Mar 28, 2005 / 22:00 pm
Archbishop Hugo Barrantes Urena of San Jose, Costa Rica, told Costa Ricans in his Easter message to embrace the faith without conditions or short-cuts and to defend the life of the unborn against efforts to legalize abortion.
The archbishop warned that “based on a relativistic understanding of the Christian faith and a conditional adherence to the Church, some Catholics seek to construct a Christianity and, consequently, a Church to their own liking, unilateral and outside the identity and mission that Jesus Christ has fundamentally given us.”
“We have been witnesses of the emergence of what some call ‘cafeteria Christianity,’ which is nothing more than the intention of having one’s ‘own church,’ constituted according to the dictates of one’s religious understanding,” he noted.
Archbishop Barrantes Urena underscored that the Church is not a “simple human creation” and that Catholics are not free to arbitrarily alter her essence by accepting what they find comfortable and rejecting whatever is challenging and difficult.