Ave Maria Meditations
Today is the Feast of the Patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, St. Louis the King. He lived his faith with conviction and publicly. Here is a meditation on this topic from a modern Franciscan who is presently the Archbishop of Denver and soon to be the Archbishop of Philadelphia:
“Speak in the light”
Cardinal Henri de Lubac: once wrote that “It is not true … that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, [man] can ultimately only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism … ”
Living within the truth means living according to Jesus Christ and God’s Word in Sacred Scripture. It means proclaiming the truth of the Christian Gospel, not only by our words but by our example. It means living everyday and every moment from the unshakeable conviction that God lives, and that his love is the motive force of human history and the engine of every authentic human life. It means believing that the truths of the Creed are worth suffering and dying for. Living within the truth also means telling the truth and calling things by their right names. And that means exposing the lies by which some men try to force others to live.
The world urgently needs a re-awakening of the Church in our actions and in our public and private witness … We need really to believe what we say we believe. Then we need to prove it by the witness of our lives. We need to be so convinced of the truths of the Creed that we are on fire to live by these truths, to love by these truths, and to defend these truths, even to the point of our own discomfort and suffering.
We are ambassadors of the living God to a world that is on the verge of forgetting Him. Our work is to make God real; to be the face of his love; to propose once more to the men and women of our day, the dialogue of salvation…The form of the Church, and the form of every Christian life, is the form of the cross. Our lives must become a liturgy, a self-offering that embodies the love of God and the renewal of the world … Let us preach Jesus Christ with all the energy of our lives. And let us support each other – whatever the cost – so that when we make our accounting to the Lord, we will be numbered among the faithful and courageous, and not the cowardly or the evasive, or those who compromised until there was nothing left of their convictions or those who were silent when they should have spoken the right word at the right time.
Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap, Archbishop of Denver.
