Serve your country best by serving God first,
Archbishop Chaput tells USAF cadets
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=15332
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Air Force Academy Chapel/ Archbishop Charles Chaput
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Archbishop of Denver Charles J. Chaput addressed
Catholic cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in
Colorado Springs on Monday, telling them the
military profession is “honorable” and urging
them to become virtuous leaders who serve their
country best by serving God first.
The archbishop discussed war, the nature of
obedience, and the need to recognize that people matter more than things.
Referring to Homer, W.B. Yeats and Robert E.
Lee’s comments on war, Archbishop Chaput
acknowledged that war is “tragic,” “brutish,” and
a sin “against our brothers, against god and
against our own human dignity. The archbishop
noted that despite its “hideousness” war also
demands noble traits such as skill, discipline and self-sacrifice.
He said war began with “our turning away from God
in Genesis,” causing a “permanent dilemma” where
Christians must pray and work earnestly for peace
despite knowing that wars will take place.
“Peace is not simply the absence of war. Peace is
the presence of justice,” he explained. “The
irony of human affairs is that sometimes evil is
so pressing and so destructive that the innocent
can’t be defended except through the cost of blood and lives.”
Virtuous military leaders are “vital” in
defending a free people, the archbishop said,
because securing peace and conducting war are “morally loaded enterprises.”
“This is also why the military profession is not
simply necessary or useful, but honorable,” he
told the Air Force cadets. “It’s why your
vocation as future military officers matters.
It’s why your lives matter – to serve God by
serving other people in the vocation He calls you to.”
Referring to his past time as a Capuchin
Franciscan, Archbishop Chaput said religious
orders can only achieve their mission by
practicing obedience, humility, discipline and self-mastery.
“When the members lose those qualities, the
community begins to unravel,” he explained.
“Leadership in religious life is very explicitly
a form of service, not power – and the best
leaders never forget what they learned about
leadership by first subjecting themselves to the leadership of others.”
Granting the “very different purposes” of the Air
Force and the Capuchins, he noted that both
depend on “proper obedience to authority, the
habit of self-mastery and a commitment to a
mission larger than the selfishness of their individual members.”
The cadets’ training, he said, teaches them
maturity through being obedient and being tested.
“Too much of our country no longer believes that
obedience has any role in helping people become
mature and free; or that self-sacrifice is the
only path to self-mastery. And I think we’re
weaker because of it,” he remarked.
The archbishop then turned to the relationship between God and government.
“We serve Caesar best when we serve God first,”
he asserted, explaining that serving God means
deepening our Catholic faith and acting on it.
Failing to do so steals from the “moral
discourse” that makes democracy work and is a form of cowardice.
Noting the vital distinction between “proper
obedience to authority” and “obedience to proper
authority,” he noted Christians’ “serious
obligations” to obey secular authority because
“all authority ultimately derives from God and is accountable to Him.”
“In the military that duty is especially urgent
because if some people don’t obey, other people can die,” the archbishop added.
However, no secular authority can override
Catholics’ conscience on the sanctity of innocent life, he insisted.
“Genocide is always gravely wrong. Deliberately
targeting civilians in combat is always gravely
wrong. Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia are
always gravely wrong. There are no exceptions,
because all of these evil actions intentionally
attack the innocent. No authority can
legitimately demand our cooperation in
intrinsically evil acts -- and authority loses
its legitimacy when it tries to do so.”
Proper obedience must be lived with humility and
unselfishness but also “with brains and a
conscience,” conscience being fully developed
self-mastery and not “a feeling or an opinion or a personal preference.”
“It’s the voice of God in our hearts,” he said,
revealed in Scripture, in prayer and in the
teaching of the God-given Catholic faith.
“Obedience to the law is never an excuse for
supporting or colluding in grave evil,” he said,
saying that Catholics are not robots but moral
agents whose decisions will be judged by God.
Noting that the cadets rank among the top ten
percent of America’s young leaders, he said their
talents have big implications for other
Americans, because “we’re all going to suffer if
you choose to be naïve, selfish or dumb.”
A free democracy depends on leaders and citizens
who know how to think and have morally formed and critical minds, he added.
“In practice, much of our popular culture now
operates like a narcotic,” Archbishop Chaput
remarked. “It dumbs down our news and politics,
bleaches out our beliefs, and reshapes our opinions.
“This has unhappy consequences. Real democracy
requires a vigorous, intelligent, shared public
commitment to the common good. It dies in a
culture addicted to the pursuit of individual
appetites and insecurities. And I believe it’s
reasonable to ask whether the latter is what we’re becoming.”
As an example of decline, he referred to the
media’s arbitrary depictions of presidential popularity polls.
“If we lose the ability to reason clearly, based
on accurate information, then we lose the ability
to be free. As citizens, that means we need to
subject the press in our country to the same hard
scrutiny and high standards of accountability to
which they hold everyone else,” he continued.
“People, not things matter,” the archbishop said,
noting that the “true moral monster” Mao Zedong
was nonetheless right when he wrote that “it is
people, not things that are decisive.”
“Our political structures as a free people are
the product of great moral and intellectual
sophistication,” he explained to the cadets,
saying that customary American pragmatism should not obscure this fact.
He recounted how a friend was shaped by his
Marine father’s death in Vietnam. This friend
said that his father’s sacrifice had been
valuable, saying his father “died serving people
he believed in… the Vietnamese people he wanted to help.”
“And that witness of service has shaped the life
of my friend and his brother ever since,” the archbishop told the cadets.
“A life lived honorably always bears fruit in the
souls of the people who follow us,” Archbishop
Chaput concluded. “So live honorably, serve
unselfishly, think clearly and love your Catholic
faith. We love our nation best when we offer it
the best we have -- the witness of our
convictions. We serve our country best when we serve God first.”
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