Transcript of Archbishop Charles Chaput’s keynote address given at the Napa Institute on July 26.
A friend of mine, a political scientist, recently posed two very good questions. They go right to the heart of our discussion today. He wondered, first, if the religious freedom debate had “crossed a Rubicon” in our country’s political life. And, second, he asked if Catholic bishops now found themselves opposed — in a new and fundamental way — to the spirit of American society.
I’ll deal with his first question in a moment. I’ll come back to his second question at the end of my remarks. But we should probably begin our time together today by recalling that even at the height of anti-Catholic bigotry, Catholics have always served our country with distinction. More than 80 Catholic chaplains died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. All four chaplains who won the Medal of Honor in those wars were Catholic priests.
Time and again, Catholics have proven their love of our nation with their talent, hard work and blood. So, if the bishops of the United States ever find themselves opposed, in a fundamental way, to the spirit of our country, the fault won’t lie with our bishops. It will lie with political and cultural leaders who turned our country into something it was never meant to be.
So, having said that, let’s turn to my friend’s first question.
The Rubicon is a river in northern Italy. It’s small and forgettable, except for one thing. During the Roman Republic, it marked a border. To the south lay Italy, ruled directly by the Roman Senate. To the north lay Gaul, ruled by a governor. Under Roman law, no general could enter Italy with an army. Doing so carried the death penalty. In 49 B.C., when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his 13th Legion and marched on Rome, he triggered a civil war and changed the course of history. Ever since then, “crossing the Rubicon” has meant passing a point of no return.
Caesar’s march on Rome is a very long way from our nation’s current disputes over religious liberty. But “crossing the Rubicon” is still a useful image. My friend’s point is this: Have we, in fact, crossed a border in our country’s history — the line between a religion-friendly past and an emerging America much less welcoming to Christian faith and witness?
Let me describe the nation we were and the nation we’re becoming. Then you can judge for yourselves.
People often argue about whether America’s Founders were mainly Christian, mainly Deist or both of the above. It’s a reasonable debate. It won’t end anytime soon. But no one can reasonably dispute that the Founders’ moral framework was overwhelmingly shaped by Christian faith. And that makes sense because America was largely built by Christians. The world of the American Founders was heavily Christian, and they saw the value of publicly engaged religious faith because they experienced its influence themselves. They created a nation designed in advance to depend on the moral convictions of religious believers and to welcome their active role in public life.
The Founders also knew that religion is not just a matter of private conviction. It can’t be reduced to personal prayer or Sunday worship. It has social implications. The Founders welcomed those implications. Christian faith demands preaching, teaching, public witness and service to others — by each of us alone and by acting in cooperation with fellow believers. As a result, religious freedom is never just freedom from repression, but also — and more importantly — freedom for active discipleship. It includes the right of religious believers, leaders and communities to engage society and to work actively in the public square. For the first 160 years of the republic, cooperation between government and religious entities was the norm in addressing America’s social problems. And that brings us to our country’s current situation.
Americans have always been a religious people. They still are. Roughly 80% of Americans call themselves Christians. Millions of Americans take their faith seriously. Millions act on it accordingly. Religious practice remains high. That’s the good news. But there’s also bad news. In our courts, in our lawmaking, in our popular entertainment and even in the way many of us live our daily lives, America is steadily growing more secular. Mainline churches are losing ground. Many of our young people spurn Christianity. Many of our young adults lack any coherent moral formation. Even many Christians who do practice their religion follow a kind of easy, self-designed Gospel that led author Ross Douthat to call us a “nation of heretics.”[1] Taken together, these facts suggest an American future very different from anything in our nation’s past.
There’s more. Contempt for religious faith has been growing in America’s leadership classes for many decades, as scholars like Christian Smith and Christopher Lasch have shown.[2] But in recent years, government pressure on religious entities has become a pattern, and it goes well beyond the current administration’s HHS [Health and Human Services] mandate. It involves interfering with the conscience rights of medical providers, private employers and individual citizens. And it includes attacks on the policies, hiring practices and tax statuses of religious charities, hospitals and other ministries. These attacks are real. They’re happening now. And they’ll get worse as America’s religious character weakens.
This trend is more than sad. It’s dangerous. Our political system presumes a civil society that pre-exists and stands outside the full control of the state. In the American model, the state is meant to be modest in scope and constrained by checks and balances. Mediating institutions like the family, churches and fraternal organizations feed the life of the civic community. They stand between the individual and the state. And when they decline, the state fills the vacuum they leave. Protecting these mediating institutions is therefore vital to our political freedom. The state rarely fears individuals, because, alone, individuals have little power. They can be isolated or ignored. But organized communities are a different matter. They can resist. And they can’t be ignored.
