Christians Need to Love One Another

As a lifelong Catholic who loves the Church, defends her publicly, and tries my best to follow her teachings, I have observed a phenomenon over the years.

It has become very obvious to me that some of my brothers and sisters in the Church have a serious moral superiority complex in regards to other Christian faiths. And I believe that this attitude has played a major part in continuing a divide in Jesus' Church.

Let's remember that one simple fact to begin with: it's not our Church. It's not mine, or yours. It doesn't belong to Pope Francis, or any other human being. The Church belongs to Jesus Christ. He is it's founder, and he is it's genuine leader still today.

Throughout centuries past, the sometimes immoral actions of Popes and other Church leaders directly led to many of the major schisms that have occurred which have separated believers from one another. Catholics need to recognize the truth in that burden before judging any Protestant, Episcopalian, or other Christian denomination.

The most important thing for any Christian is that they believe in the fact that Jesus Christ suffered and died for their sins, and that as followers of the Lord we have a responsibility to learn about his teachings and spread his Word, both to unbelievers and to those who have never heard it in the first place.

New Life in Death for a Moral Compass

"He has now been gathered by the Lord, in whom he trusted."

Those are the words of Fr. George Butler, who administered the last rites of the Church on Thursday to one Richard John Neuhaus.

At age 72, the former Lutheran clergyman turned Catholic priest died after a short battle against the cancer with which he had been diagnosed in late 2008.

If you moved on after having caught a blurb of his passing on the TV news, or having seen a headline in a newspaper the past couple days, wondering why the big deal about a priest's death from cancer, you moved on too quickly.

This was not simply the death of your Average Joe after one of life's most common end games. This was, as Philadelphia's great newspaper The Bulletin called it, the loss of a "moral compass."

Fr. Neuhaus was one of the leading voices in the Church and in the country in defense of the millions of innocent children butchered each year in abortion procedures.

He was said to be an articulate defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and perhaps the leading conservative Catholic voice in the country.

Fr. Neuhaus also had a vision, the dream of many of today's Catholics, to see the Lord's Church whole again.