Previous Post – A Revolution of the Heart

An excellent blog I have recently begun to follow is “Dating God”, written by a Franciscan brother, Daniel P. Horan, OFM.  He recently attended the 2011 Provincial Chapter of  his Holy Name Province for the order.  There he heard a challenge given by Joseph Nangle, OFM in response to another speech.  I believe that it is worth all of our consideration.  Please read it through and share your thoughts in the comments:

RESPONSE TO VINCENT CUSHING’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO HNP CHAPTER – Joe Nangle OFM – January 5, 2011

In his address just now Vincent urged us to practice social/cultural analysis as a means of discerning our role and challenges in this place and time of history.

Let me, then, offer such an analysis for your consideration.

During the early years of the 20th Century a regime came into power in a particular European country, a regime dedicated to restoring that country’s preeminence in the world. They looked for and found their “savior” in a demagogue who played on and played into all of the prejudices of that country’s dominant culture. His name was Adolf Hitler.

That Nazi regime concentrated power in the central government; it discriminated and persecuted those who were “different” from the majority: homosexuals, middle eastern people, the physically and mentally challenged; it incarcerated without due process those who objected or disagreed with their agenda.

The major Christian denomination in Germany at that time, the Lutheran Church, reacted to this process in three very different ways:

Its largest segment remained indifferent to this process; they continued to practice their faith, attend church, carry on programs of Christian education without reference to what was happening politically and sociologically in their country;

A second segment became complicit in the new order of things – they delighted in it, celebrated it and in some cases became part of the repressive state of affairs;

Finally, a third and much smaller group in the Lutheran Church became known as the “confessing church” – these were the Bonhoeffers, those who actively opposed Hitler and his policies.

I submit to you, brothers, that we Franciscans stand, together with all of our sisters and brothers in the Catholic and other Christian denominations of the U.S., in a very similar historic place.

In the face of what John Paul II has called a “culture of death”, in this consumeristic, hedonistic, individualistic, militaristic society, where vulnerable and dependent human life is cheapened and even sacrificed, we have the choice to be and to lead indifferent to what is happening around us, or worse, to be complicit with it – or to be a confessing church.

Our Chapter Theme says it all. We do indeed stand at a Crossroads, which I understand to mean danger (that we will take the wrong pathway, or even worse, no pathway at all) and opportunity.

The opportunity is “where our deep longing meets the world’s great need”. Our deep longing, I believe, is for relevance – that our lives have meant something in this time and place, that we have responded rightly to what is happening in our country and church. That longing meets the world’s great need – the need for a truly Gospel witness, for “poets and prophets” as Vincent has put it so well.

History, not to say God, has condemned the overall inertia of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany. How will history – God – judge us, my brothers?