Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The wrong side of history

"Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests, entirely outside of the current political debate, I was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring. I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said, but the words were captured on somebody’s smart phone and have now gone viral on Wikipedia and elsewhere in the electronic communications world. I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” What I said is not “prophetic” but a way to force people to think outside of the usual categories that limit and sometimes poison both private and public discourse"
Francis Cardinal George

read the whole letter here

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As we get more secular there seems to be less and less connectedness to generations before us, and similarly there is a vanishing sense that we prepare the ground for a generation that follows, and one that follows that. What a profound thing it is to live in a faith so much bigger than one's self, knowing that one's conduct over this lifetime plants seeds that may not sprout for one or more entire generations to come.