This is why, for example, if you want to rewrite the American story into a different kind of social experiment, the Catholic Church is such an annoying problem. She’s a very big community. She has strong beliefs. And she has an authority structure that’s very hard to break — the kind that seems to survive every prejudice and persecution and even the worst sins of her own leaders. Critics of the Church have attacked America’s bishops so bitterly, for so long, over so many different issues — including the abuse scandal, but by no means limited to it — for very practical reasons. If a wedge can be driven between the pastors of the Church and her people, then a strong Catholic witness on controversial issues breaks down into much weaker groups of discordant voices.
The theme of our time together today is “building a culture of religious freedom.” How do we do that?
We can start by changing the way we habitually think. Democracy is not an end in itself. Majority opinion does not determine what is good and true. Like every other form of social organization and power, democracy can become a form of repression and idolatry. The problems we now face in our country didn’t happen overnight. They’ve been growing for decades, and they have moral roots. America’s bishops named the exile of God from public consciousness as “the root of the world’s travail today” nearly 65 years ago. And they accurately predicted the effects of a life without God on the individual, the family, education, economic activity and the international community.[3] Obviously, too few people listened.
We also need to change the way we act. We need to understand that we can’t “quick fix” our way out of problems we behaved ourselves into. Catholics have done very well in the United States. As I said earlier, most of us have a deep love for our country, its freedoms and its best ideals. But this is not our final home. There is no automatic harmony between Christian faith and American democracy. The eagerness of Catholics to push their way into our country’s mainstream over the past half century, to climb the ladder of social and economic success, has done very little to Christianize American culture. But it’s done a great deal to weaken the power of our Catholic witness.
In the words of scholar Robert Kraynak, democracy — for all of its strengths — also “has within it the potential for its own kind of ‘social tyranny.’” The reason is simple: Democracy advances “the forces of mass culture which lower the tone of society … by lowering the aims of life from classical beauty, heroic virtues and otherworldly transcendence to the pursuits of work, material consumption and entertainment.” This inevitably tends to “[reduce] human life to a one-dimensional materialism and [an] animal existence that undermines human dignity and eventually leads to the ‘abolition of man.’”[4]
To put it another way: The right to pursue happiness does not include a right to excuse or ignore evil in ourselves or anyone else. When we divorce our politics from a grounding in virtue and truth, we transform our country from a living moral organism into a kind of golem of legal machinery without a soul.
This is why working for good laws is so important. This is why getting involved politically is so urgent. This is why every one of our votes matters. We need to elect the best public leaders, who then create the best policies and appoint the best judges. This has a huge impact on the kind of nation we become. Democracies depend for their survival on people of conviction fighting for what they believe in the public square — legally and peacefully, but zealously and without apologies. That includes you and me.
Critics often accuse faithful Christians of pursuing a “culture war” on issues like abortion, sexuality, marriage and the family and religious liberty. And, in a sense, they’re right. We are fighting for what we believe. But, of course, so are advocates on the other side of all these issues — and neither they nor we should feel uneasy about it. Democracy thrives on the struggle of competing ideas. We steal from ourselves and from everyone else if we try to avoid that struggle. In fact, two of the worst qualities in any human being are cowardice and acedia —and by acedia I mean the kind of moral sloth that masquerades as “tolerance” and leaves a human soul so empty of courage and character that even the devil Screwtape would spit it out.[5]
In real life, democracy is built on two practical pillars: cooperation and conflict. It requires both. Cooperation, because people have a natural hunger for solidarity that makes all community possible. And conflict, because people have competing visions of what is right and true. The more deeply they hold their convictions, the more naturally people seek to have those convictions shape society.
What that means for Catholics is this: We have a duty to treat all persons with charity and justice. We have a duty to seek common ground where possible. But that’s never an excuse for compromising with grave evil. It’s never an excuse for being naive. And it’s never an excuse for standing idly by while our liberty to preach and serve God in the public square is whittled away. We need to work vigorously in law and politics to form our culture in a Christian understanding of human dignity and the purpose of human freedom. Otherwise, we should stop trying to fool ourselves that we really believe what we claim to believe.
There’s more. To work as it was intended, America needs a special kind of citizenry: a mature, well-informed electorate of persons able to reason clearly and rule themselves prudently. If that’s true — and it is — then the greatest danger to American liberty in our day is not religious extremism. It’s something very different. It’s a culture of narcissism that cocoons us in dumbed-down, bigoted news, vulgarity, distraction and noise, while methodically excluding God from the human imagination. Kierkegaard once wrote that “the introspection of silence is the condition of all educated intercourse” and that “talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.”[6] Silence feeds the soul. Silence invites God to speak. And silence is exactly what American culture no longer allows. Securing the place of religious freedom in our society is therefore not just a matter of law and politics, but of prayer, interior renewal — and also education.
