The day before his elevation to the Sacred College of Cardinals was announced, Archbishop Francis George of Chicago, delivering an unprepared homily at a Saturday evening Mass, threw down a challenge to “liberal Catholicism.” He called it “an exhausted project” that “no longer gives life” to a Church it was so bent on critiquing. But just as quickly, he cautioned that the answer to this “turning point in the life of the Church” is “not to be found in a type of conservative Catholicism obsessed with particular practices and so sectarian in its outlook that it cannot serve as a sign of unity of all peoples in Christ.”
Having criticized both warring camps within the Church, the cardinal-designate offered what he thought the faithful needed most: “The answer is simply Catholicism, in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any cultures and yet able to engage and transform them all, a faith joyful in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world he died to save.”
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