The Legacy of Cardinal Francis George

Cardinal George Praised for His Outspoken Vigor

(CNA/EWTN News)  Cardinal Francis George of Chicago’s “intellectual vigor” and “forceful defense of the Church” may be why Pope Francis has yet to allow the 76-year-old cardinal to retire, one religion news observer has suggested.

“Cardinal George’s newspaper column often reads now like a battle plan against government overreach,” Nicholas G. Hahn III, the editor of RealClearReligion.org, said in the Wall Street Journal Aug. 23. “The cardinal takes a particularly grim view of what this intrusion by government could mean for church and state relations.”

The cardinal has famously said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

As required by canon law, the cardinal submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI last year upon turning 75, but neither Pope Benedict nor Pope Francis have accepted his resignation.

The cardinal is now recovering from his second fight with cancer.

Hahn noted that Cardinal George, a former president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, continues to play a prominent role in Chicago and in American public life.

The cardinal was active in the recent controversy over the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a church-funded group which endorsed “gay marriage” in May.

He warned that the endorsement could end Catholic Church financial support for the group. This drew opposition from several prominent state lawmakers who contended that Cardinal George was using immigrants and their allies as “pawns in a political battle.”

The cardinal, in a strong response in the Catholic New World newspaper, rebuked his critics.

“It is intellectually and morally dishonest to use the witness of the church’s concern for the poor as an excuse to attack the church’s teaching on the nature of marriage,” he said, reminding the politicians that they would have to account for their own actions.

“Jesus is merciful. But he is not stupid,” he said.

Hahn said Cardinal George’s decision on funding the immigrant group “had nothing to do with politics.”

“The Church doles out money to organizations on the assumption that they will not violate church teachings,” Hahn said. “If a church-funded environmental group announced its support for abortion, for instance, it could lose funding.”

Hahn said the immigrant group’s decision had “clearly broke an orthodoxy compact with the church.”

Cardinal George has also been an outspoken opponent of the HHS mandate requiring most Catholic organizations and employers to pay for or provide access to no-copay insurance coverage for employees that includes sterilization procedures and contraception, including early abortion drugs.

The cardinal said the Obama administration has acted as if there is a “right to free contraception” that trumps “the genuinely constitutional right of freedom of religion.” He said that the Catholic Church “will simply not cooperate” with the law.

Hahn also cited Cardinal George’s analysis of the root cause of the threat to religious freedom. The cardinal has said that the government’s tendency to claim authority over all areas of human life draws from “the secularization of our culture.”

“If God cannot be part of public life, then the state itself plays God,” Cardinal George said.

The cardinal’s public life has also included support for comprehensive immigration reform legislation, an issue on which he has stressed the bishops’ teaching authority.

Cardinal George: ‘I’m religious but not spiritual’

The following comes from Cardinal George:

It’s somewhat fashionable these days to describe oneself as “spiritual but not religious.” This is supposed to mean that one is open to an experience beyond the commercial or the political but not tied to “institutional” religion. One claims an experience of transcendence that is bound by no one else’s rules.

People can always make claims to any kind of experience. The question is always: Who cares? Why should anyone care where someone else gets a spiritual high? Because no one really cares, the claim to be spiritual but not religious is always safe. It’s never a threat and can be dismissed quite easily. The claim to be religious is different. It is a claim that God himself has taken the initiative to reveal himself to us and tell us who he is and who we are. Religion binds us to God according to his will, not ours, in a community of faith that he has brought into existence. Being religious can therefore be threatening.

Being religious as a Christian starts with the belief that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Faith in Christ’s resurrection is central to Christian religion. Jesus is not just someone’s personal idea. He really exists in a real body, now transformed by conquering death itself. Those who are “spiritual” often deny Christ’s resurrection as a physical event, something that makes its own demands when you bump into it. They prefer a Christ who is safely an idea in their minds, made in their image and likeness. By contrast, the risen Christ, the real Christ, breaks into our experience and personally seeks those he calls to be religious, to believe what God has done for us, much to our surprise.

Meeting the risen Christ spiritually therefore depends upon believing in him religiously. We are given the gift of faith in the sacrament of Baptism, in which we are configured to the risen Christ. Faith perdures, even when there’s not a lot of spiritual tingle in our lives! “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” is the cry of a religious person who asks Christ to take him beyond his own spiritual experience into a new world where bodies as well as minds share in God’s grace. Faith takes seriously everything that comes from God. The faith-filled person is sure of God and distrustful of himself. Unlike faith in God, experience is often wrong in religious matters.

Our personal faith needs communitarian buttressing, lest it degenerate into an individual spirituality. One solid and sure means of corroborating our personal faith is to check it against the faith of the church, the community founded by Christ upon the apostles. One way to make that check is to go to Peter, the apostle Jesus called to be a rock. Peter and his successors confirm our faith and keep us on the path of true religion.

The church has a new successor of Peter, a recently elected Bishop of Rome who has chosen to call himself “Francis.” St. Francis was called by Christ to renew and rebuild the church, and he checked every move he made with the pope and his advisors. Pope Francis now takes up Peter’s ministry in the universal church. He will confirm our faith and keep us tied to God’s loving plan for our salvation.

As we celebrate Christ’s resurrection from the dead and renew the faith professed for us at our baptism, let us also say a prayer for Pope Francis. His is the faith of the apostles and of the saints of all the ages, the faith that conforms our minds and hearts to the mind and heart of Jesus Christ, who is “the same yesterday, today and forever.” May the risen Christ bless you with a happy Easter!

Witness: Cardinal Francis George