"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
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.
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