[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 87 (Friday, May 25, 2018)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E737-E738]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               ARCHBISHOP NAUMANN SPEAKS TRUTH TO NATION

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, May 25, 2018

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, yesterday Kansas City 
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann was the keynote speaker at the 14th annual 
National Catholic Prayer Breakfast here in Washington, D.C.
  Archbishop Naumann's incisive remarks were extraordinarily inspiring, 
hope filled, uplifting, yet challenging. Like a modern-day Jeremiah, he 
spoke truth to the nation. After detailing some of the ``threats to the 
well-being of our nation,'' Archbishop Naumann said ``However, the most 
serious crisis for our country is none of the above, but rather a God-
crisis--a crisis of Faith. . . .
  He said, ``We have no permanent enemies, but only confused brothers 
and sisters who have yet to encounter the Lord of Life and to 
experience His unconditional love and amazing grace. . . . It is our 
task to reclaim our culture one mind, one heart, one soul at a time.''
  I respectfully ask my colleagues in both the House and Senate and on 
both sides of the aisle to take a few minutes to read the Archbishop's 
remarkable words.

                   National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

                     Washington, D.C., May 24, 2018


                           I. Acknowledgments

       It is a great honor to be with you this morning and to 
     address this distinguished gathering. As we assemble as a 
     people of Faith to pray for our nation, we must first give 
     thanks for our many blessings. We enjoy religious liberty, 
     freedom of speech and expression, the right to assemble--to 
     name only a few of the freedoms for which our Founders fought 
     and subsequent generations sacrificed heroically to preserve. 
     Despite our economic challenges, middle class Americans enjoy 
     creature comforts that were unavailable to kings of earlier 
     ages. For all this and so much more, we must give thanks to 
     God from whom all blessings flow.
       At the same time, there are certainly many challenges 
     facing our nation. Within the past week we had another deadly 
     school shooting. There are several tense international 
     situations, e.g. the Holy Land, Iran, Syria and Korea. Many 
     Christians throughout the world experience brutal religious 
     persecution. Racial tensions remain high in many cities. One 
     third of American children are being raised in homes without 
     their biological fathers. The legal status of more than a 
     million young people who were brought to this country as 
     children remains in limbo. In Massachusetts, Illinois and the 
     District of Columbia Catholic Charities is no longer able to 
     place children for adoption. Our nation continues to give 
     legal protection to doctors and organizations that profit 
     from the killing of more than one million innocent unborn 
     children. There are efforts in the courts and some states 
     legislatures to coerce Catholic Hospitals to perform 
     abortions.
       Unfortunately, this is by no means an exhaustive list of 
     the serious threats to the well-being of our nation. However, 
     the most serious crisis for our country is none of the above, 
     but rather a God-crisis--a crisis of Faith.


                            II. Is God Dead?

       Is God Dead? This was the title cover story for the April 
     8, 1966 edition of Time Magazine, when I was a junior in High 
     School and Time was the most influential periodical in the 
     United States. The 1966 article began with these words:
       ``Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes, both 
     believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and 
     atheists, who possibly suspect the answer is No.
       ``Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to 
     reflect on the meaning of existence. No longer is the 
     question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is 
     the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who 
     gave the right answer a century ago. . . .''
       At the time, the subject was considered shocking and 
     provocative. I was reminded of this article while reading the 
     2017 book, The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher who makes the 
     case that we need a new St. Benedict to form vibrant 
     Christian communities to preserve the truth of the Gospels 
     during a new Dark Age of unbelief.
       Dreher notes the decline in church attendance, the large 
     number of Millennials who profess atheism or even more 
     commonly

[[Page E738]]

     identify themselves as spiritual, but not religious. This 
     non-religious spiritualism is a new paganism, where God is 
     not the God of revelation who makes Himself known to us, but 
     a god or gods that are fashioned in our own image to re-
     enforce our own desires. Dreher gives his assessment of the 
     status of Faith in America: ``. . . God may not be quite 
     dead, but he is in hospice care and confined to bed.''


                         III. A Crisis of Faith

       Our culture is indeed experiencing a crisis of Faith that 
     leads to a denial of truth. Once the relationship between man 
     and God is severed, man becomes just a highly developed 
     organism. Human life becomes just another thing in a world of 
     things. Materialism reigns and breeds utilitarianism--our 
     value is determined by our usefulness. We no longer possess 
     inalienable rights that are God-given and from which no human 
     being can deprive us.
       The pursuit of pleasure becomes the highest goal. This 
     hedonism is a futile seeking of greater and more intense 
     pleasures that in the end leave us more and more empty. 
     Suffering and death become the great enemies that we strive 
     futilely to eliminate or at least impede
       It is this loss of a sense of God that also leaves us 
     vulnerable to lose sight of the innate value of each and 
     every human being. We consider those who are profoundly 
     disabled as more vegetable than human. We experience their 
     care as a burden rather than an opportunity for the 
     expression of the noblest form of love.
       We begin to see human life at its earliest stages as 
     something too tiny to have rights, but something very useful 
     to destroy in order to exploit its components in the hope of 
     healing or restoring youth to those already born. This loss 
     of a sense of God also leaves us helpless to find meaning in 
     suffering. Suffering becomes the other real evil and thus to 
     be avoided at all costs. If it is impossible or perhaps 
     difficult to eliminate the suffering, then it becomes 
     acceptable to eliminate the one suffering.