What I mean is this: We need to re-examine the spirit that has ruled the Catholic approach to American life for the past 60 years. In forming our priests, deacons, teachers and catechists — and especially the young people in our schools and religious-education programs — we need to be much more penetrating and critical in our attitudes toward the culture around us. We need to recover our distinctive Catholic identity and history. Then we need to act on them. America is becoming a very different country, and as Ross Douthat argues so well in his excellent book Bad Religion, a renewed American Christianity needs to be ecumenical, but also confessional. Why? Because: “In an age of institutional weakness and doctrinal drift, American Christianity has much more to gain from a robust Catholicism and a robust Calvinism than it does from even the most fruitful Catholic-Calvinist theological dialogue.”[7]
America is now mission territory. Our own failures helped to make it that way. We need to admit that. Then we need to re-engage the work of discipleship to change it.
I want to close by returning to the second of my friend’s two questions. He asked if our nation’s Catholic bishops now find themselves opposed — in a new and fundamental way — to the nature of American society. I can speak only for myself. But I suspect that for many of my brother American bishops the answer to that question is a mix of both No and Yes.
The answer is No in the sense that the Catholic Church has always thrived in the United States, even in the face of violent bigotry. Catholics love and thank God for this country. They revere the American legacy of democracy, law and ordered liberty. As the bishops wrote in 1940 on the eve of World War II, “[We] renew [our] most sacred and sincere loyalty to our government and to the basic ideals of the American republic … [and we] are again resolved to give [ourselves] unstintingly to its defense and its lasting endurance and welfare.”[8] Hundreds of thousands of American Catholics did exactly that on the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific.
But the answer is Yes in the sense that the America of Catholic memory is not the America of the present moment or the emerging future. Sooner or later, a nation based on a degraded notion of liberty, on license rather than real freedom — in other words, a nation of abortion, disordered sexuality, consumer greed and indifference to immigrants and the poor — will not be worthy of its founding ideals. And, on that day, it will have no claim on virtuous hearts.
In many ways, I believe my own generation, the “boomer generation,” has been one of the most problematic in our nation’s history because of our spirit of entitlement and moral superiority; our appetite for material comfort unmoored from humility; our refusal to acknowledge personal sin and accept our obligations to the past.
But we can change that. Nothing about life is predetermined except the victory of Jesus Christ. We create the future. We do it not just by our actions, but by what we really believe — because what we believe shapes the kind of people we are. In a way, “growing a culture of religious freedom” is the better title for this talk. A culture is more than what we make or do or build. A culture grows organically out of the spirit of a people — how we live, what we cherish, what we’re willing to die for.
If we want a culture of religious freedom, we need to begin it here, today, now. We live it by giving ourselves wholeheartedly to God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ — by loving God with passion and joy, confidence and courage. And by holding nothing back. God will take care of the rest. Scripture says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1). In the end, God is the builder. We’re the living stones. The firmer our faith, the deeper our love, the purer our zeal for God’s will — then the stronger the house of freedom will be that rises in our own lives and in the life of our nation.
Archbishop Charles Chaput is archbishop of Philadelphia.
[1] For patterns of religious belief in various age groups, see Barna Group and Pew Research Center data. For the state of moral formation among young adults, see Christian Smith, editor, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011. For an overview of American religious trends and their meaning, see Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Free Press, New York, 2012
[2] See Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, W.W. Norton, New York, 1995; and Christian Smith, editor, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2003
[3] “Secularism,” a pastoral statement by the Administrative Board of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, on behalf of the bishops of the United States, November 14, 1947; as collected in Pastoral Letters of the American Hierarchy, 1792-1970, Hugh J. Nolan, editor, Our Sunday Visitor, Huntington, IN, 1971
[4] Robert Kraynak, “Citizenship in Two Worlds: On the Tensions between Christian Faith and American Democracy,” Josephinum Journal of Theology, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2009; see also a more extensive discussion of this theme in his book, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2001
[5] C.S. Lewis, see his “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” in The Screwtape Letters, HarperCollins, New York, 2001
[6] Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion, HarperPerennial, New York, 2010, p. 44-45
[7] Douthat, Bad Religion, p. 286-287
[8] “The American Republic,” a statement by the bishops of the United States, November 13, 1940; as collected in Pastoral Letters of the American Hierarchy, 1792-1970
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I pray the Our Father prayer, which asks for God’s Kingdom and will to take place on earth. Some seem to pray for the ‘American Dream” which is not really the Gospel at all. I am not surprised at what I see in America nowadays (PS 146:3) I pray for all the faithful and the Holy Father who does not have an easy job in these trying times for the Church.
Thank you, Archbishop Chaput. I think this is an amazingly good article. Now, if only we have the courage to stand and fight for the country we love and against the pervasive secular culture which I believe is destroying it.
