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’s Mass bring to our consideration fundamental questions about our identity and purpose in the world—What does it mean to be a Catholic disciple of Jesus Christ? What does it mean to be an American? What is America’s place in the long history of God’s plan of salvation?

I think we also face fundamental questions as Catholics of America—about who we are, about our identity as believers and citizens, about the relationship of our faith to our culture.

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.

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.

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 Señor de los Dolores, outside Tucson.

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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’s mother tongue.

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.

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’s first settlers.

I fear today that we’re in danger of trying to deliberately, erase our memory of this history. It’s almost as if we are that unfaithful servant in the Gospel—who out of fear buries the gifts that God has given him.

I feel that sometimes in the same way that some people would have us forget our country’s 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’re 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.

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Those who tell us that the faith is something we should keep to ourselves, that it shouldn’t influence how we vote and behave, aren’t promoting tolerance or government neutrality towards religion. They’re promoting hostility towards religion.

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.

History shows us that when God is forgotten, the human person and the common good are forgotten, too.