Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez has actually knocked a deliberate effort “to eliminate the Christian roots of society and to reduce any remaining Christian impacts.”
In a powerful video address to the Congress on Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, Archbishop Gomez said Thursday that an “elite leadership class has increased in our nations that has little interest in religion and no genuine accessories to the nations they reside in or to local traditions or cultures.”
“This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional facilities, wants to establish what we may call an international civilization,” the archbishop warned.
“In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religious beliefs,” he continued. “In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, just gets in the way of the society they hope to construct.”
In his critique of “cancel culture” and “political correctness,” Gomez said that “typically what is being canceled and corrected are viewpoints rooted in Christian beliefs– about human life and the human person, about marital relationship, the household, and more.”
In modern society, “The ‘space’ that the Church and thinking Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking,” he regreted. “Church institutions and Christian-owned services are increasingly challenged and harassed.”
“The same holds true for Christians working in education, health care, government, and other sectors,” he added. “Holding particular Christian beliefs is said to be a danger to the freedoms, and even to the safety, of other groups in our societies.”
The task of extreme secularization, which is anti-Christian in its roots, has actually accelerated throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the archbishop stated.
“I think history will look back and see that this pandemic did not change our societies as much as it accelerated patterns and directions that were already at work,” he observed. “Social changes that might have taken decades to play out are now moving more quickly in the wake of this disease and our societies’ reactions.”
“The new social motions and ideologies that we are talking about today were being seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural organizations,” he stated. “But with the tension and worry triggered by the pandemic and social isolation, and with the killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer and the demonstrations that followed in our cities, these movements were totally released in our society.”
“… political belief systems based on social justice or individuality have actually concerned fill the area that Christian belief and practice as soon as occupied,” the archbishop stated.
“Whatever we call these motions– ‘social justice,’ ‘wokeness,’ ‘identity politics,’ ‘intersectionality,’ ‘follower ideology’– they declare to offer what faith supplies.”
“The architects of this motion look for to replace the Christian story with “what we may call the ‘woke’ story or the ‘social justice’ story,” he stated.
“Today’s vital theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic,” Gomez observed. “They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of humanity; or they believe that it is unimportant to human happiness.”
Instead, they “reduce what it implies to be human to basically physical qualities– the color of our skin, our sex, our concepts of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society,” he stated.