THIS SHOULD BE PASSED OUT WITH THE BULLETIN EVERY SUNDAY AND EXPLAINED EVERY SUNDAY. THIS IS ONE OF THOSE ADDRESSES THAT GETS TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER IN SUCH A WAY THAT EVERYONE CAN UNDERSTAND IT.WELL DONE…
Hurray for Archbishop Chaput!!! It’s good to know that when we preach social justice, true religious freedom, and the importance of faith in public life, we have a true champion in the hierarchy who’s not afraid to speak the truth. We deacons usually have little problem throwing ourselves on the barbed wire out there; Archbishop Chaput had helped fire us up in faith to give credibility to preaching on social and political issues. Christ modeled as such for us; we cannot think otherwise or expect less of ourselves when it comes to those He has charged to us. “Non Paura!” (PJPII)
Abp. Chaput lays it all out for us. Let us be grateful for his wisdom and advice and follow it.
Let us pray for Archbishop Chaput and all our bishops. The road ahead will require faith and courage.
“In an age of institutional weakness and doctrinal drift, American Christianity has much more to gain from a robust Catholicism and a robust Calvinism than it does from even the most fruitful Catholic-Calvinist theological dialogue.”
Sound observation!
I recall the words of Jesus in the Gospels: “He that is not against us is for us.”
The Archbishop describes the situation perfectly. It is reflective of the entire western world. Are we all going to be living in a kind of communist utopia? Is that what is being promised to us? Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us! She warned us about this way back in 1917.
The US Bishops published a voting guide a few years back that still haunts, especially, the Catholic body politick. In that voting guide the Bishops embraced a relativistic, ambiguous position on the most basic human right : the right to life.
Now they are trying to walk back that earlier position by picking a fight with the current political administration concerning religious freedom. But we have other problems within our midst that oppose our effort to present a united front. For example, the magazine America and Jesuit clerics and universities, LGWR, individual bishops stuck in the sixties and hives and hives of the liturgical termites are neutral or even opposed to the Bishops’ effort to repent.
++AB Chaput has been an eloquent advocate through the years for the Christian positions may he continue to be laud and strong and may Benedict XVI gives us more bishops like him.
Thank you Archbishop Chaput, I am tired of the laity complaining about the Bishops and blaiming them for everything. The real problem is that parents have been unable to create a humble, pride-free upbringing for their children, without all of the input from society. As soon as parents are willing to catechize themselves and stand up for things like purity for even their adult children we are in trouble. There is a gneration now of even prolife pants who are being mulled into silence about their beliefs in favor of “not offending” and “tolerance” of a generation of offspring that they themselves enabled into secularism by not obeying the teachings of Holy Mother Church (aka “Humane Vitae”). It is maddening to watch these same people hammer the Bishops over their lack of catechetical preaching, when in fact the laity can not even stand up and place God first before fear of offending their own children. So the Bishops have these loud Homosexual and ProChoice Pelosi types and they get seduced by (lets call it their own desires to be compassionate) into a middle ground between 2 sides. This is what happens in the family, and soon the family has lost the Lord’s truth formthe narrow path. What has replaced it is a Luke warm arbitration between right and wrong which does nothing for the souls of the family. In the end, ostracized and isolated is the family member who tries to strive to live, learn and love for God in longing to be
with Him in Heaven. I am thankful that these Bishops like Archbishop Chaput, have the intense love of our souls so much,as to constantly risk being ostracized in this world, in hopes of gaining more souls into Heaven for all eternity. I hope family leaders take note and issue Domestic Church decrees such as this one here, whether or not the Luke warm to extreme dissenters want to hear it today. God bless you.
I grew up in Lake Charles, LA during the 50s and 60s. As southern LA is predominantly Catholic, I learned quite a bit about the religion. In fact, those parts of my family that are not Jewish, are Catholic. I went to Mass with my cousin in New Orleans. I attended Mass with my friends in Lake Charles—which was a very tolerant, ecumenical community. At all public events a Priest, Minister and Rabbi were included.I did not experience any anti-semitism, although my father did in the early 1900s when he was growing up. (The Bono brothers—1st generation Italian Catholics decided to protect my father and his friend, I.T. Hart, on the way to and from school.)
My problem with public worship is that it excludes those of us who are not Christian. When the “Blue Laws” were in effect, Jews were forced to accept Sunday as the Sabbath rather than Saturday. While my Grandmother would not sweep her front porch on Saturday, she was afraid to do it on Sunday. She was afraid of arrest or persecution from her neighbors. Much like Jews had experienced in the Schetels of Europe. Newly arrived Americans who were just beginning their businesses could not afford to be closed on Saturday and Sunday—especially as Saturday was the predominant shopping day; thus, the Friday night service was initiated. Jewish workers in non-Jewish companies were not allowed time off to observe their Sabbath. In my day, holidays observed in schools were Christian. There was no mention of Jewish ones at all.The L-rds’s prayer was usually recited after the pledge. (When a death of a student occurred in the school in which I taught, the librarian, who was in charge in the absence of the principal, led the school, via the PA system, in the L-rds Prayer. Only two people in my room knew it—one student and me. Is this the fault of the school or the home.) Jews were and are excluded from many organizations, thus having to form their own—creating further rifts amongst groups.
