Abp. Chaput: "God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today."

The Archbishop of Denver made his case in Rome at the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission. A short taste:

Having said all this, we still face a problem. And here it is: God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some increase of cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of the past, consumer greed, little genocides posing as “rights” like the cult of abortion, and a basic confusion about what – if anything at all – it means to be “human.”

Science and technology give us power. Philosophers like Feuerbach and Nietzsche give us the language to deny God. The result, in the words of Henri De Lubac, is not atheism, but an anti-theism built on resentment.  In destroying God, man sees himself as “overthrowing an obstacle in order to gain his freedom.” The Christian understanding of human dignity claims that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Thomas Aquinas – whose feast we celebrate tomorrow – said that “In this [likeness to God] is man's greatness, in this is man's worth, in this he excels every creature.”  But this grounding in God is exactly what the modern spirit rejects.

Read it all on ZENIT.

And read an excerpt from Henri de Lubac's book, The Drama of Atheist Humanism:

Comments

[LJ]

The result, in the words of Henri De Lubac, is not atheism, but an anti-theism built on resentment.

I have wondered at this phenomenon. The new atheists seem to hate God more than deny his existence. This virulent anti-God activism afoot in our culture shows its fangs occasionally and seems to be testing its limits, biting here and there, working itself up to a serious attack, not on God of course, but on us.

I think this is the face of Lucifer more truly than the atheist academics of the past.