Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, one of the highest ranking prelates of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, told a large audience last week, that for Catholics, religion, family and commitment ranked on top of the list of values and rather than individualism, which he said is prized by a “disintegrating” society.
Five hundred people came to the Gates Field House March 31 to hear the cardinal who spoke in the year-long “Bridges to the Future” lecture series at DU and Colorado State University.
His speech was in sharp contrast to the informal and occasionally raucous presentation last month by activist filmmaker Michael Moore, who a week later won an Oscar for his documentary, “Bowling for Columbine.”
During the two-hour lecture by Cardinal George, fewer than 10 people were able to ask questions about a presentation that criticized America’s high-held value of independence.
The cardinal maintained that family is the most stabilizing contributor to civil society.
“A culture that prizes individualism has a tendency to say you are not fully mature until you are able to separate yourself,” he said, referring to traditional rites of passage.
He said that Catholics believe that “family is best for children and best for society.”
“In a society that says you have to invent yourself or else you’re not human, family is in trouble.
“Views must exemplify that it is in the family that we learn to form expectations and hold others accountable.,” he said.
“An even more troubling tendency is [for] couples to live together,” he said. “The woman is much more likely to suffer physical and sexual abuse. Relations in public life…need legal institutions to support them,” he said.
However, even people that value the family environment are at risk to neglect children. “While working to provide children for a more prospective future…we deprive children when they are most need for parentage attention,” he said. “If men keep working as before and women work…love and service and the family [are neglected].”
At the crux of the improvement in our society is religion, the cardinal said.
“The role of religion has been one of personal motivation, one of service, one of crisis and one of giving advice, which is able to…contribute to moral foundation,” he said.
“When citizens live according to religious confessions, [there is] less divorce, less abuse, less addiction and more service to neighbors,” he said.
Despite his suggestion that the events of Sept. 11 are evidence that our society is disintegrating, the cardinal referred briefly to the tragedy as the end of the American century.
“Our [past] engagement [in war] has been on our own turf. Our energy in the world in this way was possible because we were protected and because we had so many riches, natural and created.”
For that reason, the United States must not lose the war, the cardinal said.
“It would be a loss on our ability to shape the world,” he said. “We would have under-minded ourselves.”
Drawing his focus back to religion, the cardinal emphasized the difference between the consequences of conflict because of war based on differences versus the consequences of conflict based on religion.
“More people have been killed in the name of freedom in the last century than in the name of Moses,” he said, naming several religious deities.
“This is a country with the soul of the Church,” he said. Although “it should not have the pretense of being one, [the country also] has to have a mission.”
The next “Bridges to the Future” lecture took place April 1 at Colorado State University, in “Globalization: Historical, Economic and Cultural Perspectives” by College of Liberal Arts and College of Business, CSU.
