ARCHBISHOP GOMEZ DELIVERS LECTURE ON HISPANIC INNOVATORS OF THE FAITH AT CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA IN WASHINGTON D.C.

February 6, 2019  |  By: newsroom  |  Archbishop Gomez, Press Releases  |  

Today Archbishop José H. Gomez delivered a lecture at Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. about Hispanic Innovators of the Faith. Throughout the lecture, Archbishop Gomez reflected on the “crisis of man” in our times and the loss of the meaning of the human person.

“The crisis I see today is this: In our society, we no longer seem to share any coherent or common understanding about what it means to be a human being. As I see it, this problem is rooted in our society’s broader loss of the awareness of God,” said Archbishop Gomez.

“We need to examine the challenges of our historical moment — social and spiritual, political and economic — and we need to look for new ways, new strategies to propose the Gospel in this society that has closed itself off from God and denied the spiritual character of the human person,” he added.

Archbishop Gomez challenged the university students to return to the project that St. John Paul II put forward: “to set everything we do in the Church in the context of holiness.”

“We need to recover the awareness that we are created by the holy and living God and this God invites us to be holy as he is holy, which means to love as he loves. We need to recover the awareness that seeking holiness is the ordinary measure of what it means to follow Jesus,” said the Archbishop.

Archbishop Gomez concluded his talk reflecting on Venerable Maria Luisa of the Most Blessed Sacrament,

a contemplative Carmelite who served the poorest of the poor in Mexico in the 1920s, was driven underground and then into exile during the bloody persecution of the Church. She came to Los Angeles in 1927, along with thousands of refugees from Mexico.

“Out of the violence carried out in the name of an atheist humanism, Mother Luisita called us to live as saints in everyday life, relying on the loving Providence of God and with our hearts open to the sufferings of the poor and forgotten,” said Archbishop Gomez. “She used to tell people: ‘For greater things you were born.’ In this short and beautiful expression, we have the truth of the Incarnation. And this is the truth about our lives.”

“Friends, there is a hidden despair lurking just beneath the shiny surfaces of our consumer culture. As much as we try to distract and amuse ourselves, as much as we try to dull our senses through consumption and entertainment, people know something is missing,” concluded the Archbishop. “We know that in the end, our science cannot save us, our technology cannot redeem us. The happiness that consumer society promises does not last; it is in constant need of recharging through relentless novelty.”

Follow the conversation on social media using #MadeForGreater. The full text of the lecture is available at https://angelusnews.com/voices/archbishop-gomez/born-for-greater-things-from-the-crisis-of-man-toward-a-new-christian-humanism.