Rome, Italy, Jul 23, 2008 / 15:42 pm
During an international meeting with the heads of various religious communities, Cardinal Franc Rode, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, said Europe is “moving backwards in the area of religion because legislative bodies on the continent are increasingly moving further away from Christian principles.”
During the meeting organized by the congregation he heads, the Slovenian cardinal underscored that “laws being passed in almost every country in Europe do not coincide with Christian principles,” and therefore religious “superiors have a clear challenge, and at the same time an inescapable task: to root out the subtle forms of internal secularization that have become present in our surroundings.”
These subtle forms of secularization include “language that has lost its religious content, the engaging in social activities to the detriment of more ecclesial ones, the concept of the mission as an agent of social progress and not as a means of evangelization,” he said.
Cardinal Rode later said that the “Church and society need people capable of giving themselves totally to God and to others out of love of God,” and therefore “consecrated persons can and should respond in a credible way to religious indifference, to the loss of the sense of the transcendent and of eschatological hope.”