[immoceefe]

I know Fr. Chad well and appreciate why he signed the declaration. But such declarations, in my limited mind, tend to discredit the essentially eschatalogical character of the Church, and diverts us from our true mission as such. The world is always going to hell, and while I think it is important for the Church to witness to certain cultural atrocities -- abortion comes to mind as perhaps the most egregious -- the problem with this declaration is, in a sense, its lack of radicalism, in the true sense of the term. Of course, you cannot get such disparate elements together to agree on a theological statement. And so they focus on what they can agree on in the social sphere only. But it is kind of a, well, conventional bourgeois approach. So what is the right approach? I think Christians should be wary of confusing liberal tolerance with our mission. The declaration is couched in those terms exclusively. It basically concedes the Gospel to the secular ideal, by arguing that Christians should not be persecuted for these beliefs. But Christians SHOULD be persecuted for these beliefs! That's why we exist. If we are not being persecuted for our beliefs, then we don't have any beliefs worth mentioning. If there is nothing to die for, then there is nothing to live for.