Sydney, Australia, Jul 16, 2008 / 05:34 am
Charles J. Chaput, the Archbishop of Denver, spoke in Sydney on Wednesday night at a Theology on Tap session as part of a World Youth Day Youth Festival Event. In a speech which will be broadcast on the Australian television station Channel Nine, he exhorted young Catholics to avoid living a double life of “part-time Christianity,” and to know and love Christ “like our lives depend on it.”
Addressing a crowd of young people in P.J. Gallagher’s Irish Pub in Sydney, Archbishop Chaput said that Christian believers are pressured to live a “double life,” that is, “to be one person when we’re in church or at prayer and somebody different when we’re with our friends or family, or at work, or when we talk about politics.” He said Catholics should not internalize the “old adage” to avoid talking about religion and politics.
“These are precisely the things we should be talking about,” the archbishop argued. “Nothing else really matters. What could be more important than religious faith, which deals with the ultimate meaning of life, and politics, which deals with how we should organize our lives together for the common good?”
The archbishop noted how Australian bishops’ opposition to a bill that would allow the cloning of embryonic stem cells, opposition which he called courageous, was greeted with talk about charging Catholic leaders with intimidating Ministers of Parliament and tampering with the legislative process.