In an exclusive interview on his new e-book A Heart on Fire, Archbishop Charles Chaput says the recent contraception mandate points to a “pattern” of attacks on religious liberty in the U.S.
These attacks, he noted, are changing America into a country more hostile to religion in general and to Catholicism in particular.
“Our national leadership over the past few years has been much colder toward America’s traditional understanding of religious freedom than any administration in recent memory,” the archbishop of Philadelphia told CNA April 16.
While Americans presume that the Constitution guarantees their rights, he said, “in practice our rights survive or disappear based on how firmly we defend them.”
“It’s not hard to imagine a time in this country when sexual and reproductive ‘rights’ will take precedence over rights of conscience and freedom of religious expression. It’s happening elsewhere. It can happen here. We have no magic immunity.”
The archbishop’s e-book, released on March 27 through Doubleday, comes at a time of intense controversy over religious freedom in the U.S. The Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that almost all employers provide insurance coverage for sterilization and contraception, including an abortion-causing drug.
The federal rule’s narrow religious exemption does not apply to many Catholic institutions like health-care systems, colleges and charitable agencies. Employers who do not comply will face heavy fines.
While the Obama administration has proposed a compromise, Catholic leaders say it still requires them to cooperate in providing procedures and drugs whose use they consider to be sinful.
For Archbishop Chaput, the debate is “not an isolated incident.”
“It’s part of a pattern,” he said.
The archbishop finished his e-book last November before the HHS mandate controversy arose, but, in his view, attacks on religious freedom are problems that have been “brewing in our country for years.”
“Religion is under pressure in the public square because traditional religious faith and the morality that flows from it are obstacles to a very different and much more aggressively secular model of American life,” said the archbishop, who served on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom.
The archbishop’s comments echo his e-book, which predicts that religious freedom will be “one of the key issues facing Christians in the coming decade” both globally and in the U.S.
“Nothing guarantees that America’s experiment in religious freedom, as we traditionally know it, will survive here in the United States, let alone serve as a model for other countries in the future,” he warns.
He writes that many American leaders no longer regard religious faith as a healthy force, even though American institutions and American values grow out of “a predominantly religious view.”
“The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past. And that poses a challenge for all of us as Catholics.”
The archbishop’s e-book urges Catholics to witness to their faith in public life, which he describes as “an obligation of the Gospel.” This witness is “even more urgent as the mistakes and ambiguities of the past half century of American Catholic experience come to harvest.”
Archbishop Chaput said that traditional religion and morality are under pressure because they are obstacles to a “much more aggressively secular model of American life.”
These attacks on religious faith and morality, such as advocacy for abortion and same-sex "marriage,” are carried out in the name of the individual, but, ultimately, these attacks benefit the power of the state.
The state “necessarily grows stronger as mediating institutions like the Church are pushed out of the conversation or forced to violate their own teachings,” he said.
“It is a difficult time for believers,” he added.
The archbishop rejected any claim that the e-book and its concerns about religious liberty serve as a distraction from the internal problems of the Catholic Church.
“The main focus of every bishop certainly does need to be his own diocese and his own people, in Philadelphia and everywhere else. But religious liberty is not just another passing national controversy. It impacts every believer in every diocese, right here and right now,” he said.
Catholics should be especially protective of religious freedom because of the United States’ “long history of anti-Catholic prejudice,” he said.
Turning to the origins of A Heart on Fire, Archbishop Chaput explained that it began as a new foreword to the print edition of his 2008 book Render Unto Caesar. Its electronic form is an inexpensive way to reach a general audience quickly, he added.
The title is a compromise with his publisher. He had originally intended to use the title Fire Upon the Earth, from Luke 12:49, but his publishers thought it seemed “a bit too strong.”
The title still reflects Jesus’ desire for his disciples to “burn with the love of God” and to “have a zeal for winning souls and making the world holy.”
“A living Christian faith is never entirely at peace with the world,” he said. “Tepid faith is not much better than no faith at all, and, in some ways, it's worse because it deludes us into thinking we have a friendship with God.”
Every Christian has a missionary vocation, he emphasized. “If we’re not somehow bringing others to Jesus Christ, we’re missing the point of our baptism.”
Original EWTN News March 27 story continues below.
A new e-book by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia examines the role of religious faith in American public life and contemporary pressures on religious liberty.
