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The Christian heritage of the West cannot be preserved by looking backward, but only by looking forward, the former head of the Knights of Columbus said in a lecture in Rome on March 17.
Carl Anderson (pictured meeting Pope Francis) made the comments while delivering a lecture for the St John Paul II Institute of Culture in the Polish pope’s alma mater, the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas.
“The Church does indeed hold within herself the future of the world. That future depends in so many ways on the degree to which each of us can build an authentic culture of Christian witness,” he said.
Anderson, who served as Supreme Knight from 2000 to 2021, said that it is still important to “resist efforts to cancel two millennia of Christianity in the West”.
Now is also the time to look ahead to how Christianity can be “reintroduced” to secular societies, he added.
“My experience in leading more than 2 million members of the Knights of Columbus and their families tells me that regarding a life of Christian witness, the harvest may be more plentiful than we know. The problem may not be so much that the workers are few, but that we have called so few to come forward to lead such lives”, Anderson added.
He added that he believed that what was needed was to provide “structure, formation, guidance, empowerment,and opportunity to the laity, especially at the parish level.”
“And most importantly calling our fellow Catholics to a better understanding of the Christian state of life, the vocation of the laity, and the call to discipleship,” he said.
“We are a pilgrim Church, and the implications of this reality are many. But surely one implication is that we remain faithful to our fellow pilgrims along the way — to keep faith, especially with those who have given their lives in places like Auschwitz, Aleppo, Nineveh, and now Kyiv,” he said.
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