I know that a one time many places of business had signs which stated, “No blacks, Jews, Catholics are dogs.” One would hope that we have moved beyond this point. I have found with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity, there has been a rise in anti-semitisim.
I applaud your statement of working together to find a “common ground” and for treating all people with with “charity and justice”. As Micha said, “What doth the L-rd require of thee: to love mercy, to do justice and to walk humbly with our G-d”. Today there are many religions in America with different customs and beliefs. You and I in practicing our own beliefs, can not ignore the beliefs of others—even if they contradict our own. Hopefully we have moved past such periods as the Inquisition, Holocaust, and the destruction of the Native American tribes. Each religion has something to offer/and have had something to offer to the development of this great nation. I hope all of these things are taken into consideration as laws are passed, judges are selected and politicians are elected.
Baruch hashem—Blessed be G-d!
The decline of the USA in inevitable. All Empires decline. They change from within and often after economic social unity crumbles fall apart. America’s great weakness is it has no religious unity…hence people judge your religion is as good as mine. Which can’t be true! The next is the seeds of decline are sown in a view that sees America’s view of the world an itself is for all outside the USA. It isn’t! Hollywood pollutes the world and so many pecular American traits are exported. We in the rest of the world do not want to be controlled by you! You are stale and self obsessed. Your view of yourself is like your size…unhealthy and a sign of appetite out of control. For American Catholics please please grasp you are Catholic first and you happen to be in the USA. Not the other way around! This is true for any Catholics.
How is America doing as a “Christian” nation? At the end, it won’t matter, when the prayer of Mt 6:9.
Dan 2:44, Douay: “But in the days of those kingdoms, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, and his kingdom shall not be delivered up to another people: and it shall break in pieces, and shall consume all these kingdoms: and itself shall stand for ever.”
Some have said this prophecy about “those kingdoms” has been fulfilled already, but “never be destroyed” and “all these” seem to rule that out. What do you think?
In a genuinely obscure prophecy at Dan 9, 11, and 12, Jesus called Daniel “the prophet”. Mt 24:15, dealing with ” the consummation of the world”. A prophet is one who records ‘history in advance’, not afterward. Thus neither Daniel nor Jesus were referring to the desecration of the Second Temple, as the Jews and others have it.
Again, my question is, is it important for US clergymen to focus on the US, or on worldwide rulership?
Lillie Ray Levy writes: “I applaud [the Archbishop’s] statement of working together to find a “common ground”.
I wonder if your knowledge of 1492 goes beyond the ‘Cliff’s Notes’ version. Jews were required to abjure their faith in ha’Shem- “one ha’Shem” says the prayer- and to accept a God made up equally of a father, a son, and a spirit. What meeting ground can there be between such?
The mainstream churches of Christendom, all of whom require their followers to believe in such a trinity, no longer have the political power to do harm to unbelievers. If that changes do you expect them to abstain from using it again? Especially with the more fanatical of the other followers of “the God of Abraham” causing so much trouble worldwide?
I’m not denying your faith, just what I see as your naivete.
God I love this guy!
In response to those tied to the past sins of the Church: too often going back to the faults exercised in the past is counter-productive and spiritually detrimental for all parties. Not that we should forget the past, but strive to change it for the better. Any institution run by humans, even if instituted by God, is going to have drawbacks, thanks to our flawed human nature. Christ calls all of us to forgiveness, reconciliation, and continued effort to both. As an Italian whose family came to the US in the early 20th Century there were a multitude of of injustices committed toward my people here, especially by the Irish (89 Italians lynched in New Orleans by striking Irish dockworkers; being forbidden by Irish priests to attend Mass in English speaking parishes; the continued media stereotyping through popular programs like Jersey Shore and The Sopranos - Yes, my father’s name REALLY was Guido. But thanks to people lile Cardinal Gibbons, Nicola DiCarlo, John Scalabrini, Frances X. Cabrini, we can live in the present. I’m married to wonderful Irish-English woman and we celebrate the best of both cultures. The world lives too much victimization and that is the big problem with our country - everyone is a victim, everyone wants “closure”. Christ calls us to rise above it in faith that WE teach the world by our lives as is said at the end of Mass, “Go forth glorifying God by your life.” We have to live it for it to be meaningful. The only closure to anything is forgiveness and moving on with life. Christ has it right when he modeled forgiving his murderers. He expects nothing less from us if we are to choose life, his life, which is all that matters. They may torture me, kill me, deliver my body up to be burned, but if I do not respond in love, I have nothing. The choice is yours - death, or life. Choose one - there is no compromise.
archbishop chaput states well the “condition” of the present american culture. somehow he strikes a chord reflecting the vision of leo X111 (co-robarated by blessed anne emerich’s visions) regarding God’s permission to release satan for a hundreds years in the 20th century to inspire and promote more evil actively in the hearts of people to commit moral “mutiny”—the results are reflected in today’s existence of loose moral conduct including but not limited to homosexuality, abortion, contraception, divorce, sexual abuse and other forms of moral decay. pray God we will be “resurrected” by this form of perdtion.