“Our national leadership in 2012 seems deaf to matters of religious freedom abroad and unreceptive, or frankly hostile, to religious engagement in public affairs here at home,” Archbishop Chaput writes in A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America.
The book was released March 27 through the Random House publishing division Doubleday, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia reported.
The book is an extended essay that contends that a new and authentically Catholic activism is urgent “as the mistakes and ambiguities of the past half century of American Catholic experience come to harvest.”
Some of these mistakes came because American Catholics “really wanted to fit in and wanted to kind of minimize the teachings of the Church that might be in conflict with the broader culture,” Archbishop Chaput said on the March 23 broadcast of The Dom Giordano Program on CBS Radio Philadelphia.
“I think that effort to fit in kept us quiet, and it fully undermined even Catholics’ belief and knowledge. It also compromised our ability to speak clearly about the truth.”
The new book is “very small” and will serve as a new forward to his 2008 book Render Unto Caesar, a new edition of which will be released this summer.
The book was drafted in the fall of 2011. The Philadelphia Archdiocese said the book is “even timelier now” in light of the controversy over the Health and Human Services mandate requiring almost all private health-care plans to cover sterilization and contraception, including abortion-causing drugs.
Archbishop Chaput has criticized the mandate as “coercive and deeply troubling for the rights of conscience.”
The archbishop served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2003 to 2007. Besides Render Unto Caesar, he is also the author of Living the Catholic Faith: Rediscovering the Basics.
Dan Burke: Prayer for the Souls in Purgatory
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What an opportune time for Archbishop’s e=book to come out….Thank God
that he is speaking out in these difficult times.
Thank god we do have a few real godly prophets left to teach the truth.$
But—activism for what? Is Archbishop Chaput ready to say that Catholic universities and hospitals ought to begin to be Catholic? Because if they were, if they promoted the Catholic faith rather than accomodating to ecumenical principles, they might escape the deadly force of the contraceptive/abortion mandate under the protection that they were a religious institution. But, this article and probably the book is a little vague on the details. In order to get particular on the details of “the mistakes and ambiguities” of the last half century, it would be necessary to criticize Vatican II. Vatican II totally scripted the “fitting in” that Archbishop Chaput is lamenting. They cancelled the Catholic’s right to a Catholic state if we could get one. They said all Faiths fitted in with the Church’s identify, no need to convert anybody, all the roads led to heaven. They said every sinner had a right not only to think what he wanted, but to act as he wanted, according to his own conscience, and that’s how we got abortion in the first place. The new Catholic role, Vatican II laid it out, Nancy Pelosi only lives it, is to live yourself according to the Faith, and be that example, but don’t make legislation infringing on someone else’s dignity and right to make their own decision. We call that ‘forming consciences.’ It is one of the mistakes Chaput may refer to—does he say? I think not, or this article would surely quote it as the heart of the matter. Archbishop Chaput has started the sentence but he has pulled back on finishing it. In order to make any logical conclusions from his beginning, you end up siding with SSPX and all the rest of traditionalists who say that Vatican II was a wrong turn and things won’t get fixed until that gets fixed. Archbishop Chaput is still fitting in himself, it seems.
The book, which I’m sure is great, would sell much better if it had a nice cover to catch the eye.
Just a thought!
Archbishop Chaput doesn’t need a great cover to advertise his writing - the man is not hesitant to speak or write the truth ;-)
... and it’s 99 cents! I just downloaded it :-)
@ Barefoot Mommy, I disagree, if he wants to reach a bigger audience he needs something to catch the eye, it’s called marketing! He’s already got people like you in the bag, I thought the idea was to gain converts and reach a bigger audience. It isn’t about his ability to speak and write truth, it’s about getting people to want to read and listen to the truth.