              IV. The Essence: An Encounter with a Person

       Pope Emeritus Benedict, in his writings and speeches 
     reflecting on the essence of what it means to be Catholic 
     declared it is not our dogma and doctrine. Obviously, it is 
     not that he thought these to be unimportant, after all he had 
     been the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the 
     Faith--he was the architect of the Catechism of the Catholic 
     Church. Yet, important as they are, they are not the essence 
     of Catholicism. Similarly Pope Benedict maintained that 
     living an ethical life is not the heart of what it means to 
     be Catholic. Again, he was not claiming this is 
     insignificant, but it is the fruit of our Faith, not its 
     essence.
       Pope Benedict asserts the essence of Catholicism is an 
     encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. Without that 
     personal encounter, our dogma and doctrine makes no sense. 
     Without this encounter we will not have the capacity to 
     persevere in living a virtuous life.


                      V. Jesus, the Man Who Lives

       Malcolm Muggeridge--the late BBC television personality, 
     while an agnostic, filmed a documentary on Mother Teresa of 
     Calcutta entitled Something Beautiful for God. Muggeridge 
     made Mother Theresa a household name in the English speaking 
     world. Muggeridge's experience of Mother Theresa's selfless 
     love changed the trajectory of his life.
       The BBC subsequently assigned Muggeridge to do a 
     documentary on Jesus. In Bethlehem at the Church of the 
     Nativity while observing the prayerfulness of Christian 
     pilgrims venerating the spot commemorated as the birth place 
     of Jesus, Muggeridge was inspired to name his documentary--
     Jesus, the Man Who Lives. Muggeridge realized Jesus was not 
     just another historical figure, but he was still alive and 
     animating the lives of his disciples like Mother Teresa and 
     millions of other saints canonized and uncanonized for the 
     past 2,000 years.
       It is this same Jesus we encounter every time we open our 
     hearts to His presence in prayer. It is this Jesus, the Lord 
     of Lords and King of Kings, who conquered death and is alive, 
     whom we receive in the Eucharist.
       It is this Jesus who transformed Peter from the coward of 
     Good Friday to the martyr in Rome, who changed Paul from a 
     persecutor of His disciples to the greatest Christian 
     missionary, who inspired Francis of Assisi to abandon a 
     frivolous life of comfort and through simplicity and poverty 
     to awaken the world to the Gospel. It is this same Jesus who 
     motivated Thomas More to resign as Chancellor of England and 
     die a Martyr's death rather than betray his conscience, who 
     emboldened the North American Martyrs to make the perilous 
     crossing of the Atlantic to evangelize Native Americans well 
     aware that they would meet violent deaths, who led St. Damien 
     to provide pastoral care for the lepers of Molokai knowing 
     the probability that eventually he would succumb to the 
     dreaded disease, and who gave Blessed Stanley Rother, a farm 
     boy from Oklahoma the courage to stay with his flock in 
     Guatemala despite being a target of the death squads. This is 
     to name only a tiny fraction of some of the more well-known 
     disciples who found abundant and eternal life in losing their 
     lives following Jesus, the Man Who Lives.


                   VI. A God Who Died but Is Not Dead

       The Original Sin was the decision by our first parents to 
     push God out of their garden in order to become their own 
     gods. This is the archetype of every sin. God's response to 
     humanity's rebellion is mercy. God does not abandon us to 
     dwell in the darkness created by our rejection of His love. 
     Instead, God comes to rescue us just as he saved Israel from 
     the slavery of Egypt. Sin masquerades as freedom but in 
     reality enslaves us to disordered cravings. Jesus came to 
     liberate us from the bondage of sin and to vanquish death 
     destroying its power to rob life of its meaning and render it 
     absurd.
       The method of this rescue was not to use His almighty power 
     to force us into submission to His will, but it was through 
     His incarnation to become one with us in all things but sin. 
     Like a special operations soldier dropped behind enemy lines, 
     Jesus entered fully into our humanity, enduring unspeakable 
     suffering because of our sin.
       Jesus defeats humanity's twin enemies, sin and death, by 
     walking through death to eternal life. We believe in a God 
     who died but is far from dead. The triumphant, risen Lord is 
     still animating the lives of those who open their hearts to 
     encounter His love. Thus for the Christian, we are never 
     without hope.
       In recent years, I have been drawn to read the memoirs of 
     former atheists who have become Catholic. Two of my favorites 
     in this genre are Jennifer Fulwiler's Something Other Than 
     God and Sally Read's Night's Bright Darkness. Both of their 
     conversions illustrate, if we just open a crack in our 
     hearts, God's amazing grace will come rushing in.


                       VII. A New Great Awakening

       In our prayer this morning, let us pray for a religious 
     revival in our nation, another great awakening. For those of 
     us who have encountered the Risen Jesus we have a 
     responsibility to bring His love and mercy to others, 
     especially as Pope Francis so often reminds us to those on 
     the peripheries. We are called to be Missionary Disciples, 
     communicating the love of Jesus to others and bringing others 
     to encounter the Risen Lord.
       We have no permanent enemies, but only confused brothers 
     and sisters who have yet to encounter the Lord of Life and to 
     experience His unconditional love and amazing grace. We are 
     called to renew our nation, not primarily by enacting laws, 
     but by announcing the Joy and Hope of the Gospel of Jesus to 
     individuals in desperate need of its good news. It is our 
     task to reclaim our culture one mind, one heart, one soul at 
     a time.

                          ____________________