Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput has a historical reality check for those tempted to give up the good fight!



Adapted from his book, Render Unto Caesar, page 97- 98.

"In 1084, a year before his death in exile, an anguished Pope Saint Gregory VII wrote, I cry, I cry and I cry again ... The religion of Christ, the true faith, has fallen so low that it is an object of scorn not only to the devil but to Jews and Saracens and pagans ... These keep their law, as they believe it; but we, intoxicated with the world, have deserted our law.

"We can take two lessons from his words.

"The first is this:

"All people are shaped by their time.

"Gregory wrote in an age of fierce princely intrigue and strong anti - Judaism.

"He also wrote just a decade before the First Crusade, and three decades after the Great Schism with Eastern Christianity.

"In other words, he faced a fractured Christian world under siege from four hundred years of Muslim jihad.

"The second lesson is this:

"Despite the sins we find in every church generation,renewal always reasserts itself.

"Gregory VII was one of the great reformers in Catholic history.

"Later centuries saw uglier behavior from some church leaders: a scandalous papacy, the abuse of church power, and the stagnation that led to the Reformation.

"But in a way, that proves a point.

"The hunger for Christian renewal throughout history is a sign of life in response to a peculiar illness.

"Among believers, the sickness takes different forms in different ages, but the illness is always the same.

"Cardinal John Henry Newman identified the problem eight hundred years after Gregory VII.

"He said that the conduct of most Christians was barely different from what it would be have been otherwise, neither much better nor much worse, if they believed Christianity to be a fable.

"In other words, they lacked real faith."