While I haven’t had the oppurtunity to read the book, two quotes from the aritcle jumped out at me. The first, “Our national leadership . . .” and second, “really wanted to fit in and wanted to kind of minimize the teachings of the Church that might be in conflict with the broader culture.” One has to ask if AB Chaput has dealt candidly and honestly with the failure of “our national leadership” i.e. USCCB and its predecessor, NCCB, really wanting to fit in etc.” and that being the root cause as to the situation we are preseently in. I would suspect not. AB Chaput talks a great game but has he ever enforced C. 915? Has he ever required of theology profs at Regis University in Colorado to obtain the Mandatum? He may have since the last itme I checked, but I doubt it. One leads by action, not by words alone. For too long, the Bishops of this country, with few exceptions, have at best remained silent. At the worst, names like Weakalnd, Bernadin and Mahoney come to mind. While I hope and pray it is not the case, AB Chaput’s efforts and other’s like him, may be too little too late and they have no one else to blame but themselves. For too long faithful Catholics have been seeking the Truth of our Faith to be taught and maintained only to be ignored or branded as trouble makers whjo lack charity. All the while, the Truth was being sacrificed for this false sense of charity.
To Janet Baker: What you said after “Vatican II totally scripted the “fitting in” that Archbishop Chaput is lamenting” is not necessarily true. Not everything that happened after Vatican II was caused by it. The indifferentism you think it caused is skewed beyond belief. Merely “siding with SSPX and all the rest of traditionalists” will not fix anything. The Protestants refused to remain in the fold to reform the Church from within it. The SSPX is doing the same thing. It is no better than Luther and Calvin. Have you read George Weigel’s book, Courage to Be Catholic? I suggest you do.
“mistakes and ambiguities of the past half century” Half century = 50 years, 2012 - 50 = 1962 the year of Vatican II . The mistakes and ambiguities of the post Vatican II church. Yes, the “chickens have come home to roost”
The more Bishops that we have, like Archbishop Chaput, who are willing to go public, and to vigourously speak out against the forces of secularism and especially against our Americanized watered down Catholicism, the better. Hopefully Archbishop Chaput is a pre-cursor to much more to come, including a trasformed USCCB under Cardinal Dolan that will be more traditon bound and active defenders of the Church and their flock. And a pulpit in every Church that once again speaks out with vigor and clarity.
The problem with the printed page is that people must WANT to read it or they won’t pick it up. Preaching the unadulterated truth from the pulpit is far more effective in penetrating the rather thick and obstinate skull of the American Catholic. The Gospel is always spread by ear more effectively. The Bishops have missed yet another national teaching moment. Still no preaching on WHY contraception is evil. We need a Bishop Sheen to rise out of this limp-wristed bunch. Pray hard.
The Catholic Bottom Line as Learned in Catholic Schools Prior to Vatican II
The Lord is my light and my salvation, of whom shall I be afraid? Try saying that to yourself (or humming it) two or three times right now. Savor it. Let it sink in. The Lord is my light and my salvation, of whom shall I be afraid.”
If we really believe—really believe this—then the answer is obviously no one. The worst anyone can do to us is to take our life here on earth, but they cannot do harm to the one thing that defines us, i.e., our immortal soul. To die in the state of grace is the greatest accomplishment a person can achieve. No earthly position, no award, no amount of notoriety, no political position or secular fame comes close. When you contemplate this as part of your daily meditation you will always put the things you do, the things you plan to do and all your hopes and aspirations in Divine perspective. You will save your soul and be given the grace by God to help others to save theirs. You will spend eternity with God in perpetual happiness. Your life will have been a success, no matter what others might have said about you or how they might have judged you. You are a saint of God, and because of this nothing else matters.
Likewise, if you die and are not in the state of grace you are not and can never be a saint of God—and again—nothing else matters. God no longer cares for you because you no longer matter. You turned your back on him while you were in this world and He turns His back to you in the next. You are not a saint; you have chosen to condemn yourself to suffer the eternal tortures of the damned with others who have made the same choice. There is no hope and no way to help yourself or anyone else. You have failed the only test in life that really matters. You are the ultimate failure. You have gambled and lost the only thing that ever mattered from the moment you were conceived. You have traded the world, the flesh and the devil for the love and friendship of God, and you now have an eternity to regret having chosen to do this to yourself by the wrongful use of your intelligence and free will—God’s gifts to you that were necessary for you to make the correct choices to achieve sainthood. You have traded at most 100 years of human life for an existence without end of devils who laugh at you in the dark, dreary dankness and stench. Why would anyone do this? Why would you do this? By the exercise of our free will each of us is either on the road to Heaven or on the road to Hell.
The bottom line is that we are not a body with an appended soul. We are an immortal soul with an appended body. When a person realizes this everything else follows. Death, Judgment, Heaven or Hell—it all falls into place.
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