A new bishop for Ft. Wayne-South Bend

Welcome to Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, the recently installed ninth bishop of the Diocese of Ft. Wayne-South Bend!  Rocco (no surprise) has details on the installation, and also the full text of Bishop Rhoades' homily.  Here's a bit:

As I begin my ministry as Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, I wish to reaffirm my commitment to my episcopal motto, “to proclaim the truth in charity.” These words come from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians where he writes: “Let us, then, be children no longer, tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine that originates in human trickery and skill in proposing error. Rather, let us profess the truth in charity and grow to the full maturity of Christ the head. Through him the whole body grows, and with the proper functioning of the members joined firmly together by each supporting ligament, builds itself up in love.” — Ephesians,: 4:14-16.

These words of St. Paul remind us of our mission: to profess the truth in charity. In his trial before Pontius Pilate, Jesus himself proclaimed that “(he had) come into the world to bear witness to the truth.” — Jn 18:37. We carry on this mission. Our duty is to bear witness to the truth of the apostolic faith we have received and to act as witnesses of the Gospel in word and deed. I am reminded of the words of the Apostle Paul to one of his successors, one of the first bishops of the Church, St. Timothy: “Never be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord.”

This is an important exhortation for us today, living in a culture of increasing secularism and relativism, a society in which the Catholic faith is increasingly counter-cultural. “Never be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord.” At Baptisms and Confirmations, after the baptismal promises are made or renewed, the bishop or priest says: “This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. We are proud to profess it in Christ Jesus our Lord.” My brothers and sisters, we should always be proud to profess our Catholic faith, doing so with courage and without equivocation.

My episcopal motto, “veritatem in caritate” (“truth in charity”) is a reminder that truth and charity must always go together. Love and truth are “the vocation planted by God in the heart and mind of every human person.” — “Caritas in Veritate” No. 1. Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God who is “Eternal Love and Absolute Truth” (ibid).

One of the greatest challenges we face in our culture today is relativism, the denial of the existence of objective truth. As we heard, St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians about the danger of letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching. The day before his election as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger said in a famous homily that “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as certain and has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.”