Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez has denounced a deliberate effort “to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.”
In a powerful video address to the Congress on Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, Archbishop Gomez said Thursday that an “elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures.”
“This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization,” the archbishop warned.
“In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions,” he continued. “In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.”
In his critique of “cancel culture” and “political correctness,” Gomez said that “often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more.”
In modern society, “The ‘space’ that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking,” he lamented. “Church institutions and Christian-owned businesses are increasingly challenged and harassed.”
“The same is true for Christians working in education, health care, government, and other sectors,” he added. “Holding certain Christian beliefs is said to be a threat to the freedoms, and even to the safety, of other groups in our societies.”
The project of radical secularization, which is anti-Christian in its roots, has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, the archbishop said.
“I think history will look back and see that this pandemic did not change our societies as much as it accelerated trends and directions that were already at work,” he observed. “Social changes that might have taken decades to play out are now moving more rapidly in the wake of this disease and our societies’ responses.”
“The new social movements and ideologies that we are talking about today were being seeded and prepared for many years in our universities and cultural institutions,” he stated. “But with the tension and fear caused by the pandemic and social isolation, and with the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman and the protests that followed in our cities, these movements were fully unleashed in our society.”
“. . . political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” the archbishop said.
“Whatever we call these movements — ‘social justice,’ ‘wokeness,’ ‘identity politics,’ ‘intersectionality,’ ‘successor ideology’ — they claim to offer what religion provides.”
“The architects of this movement seek to replace the Christian story with “what we might call the ‘woke’ story or the ‘social justice’ story,” he said.
“Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic,” Gomez observed. “They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness.”
Instead, they “reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society,” he declared.
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