Archbishop Charles Chaput addresses
Los Angeles Prayer Breakfast
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Archbishop Charles J. Chaput |
CALL Board member Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia addressed a Los Angeles Prayer Breakfast gathering on September 18. His message was both timely and challenging and we thought that we would share his message with you.
Sincerely in Christ,
Robert B. Aguirre
President/CEO
LIVING THE YEAR OF FAITH
Some thoughts on the Christian vocation
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Los Angeles Prayer Breakfast, 9.18.12
Writing in about the year 116, the pagan historian Tacitus described a fringe group of religious blasphemers who lived in Rome under the emperor Nero. They refused to honor the gods. They engaged in "superstitious abominations" and worshipped a crucified criminal. The were blamed for Rome's great fire in A.D. 64, and as a result, they were hunted down and put to death.
Three hundred years later, they were the official religion of the Roman state.
Numbers can be misleading. They're never the best way to measure the health of the Christian faith. The Church in Rome's catacombs was small. But she was stronger than any of her critics or persecutors. And that's as true today as it was in the time of Tacitus. A century ago, sub-Saharan Africa had fewer than 2 million Christians. Today it has more than 130 million. That's a growth rate of nearly 7,000 percent. We live in a supposedly "post-Christian" age, a time when 70 percent of the people across the globe live in countries with restrictions on religious freedom. But Christianity is alive, vigorous and growing rapidly across the entire Southern Hemisphere - arguably faster than any other religion in the world, including Islam.
That's the good news. Of course, there's another side to history.
In A.D. 600, the Mediterranean world had hundreds of thriving Christian communities. Around that time, two Greek monks, John Moschos and Sophronius, began a pilgrimage. They went to Egypt, Jerusalem and around the great Middle East heartland of Christianity. They wrote a journal called The Spiritual Meadow. A best seller in its day, and still a Christian classic, it was a kind of spiritual travelogue -- a record of the wisdom, visions and stories from the historic center of the Christian faith.
John Moschos died in the year 619, unaware of an obscure Arab holy man named Mohammed. Within a hundred years, Muslim armies had overrun and conquered all of the Middle East, North Africa and most of Spain. Today the ancient Christian communities in Afghanistan are dead and forgotten. St. Augustine's diocese of Hippo is now a Muslim town in Algeria. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit was once a center of Christian scholarship. In the birthplace of Christianity, after centuries under Islam, Christian minorities face discrimination and often violence, and they barely manage to survive. Click here to continue reading. 
