Cardinal George passed away on April 17th, 2015. An earlier version of the Throwback post below was published three days after death on the 20th of April 2015.
Cardinal Francis George, one of the outstanding American churchmen of recent years, passed away last week (April 17th, 2015). Many commentaries I have seen in the Catholic press and blogosphere have, for understandable reasons, highlighted the following quote:
I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.
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| Cardinal Francis George, 1937-2015 |
The first part of the quote has generated the most attention. Some people have dismissed it as overblown or sensationalistic, but I’m not so sure. George Washington and John Adams warned that a people not grounded in the practice of religion and morality would be unable to maintain a republic as free citizens; our current age seems determined to put that assertion to the test and, quite frankly, the preliminary results are not promising. And while we here in the U.S. are not facing the sort of violent persecution that our Christian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world must endure, things have nonetheless reached a point that would have seemed unthinkable just a couple of decades ago, when anyone who suggested that American Christians might be forced to lose their jobs and businesses simply for living according to their faith would have been dismissed as a hopeless crank.
The second part, about a successor who will “pick up the shards” and “help rebuild civilization”, has received a lot less attention, but is, I think, the more important part, the point of the quote. After all, it is always difficult to be a committed and consistent Christian, even in an age when “everyone else” supposedly is a believer as well. There is no shortage of saints who gave their lives because their insistence on taking the faith seriously led to conflict with their Christian monarchs (think of Thomas Becket and Thomas More), or even Christian neighbors. One doesn’t need the gift of prophecy to see our society becoming increasingly hostile, nor is there any reason to believe that the trend is changing in the near future. It seems to me that Cardinal George is pointing beyond our current troubles, or even worse ones that may come, to Christ’s promise that the Gates of Death will not prevail against his Church (Matthew 16:18), just as she survived the fall of Rome in the first millennium and and the heavy boot of communism in the second. In each case she preserved essential elements of the society that existed before the cataclysm. And of course the assured survival of his Church in this world is itself a sign pointing to the greatest victory of all, Christ coming again in glory at the end of time. The assurance of that Triumph is the ground of our Hope as Christians.
By placing today's sufferings in the context of our final destination, Cardinal George calls to mind what St. Peter said to the first generation of Christians:
Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. (1 Peter 5:8-11)
I have seen a few people proposing Cardinal George as an intercessor for persecuted Christians, and (not that I'm opening a cause for his canonization) we all could use such an intercessor, both those of us in the West suffering what is now a relatively mild but still real threat of persecution, and those believers in other parts of the world suffering a persecution as brutal and diabolical as any unleashed on the Church since the time of Christ.
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| The Grandeur that was Rome: Palatine Hill, with Circus Maximus in foreground |
I would add something else. Cardinal George was asked at one time what he was thinking as he stood on the balcony of St. Peter’s in Rome after the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. According to Bishop Robert Barron, George replied:
I was gazing over toward the Circus Maximus, toward the Palatine Hill where the Roman Emperors once resided and reigned and looked down upon the persecution of Christians, and I thought, “Where are their successors? . . . But if you want to see the successor of Peter, he is right next to me, smiling and waving at the crowds.” (hat tip to Elizabeth Scalia)
As in the quote at the top of this post, Cardinal George made a point of situating persecution of Christians in the context of the ultimate victory of Christ, of which the endurance of the Church in this world is really just a reminder. Given that, should the former shepherd of Chicago ever join the ranks of canonized saints, perhaps he will also be remembered as a Patron of Christian Hope.
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