Thank you, Archbishop Chaput, for such inspiring words. I hope everyone reads this and acts upon it.
Outstanding!!! Thank you for such a clear and concise message.
WE HAVE AN ANSWER to part of His Excellency’s call…We can help your school recover Catholic Identity by implementing Catholic textbooks for social studies and history courses. See CatholicTextbookProject.com
The Archbishop says;
“We need to re-examine the spirit that has ruled the Catholic approach to American life for the past 60 years. In forming ... especially the young people in our schools and religious-education programs — we need to be much more penetrating and critical in our attitudes toward the culture around us. We need to recover our distinctive Catholic identity and history.”
Thank you for a brilliant article. As I read on I kept thinking that the good Bishop has surely been touched by The Holy Spirit.
Abp Chaput one of the brightest lights of charity, clarity, courage and LEADERSHIP in the Church. He is consistently both inspiring and humble. He is an outstanding teacher and shepherd. This is just one of many excellent presentations he has made over the years. I have been following him ever since he became Abp of Denver. He has produced many excellent articles, letters, and a book or two…all of which are excellent and well worth one’s time. It was no coincidence that by the time he left for Philadelphia, 40%+ of registered Catholics were attending Sunday Mass in Denver. He is all hat and all horse. The man get’s it! He walks the talk and speaks clearly. He leads from the front of the battle lines. He is superb! If there were ever a reason to make an exception for cloning, this great and holy Bishop would justify it. Let’s pray for him and all the bishops daily. No question he will be named a cardinal sooner rather than later.
I wish I could hear things like this in my diocese. I feel like I’m attending my grandmothers parish. It seems to be keep your head down and pray. We don’t even get bulletin inserts and I know the USCCB has put some out. I will stand with my bishop but he has to stand up first.
Amen, jacobum!
In church parishioners are requested to pray for religious freedom in the US. We are aware of the efforts of government to curtail religious freedom or, as some would say, religious liberty, in this country today. Also, there is no denying that many are praying for it. We are praying in faith that God will hear us and provide solutions. The church time and again is bringing to the attention of people the issues like the affordable health care that some provisions are against the laws of God and the moral teachings of the church. The church is hoping that with the issues laid before the people, they will be able to vote according to what their conscience dictates to them. Now if the people will follow the leading to the church, if they can read between the lines, if the people can understand that the church is indirectly telling them not to re-elect the incumbent yet at the same time not telling the people who to vote for, then the church would have attained its objective. Now while the president is the biggest formulator or promoter of policies, he is not the only one. Policies are formulated by the lowest to the highest elected officials and of course by those to be ultimately appointed by them.
Until now, Catholics and other Christian groups are almost always on the defensive, only reacting to issues that contravene the laws of God and Christian morality. For a change why not Christians take the offensive and let the other side take the defensive stance. Especially at this election year, the strategy is to bring out issues like a candidate having made fully documented statements and actions, like voting, favoring issues, matters, and policies contrary to Christian values. Up until now, the Church is educating its people on church’s teachings and encouraging them to vote according to what is dictated to them by their conscience without suggesting or telling whom to vote. I don’t think there will be violation if the names of those backing, advocating, promoting and supporting unchristian virtues and values will be disclosed, without actually telling people not to vote for them as well as whom to vote for, which decision is left to the voter. With this approach, the candidates concerned would be busy defending his actions and position. Christian organizations can take this role of bringing the matters and the people involved, to the people. We need to elect the right public leaders, from the highest to the lowest, who will create the right policies and appoint the right judges.
For a change, God’s people must take the offensive mode.
@ JunF
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You are correct: “For a change, God’s people must take the offensive mode”.
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I sense you prefer to do it in a proper way in union with the American bishops and that is good. There is a real problem with conscience formation, however. If you study my posts (by scrolling to or word-finding “Folger” within the two linked-articles just below), you’ll see that unless problem areas 1) thru 5) are fixed/ clarified, a “WELL FORMED conscience” is not possible for MANY Catholics.
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And that is *dangerous*. Archbishop Chaput wrote that the government attacks on conscience are dangerous. But UNFIXED fixable-& -clarifiable problems of the USCCB’s own making are logically-unacceptably dangerous if we respect the Founders’ sacrifices and those by thousands of later soldiers who died to save the Republic.
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Of course it was unintended and is more a matter of their doing too much with insufficient checking for perception by ordinary readers. So it’s not a matter of doctrinal errors. Yet omissions, ambiguity and conflicting conditions (e.g., on racism) – for the sheep—will cost important votes and quite plausibly in a close race, the cost could well be an ever-morphing Tyranny of Socialism via a two-term President Obama. Hence the USCCB’s job is rather easy since they only need to do clarifications and fix some Omissions with a single sheet, double-sided Bulletin-Insert, readied by EARLY-September and widely advertized and treated in the news.
