History Lesson

From Catholic World Report:

Before I came to Los Angeles, I was the archbishop of San Antonio, as many of you know. My cathedral see was San Fernando Cathedral, which was established in 1731. If you know your dates, you’ll know that George Washington was not even born and already Catholics were worshipping there. We also know that priests traveling with Ponce de León near southeast Florida in 1521 offered the first Mass celebrated in the present boundaries of the United States. That’s almost exactly a century before William Bradford and the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock.…

That means that as Americans, we are children both of the Protestant Reformation that prevailed in places like England and also of the Catholic renewal, or the Counter-Reformation, centered in Spain and Rome. It is true historically that the Protestant spirit came to inform America’s political, economic, and cultural institutions, while Catholics for many years faced discrimination in different forms. But today the broad Christian consensus that once underwrote the institutions and assumptions of American life has collapsed. And in the face of widespread religious indifferentism and elite disdain for religion, I believe it is more necessary than ever that we recover the spiritual legacy of our country’s Catholic “founders.” ~ Archbishop José Gomez