\nAs you can see, the readings of today\u2019s Mass bring to our consideration fundamental questions about our identity and purpose in the world\u2014What does it mean to be a Catholic disciple of Jesus Christ? What does it mean to be an American? What is America\u2019s place in the long history of God\u2019s plan of salvation?<\/p>\n
I think we also face fundamental questions as Catholics of America\u2014about who we are, about our identity as believers and citizens, about the relationship of our faith to our culture. <\/p>\n
I find myself thinking a lot about these things in the past year. In San Antonio, we are celebrating a Jubilee Year to honor the 275th anniversary of the founding of our San Fernando Cathedral.<\/p>\n
The faith was brought to our region long before that. In fact, San Antonio got its name because the Holy Eucharist was first celebrated along the riverbank there by Spanish-speaking missionaries on the feast of St. Anthony of Padua in 1691.<\/p>\n
As you well know, your Catholic and Hispanic roots here in Arizona go even deeper. It is amazing to think that the Gospel was preached to the indigenous peoples here in the 1530s, by missionaries sent from Mexico. Around the time our Cathedral was being established, the great Jesuit Father Kino was founding his mission, Nuestra Se\u00f1or de los Dolores, outside Tucson.<\/p>\n
4<\/p>\n
What this means, my brothers and sisters, is that long before the United States of America was even an idea, this land was Catholic. Holy Mass was celebrated here, at that time in Latin; The Word of God, was preached in the Spanish language, and both then are part of our country\u2019s mother tongue.<\/p>\n
Every American today, in some way traces his or her roots to the great Hispanic-Catholic missions of the 16th and 17th centuries. We feel this deeply here in the Southwest. In other parts of our country, Americans proudly trace their roots more deeply to the early Catholic missions of immigrants from other foreign lands, France, Poland, Germany, Ireland and Italy.<\/p>\n
But we are all of us Americans, and most of us are children of immigrants. And all of us are heirs to the legacy of the Gospel believed and preached here by our country\u2019s first settlers.<\/p>\n
I fear today that we\u2019re in danger of trying to deliberately, erase our memory of this history. It\u2019s almost as if we are that unfaithful servant in the Gospel\u2014who out of fear buries the gifts that God has given him.<\/p>\n
I feel that sometimes in the same way that some people would have us forget our country\u2019s Hispanic heritage, there are powerful forces at work that want us to forget our Catholic and Christian roots, too. You know this in your work. The reason we\u2019re always fighting over Church-state and religious freedom issues in our courts and legislatures is that there are strong pressures to suppress and privatize religion.<\/p>\n
5<\/p>\n
Those who tell us that the faith is something we should keep to ourselves, that it shouldn\u2019t influence how we vote and behave, aren\u2019t promoting tolerance or government neutrality towards religion. They\u2019re promoting hostility towards religion.<\/p>\n
Practical atheism is dangerously close to becoming our de facto state religion. What I mean is that, more and more, in order to live in our society, to participate in its economic and political life, people are required to essentially conduct themselves as if God does not exist.<\/p>\n
History shows us that when God is forgotten, the human person and the common good are forgotten, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I tried to post this earlier, but the pdf format froze up my other computer for some reason… Archbishop Gomez of San Antonio’s homily at this past weekend’s Red Mass: (pdf format, obviously) As you can see, the readings of today\u2019s Mass bring to our consideration fundamental questions about our identity and purpose in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
Who we are - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Who we are - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I tried to post this earlier, but the pdf format froze up my other computer for some reason… Archbishop Gomez of San Antonio’s homily at this past weekend’s Red Mass: (pdf format, obviously) As you can see, the readings of today\u2019s Mass bring to our consideration fundamental questions about our identity and purpose in the…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-01-17T15:00:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Who we are - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Who we are - Via Media","og_description":"I tried to post this earlier, but the pdf format froze up my other computer for some reason… Archbishop Gomez of San Antonio’s homily at this past weekend’s Red Mass: (pdf format, obviously) As you can see, the readings of today\u2019s Mass bring to our consideration fundamental questions about our identity and purpose in the…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-01-17T15:00:42+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html","name":"Who we are - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2007-01-17T15:00:42+00:00","dateModified":"2007-01-17T15:00:42+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-we-are.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Who we are"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}