May 17, 2011 / 01:23 am
Addressing new graduates of Thomas Aquinas College on May 14, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez urged them to bear witness to the Catholic Church's harmony of faith and reason, in a culture that has lost its intellectual and religious bearings.
“The problem today is that our intellectuals and our cultural leaders no longer have confidence. They are skeptical that we can know our creator from what he has created,” Archbishop Gomez told the 82 graduating seniors and their families. “So we bracket off the question of God as something we cannot know.”
The archbishop contrasted this skeptical conclusion with the words of Blessed John Paul II, who described faith and reason as the “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth.” He pointed out that God “made us with minds that can reason and hearts that can believe,” with both abilities needed to know the truth about God and the world.
“When God is unknown, we are unknowable to ourselves,” Archbishop Gomez observed, citing the Second Vatican Council's warning that “without a creator, the creature vanishes.” He also noted that modern science, for all its important advances, had become the foundation for a world in which the question of God was no longer relevant.