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The right to clarify and fix omissions is NOT in conflict with any IRS regulations!
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Regarding complex Social Justice matters, including health-care and other programs, the Bishops need to write and preach this truth *BEFORE* the Two Political Conventions start, the first on August 27: “the Catholic faith does not require a nation to seriously dangerously risk its freedoms by engaging in fiscal irresponsibility in the funding of health-care programs.”
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http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/let-freedom-ring/
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http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/as-disciples-of-christ-you-and-i-are-responsible-for-this-moment/
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In the latter link I ask: “By mid-August, since fellow bishops are email connected, it is not too late from here for you and the USCCB to demonstrate the “preferential option for the SHEEP”. As with the “last canon” of the Church, USCCB rules must not be allowed to damage the American flocks. AFTER November 6 is a very bad, unnecessary gamble as we will then have been denied reasonable protection of our God-blessed freedoms by our Shepherds. Thank you, dear Archbishop; the USCCB is in our special prayers.”
Thank God for Archbishop Chaput and his beautiful articulation of the current state of America, culturally, religiously, politically, as well as the path to correcting it. At this point, he does appear to be our most articulate and effective leader. One idea I would add or perhaps challenge is the notion that America is a democracy. It certainly was not founded as a democracy but rather as a Constitutional Republic, that Constitution limiting the powers of government over the citizens. Politically, the failure of politicians to adhere to their oath of office of adhering to the Constitution along with citizens who have not been educated about the Constitution nor vigilant in demanding adherence to it are at least 2 of the political underpinnings of the current crisis. At the same time, the Church itself has much to review as to a similar permissiveness regarding truthful and faithful catechesis, the result of which is a huge number of Catholics not following the teachings nor believing in them. May each of us do our part to step upon and then shine light upon the path that Christ would have us follow. God bless Archbishop Chaput.
This news, in light of the above discussion regarding religious freedom and taking a stand, etc., is puzzling, if not disturbing:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/cardinal-timothy-dolan-will-host-obama-white-tie-fundraiser-health-care-causes
This is so well put!!!! Thank-you Bishop Chaput. This is the kind of leadership I, as a Catholic layperson need. You have educated, fed my soul, and given inspiration.
I hope that his excellency can see the following. One of the reasons I prefer the traditional mass is it’s silence. He wrote that society is not allowing the silence, but neither is the church in her new mass.
Kierkegaard once wrote that “the introspection of silence is the condition of all educated intercourse” and that “talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.”[6] Silence feeds the soul. Silence invites God to speak. And silence is exactly what American culture no longer allows.
The silence of the transformation of bread and wine to body and blood in the latin mass is most beautiful!
Promulgate more latin masses, with confessions during mass. It’s what we long for.
Also, throw the TV’s away. We don’t need them.
Someone mentioned throwing out the TV’s. Instead how about using them for something worthwhile? After listening to mainstream media tell me about the Tom Cruise Katie Holmes divorce for the 25th time before noon I changed channels. I found the Holy Rosary at 10:30 am followed by mass, I found shows like Threshold of Hope covering the encyclicals of the Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, I found a bible study with Dr, Scott Hahn, I found new TV stars like Father Mitch Pacwa, Dr. Scott Hahn, Fr Robert Barron (Catholicism) and coverage of what is happening from someone who understands our point of view Raymond Arroyo. There is 24 hr coverage on EWTN of Catholic life including a few hours in the afternoon for the Catholic kid still living in all of us. And often the mass is a concelebrated latin high mass.
Jim Nelligan I suggest to you that you go to mass ten minutes early and read the communion prayers that seem to bother you. Notice they all say WE,OUR, and US not I, MINE or ME. The Communion sacrifice is the priethood of the faithful in communion with the consecrated priesthood offering OUR sacrifice to the Father. It should be an active sacrifice on the part of the laity. You should actively be involved in the sacrifice that you offer to God.During every minute of the Consecration you should be actively taking those prayers to heart because they are supposed to be coming from you. You are blessing the Host with the consecrated priest. You are blessing the Wine with the consecrated priest who is doing all that in the Spirit of Jesus Christ as celebrant. I have found that two things should not be spectator sports one is part of Gods first covenant with mankind and the other is part of Gods last covenant with mankind.
Today’s Feast of Mary’s glorious Assumption into Heaven is also mid-August which will probably pass with no demonstration by the USCCB of the “preferential option for the SHEEP” that I requested on July 9 (*later to see it*, click the link in my above post containing “disciples-of-christ”). However, for right now, we have only ten days—BEFORE either National Convention begins, the first on August 27 – during which the USCCB can simply *act out* the “preferential option for the SHEEP” by broadly affirming the following *crucial truth* also in my above August 7 post:
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“The Catholic faith does not require a nation to seriously dangerously risk its freedoms by engaging in fiscal irresponsibility in the funding of health-care programs.”
