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Chaput Vs. Catholic Assimilation

Philadelphia archbishop calls on Catholics to embrace countercultural identity
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Philadelphia’s Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered a humdinger of a speech today at Notre Dame, at the Bishop’s Symposium on Reclaiming The Church for the Catholic Imagination. Excerpts:

The 2016 election is one of those rare moments when the repellent nature of both presidential candidates allows the rest of us to see our nation’s pastoral terrain as it really is.  And the view is unpleasant.  America’s cultural and political elites talk a lot about equality, opportunity and justice.  But they behave like a privileged class with an authority based on their connections and skills.  And supported by sympathetic media, they’re remaking the country into something very different from anything most of us remember or the Founders imagined.

The WikiLeaks email release last week from the Clinton entourage says a lot about how the merit-class elite views people like those in this room.  It’s not friendly.

But what does any of this have to do with our theme?  Actually quite a lot.  G.K. Chesterton once quipped that America is a nation that thinks it’s a Church.  And he was right.  In fact, he was more accurate than he could have guessed.  Catholics came to this country to build a new life.  They did exceptionally well here.  They’ve done so well that by now many of us Catholics are largely assimilated to, and digested by, a culture that bleaches out strong religious convictions in the name of liberal tolerance and dulls our longings for the supernatural with a river of practical atheism in the form of consumer goods.

More:

For all of its greatness, democratic culture proceeds from the idea that we’re born as autonomous, self-creating individuals who need to be protected from, and made equal with, each other.  It’s simply not true.  And it leads to the peculiar progressive impulse to master and realign reality to conform to human desire, whereas the Christian masters and realigns his desires to conform to and improve reality.

More:

In Philadelphia I’m struck by how many women I now see on the street wearing the hijab or even the burqa.  Some of my friends are annoyed by that kind of “in your face” Islam.  But I understand it.  The hijab and the burqa say two important things in a morally confused culture:  “I’m not sexually available;” and “I belong to a community different and separate from you and your obsessions.”

I have a long list of concerns with the content of Islam.  But I admire the integrity of those Muslim women.  And we need to help Catholics recover their own sense of distinction from the surrounding secular meltdown.  The Church and American democracy are very different kinds of societies with very different structures and goals.  They can never be fully integrated without eviscerating the Christian faith.  An appropriate “separateness” for Catholics is already there in the New Testament.  We’ve too often ignored it because Western civilization has such deep Christian roots.  But we need to reclaim it, starting now.

A-men! Finally, this passage:

When I was ordained a bishop, a wise old friend told me that every bishop must be part radical and part museum curator – a radical in preaching and living the Gospel, but a protector of the Christian memory, faith, heritage and story that weave us into one believing people over the centuries.

I try to remember that every day.  Americans have never liked history.  The reason is simple.  The past comes with obligations on the present, and the most cherished illusion of American life is that we can remake ourselves at will.  But we Christians are different.  We’re first and foremost a communion of persons on mission through time – and our meaning as individuals comes from the part we play in that larger communion and story.

If we want to reclaim who we are as a Church, if we want to renew the Catholic imagination, we need to begin, in ourselves and in our local parishes, by unplugging our hearts from the assumptions of a culture that still seems familiar but is no longer really “ours.”   It’s a moment for courage and candor, but it’s hardly the first moment of its kind.

Read the whole thing. See, this is the kind of leadership that all churches need in this new Dark Age. I had a chance a week or two ago to read an advance copy of Archbishop Chaput’s forthcoming (February 2017) book Strangers In A Strange Land: Living The Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World.  It’s very good and very important — and not just a book for Catholics. It made me feel confident about The Benedict Option book, in that it’s not just me and a relatively small number of Christians who read the signs of the times in the same way. We’re going to need each other more and more as the times grow darker.

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