It is an excellent talk and well worth reading in its' entirety.
There are a few articles and posts about the web pointing out his comments regarding the major party nominees for President in 2016. This is a minor point. He lists five reasons why Christians do not have the luxury of cynicism during this election. He notes:
Fifth and finally, Christians are not of the world, but we’re most definitely in it. Augustine would say that our home is the City of God, but we get there by passing through the City of Man. While we’re on the road, we have a duty to leave the world better than we found it. One of the ways we do that, however imperfectly, is through politics.and
In other words, elections do matter. They matter a lot. The next president will appoint several Supreme Court justices, make vital foreign policy decisions, and shape the huge federal administrative machinery in ways over which Congress has little control. It’s good to remember that Congress didn’t create the politically vindictive HHS mandate. The Obama White House did that.
He speaks about the need for us to become different people, that is to say he calls for our conversion so that the society can be converted too. He discusses Mercy and points out:
Mercy means nothing – it’s just an exercise in sentimentality – without clarity about moral truth.He discusses some of how we got into this mess and points at the 1992 Casey decision by the US Supreme Court:
Writing for the majority in Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy claimed that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This is the perfect manifesto of a liberal democratic fantasy: the sovereign, self-creating self. But it’s a lie. It’s the very opposite of real Christian freedom. And to the degree we excuse or cooperate with it, we make ourselves liars.
The Gospel of John reminds us that the truth, and only the truth, makes us free. We’re fully human and free only when we live under the authority of the truth.
Then, significantly, he speaks directly to Notre Dame about their mission saying in part:
Leon Bloy, the great French Catholic convert, once said that — in the end — the only thing that matters is to be a saint. That’s the ultimate task of a place like Notre Dame. It’s not to help you get into a great law school, or to go to a great medical school, or to find a great job on Wall Street, as good as those things clearly are. It’s to help you get into heaven – which is not some imaginary fairyland, but an eternity of life in the presence of a loving God. If you don’t believe that, you’re in the wrong place.and further down he says:
For the nation’s leading Catholic university to honor a Catholic public official who supports abortion rights and then goes on to conduct a same-sex civil marriage ceremony just weeks later, is – to put it kindly – a contradiction of Notre Dame’s identity. It’s a baffling error of judgment. What matters isn’t the vice president’s personal decency or the university’s admirable intentions. The problem, and it’s a serious problem, is one of public witness and the damage it causes both to the faithful and to the uninformed.and
It’s quite stunning to walk this campus and see the beauty of the buildings, the scope of the stadium, the energy of the students and the constant pace of growth. But I hope Notre Dame never stops examining the fundamental why of its mission. What kind of success is really success? It seems to me that we already have a Princeton, a Stanford and a Yale. We don’t need a Catholic version of any of them.
What the Church needs now is a university that radiates the glory of God in age that no longer knows what it means to be human. What the people of God need now is a university that fuses the joy of Francis with the brilliance of Benedict and the courage, fidelity and humanity of the great John Paul.I encourage you to read this talk and think about the points that the archbishop makes.
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