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Without that truth being affirmed, our bishops leave their sheep with unfair and often guilt-tripping types of pressures wrongly pressed upon the under-informed – some by bishops who were negligent and/or partisan-sounding (something admitted at their mid-June Meeting) and some by outsiders who abuse the Compendium on Social Doctrine and have leftist leanings that can result in destruction of our Republic via the serious weakness in the Electoral College presidential voting system!
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Archbishop Chaput emphasizes in his article: “… every one of our votes matters. We need to elect the best public leaders, who then create the best policies and appoint the best judges. This has a huge impact on the kind of nation we become.”
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It therefore follows that misinformed and under-informed votes will likely bring our children and grands untold future misery if the USCCB remains silent BEFORE the Conventions. BOTH Parties must be publicly told the above truth, at least for the sakes of Catholics within party ranks and within the general voting Catholic public. Only a fool would dare to order bishops to do ‘this and that’; indeed every reasonable person sees that the timing I cite is driven by the political calendar and how close we are to November 6.
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Hence I said in my August 7 comment above: “…the USCCB’s job is rather easy since they only need to do clarifications and fix some Omissions with a single sheet, double-sided Bulletin-Insert, readied by EARLY-September and widely advertized and treated in the news. The right to clarify and fix omissions is NOT in conflict with any IRS regulations!”
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Given modern means to communicate, there is absolutely no excuse why the USCCB cannot arrange for such relatively simple fixes in the above timely manner which fixes do not involve doctrine. Our Shepherds owe that much to us SHEEEP. The Good Shepherd approves. Of that we can be confident: “Feed my lambs; Tend my sheep; Feed my sheep” – fullness of truth.
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In a subsequent comment there are important things to say which still respect Cardinal Timothy Dolan. The Al Smith dinner is so close to Election Day that we cannot fail to publicly, courteously examine its plausible impacts with President Obama being invited so close to election that it could mean a second term president Indeed, chastisement of America may well be *earned*by our past for not letting God be THE Builder as in Psalm 127:1 which Archbishop Chaput cites in his closing paragraph, above.
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And before that, the Archbishop warns as a friend: “Democracies depend for their survival on people of conviction fighting for what they believe in the public square — legally and peacefully, but zealously and without apologies. That includes you and me.” Amen.
We the faithful too often are living in the Church of our grandparents. In that Church the faithful listened and did and some times though not often thought. I suggest all go to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and start reading at paragraph 897 through 915. This is who and what Christ has called YOU to be. These are the duties given YOU by Christ. Christianity is not the job only of the priests and bishops. Christianity living in Christ Jesus is our job 24/7/365. Yes the bishops can lead,they can inform but if you want the world to listen the words they hear must come from us. They must hear by our words,see by our actions that we believe and live what we believe. If it comes from the bishops they will say “most Catholics” don’t believe or follow the Church. Most Catholics have to leave the confines of the church building and say I believe and I will live by my beliefs out in public where they can’t ignore us. Listen to the media they don’t believe we exist the true believer. The bishops can only do so much without the active, physical participation of the laity. Text freedom to 377377 to get into the loop with the bishops. Remember the media says 98% of Catholic women take contraceptives. Every Sunday I wonder if that is true where are all these little kids in the pews coming from. Witness to your faith in public for the sake of all those little kids in the pews the media doesn’t think exist.
Jim Nelligan, Mass is no time to go to confession; that should have been done at another time. We should not be distracted during the Sacrifice of the Mass by lines of people shuffling to the Confessional. YOU may Long formore Latin Masses; fine, but include alot of us out. I grew up in the 50s and 60s with the Tridentine Mass, but like the Novus Ordo Mass far better.
Deacon Bill I wish you could have grown up in Milwaukee during that same time. In my grandmothers neighborhood there were 3 Catholic churches within 6 blocks of each other. One Irish, one Itallian and one Polish. It was not until I went to the Cathedral HS that I learned the difference between the religion and the culture of the faithful. My HS had students from 72 different parishes. One day the priest sent to help with religion classes wrote his name on the board but never said it in introduction. Near the end of class he said I can tell which parishes all of you come from without asking. We of course didn’t believe him and so he pointed out 15 of us and said all of you come from Polish parishes and he pointed out some more students and said all of you come from German parishes. We asked him how he knew because of course he was right and I was real confused because I have a German last name but am both German and Polish. He said the 15 of you those from Polish parishes all called me Father and by my first name all of those from German parishes called me Father and my last name. That is the difference between culture and religion. Now I live in a Hispanic parish in South Texas and can see the cultural differences from what I grew up with. It is the true strength of Catholicism at its best.
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