MUST READ: Archbishop Chaput Addresses Notre Dame's "Right To Life" Student Group

From Archbishop Chaput on Facebook:

"Last Friday, I addressed the University of Notre Dame's 'Right to Life' student group.  I urged them to be courageous in fighting for their beliefs, and to always remember what being Catholic REALLY means." 

Here are excerpts from the speech called Politics And The Devil (I wanted to post the whole thing, it's THAT GOOD, but Witherspoon has a copywrite, so....:

...the idea that the “separation of Church and state” should force us to exclude our religious beliefs from guiding our political behavior makes no sense at all, even superficially. If we don’t remain true in our public actions to what we claim to believe in our personal lives, then we only deceive ourselves. Because God certainly isn’t fooled. He sees who and what we are. God sees that our duplicity is really a kind of cowardice, and our lack of courage does a lot more damage than simply wounding our own integrity. It also saps the courage of other good people who really do try to publicly witness what they believe. And that compounds a sin of dishonesty with a sin of injustice.

And this...

The moral and political struggle we face today in defending human dignity is becoming more complex. I believe that abortion is the foundational human rights issue of our lifetime. We can’t simultaneously serve the poor and accept the legal killing of unborn children. We can’t build a just society, and at the same time, legally sanctify the destruction of generations of unborn human life. The rights of the poor and the rights of the unborn child flow from exactly the same human dignity guaranteed by the God who created us.

And even THIS:

In Europe and the United States, our knowledge classes like to tell us that we live in an age of declining religious belief. But that isn’t quite true. A culture that rejects God always invents another, lesser godling to take His place. As a result, in the words of the great Jewish bioethicist Leon Kass, we live in an age of “salvific science.” In the place of the God who became man, “we have man become as god.” And in place “of a God who—it is said—sent his son who would, through his own suffering, take away the sins of the world, we have a scientific savior who would take away the sin of suffering altogether.”

There is so much more to this speech than what I've posted above, and it's very well worth spending a few minutes to read and ponder.  I've never read a speech of his that wasn't.  I'm just waiting for the day he's made Cardinal...or even...dare I say?