to read at my leisure. It functions like a personalized magazine in a way. Homesick Texan's musings on biscuits will be followed by Orson Scott Card's thoughts on walking everywhere to save gas. At any rate, I was reading along in this piece and by the time I worked my to the statement below I was taken by surprise.

First, I’m tired of the Church and her people being told to be quiet on public issues that urgently concern us. And second, I’m tired of Christians themselves being silent because of some misguided sense of good manners. Self-censorship is an even bigger failure than allowing ourselves to be bullied by outsiders.

I blinked. Who wrote this? I looked back at the beginning. Yep. Archbishop Chaput. That's the spirit I like to see in our bishops. More power to him.

Much of it follows theme developed by Georges Bernanos in his seemingly prophetic "The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos."

As Bernanos explains it, big ideological systems “mechanize” history with high-sounding language like progress and dialectics. But in doing so, they wipe out the importance of both the past—which they describe as primitive, unenlightened, or counterrevolutionary—and the present, which is not yet the paradise of tomorrow. The future is where salvation is to be found for every ideology that tries to eliminate God, whether it’s explicitly atheistic or pays lip service to religious values. Of course, this future never arrives, because progress never stops and the dialectic never ends. ...

Time and freedom are the raw material of life because time is the realm of human choice. Bernanos reminds us that the Antichrist wants us to think that freedom really doesn’t exist, because when we fail to choose, when we slide through life, we in effect choose for him. Time is the Devil’s enemy. He lives neither in the eternity of God nor in the realm of man. Satan has made his choice against God and he is forever fixed in that choice. But as long as man lives in time, which is the realm of change, man may still choose in favor of God. And, of course, God is always offering the help of his grace to do just that. If the Devil can sell us the idea that history is a single, determined mechanism; if humanity’s freedom of will can be forgotten or denied; then man will drift, and the Antichrist will win.

There is much more to ponder in this speech and I encourage everyone to go read it at least once.