America, Religion & Freedom

From a piece by Archbishop Charles Chaput:

Note what James Madison said in his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” in 1785: “[Man’s duty of honoring God] is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation to the claims of civil society. Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe.”

That is why religious freedom is humanity’s first and most important freedom. Our first governor is God, our Creator, the Governor of the universe. We are created for a religious purpose. We have a religious destiny. Our right to pursue this destiny precedes the state. Any attempt to suppress our right to worship, preach, teach, practice, organize and peacefully engage society because of our belief in God is an attack not only on the cornerstone of human dignity, but also on the identity of the American experiment.

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If only more Bishops were like him... (UPDATED)

Archbishop Chaput

***UPDATE***: See Below

Archbishop Charles Chaput is a courageous and intelligent Bishop. As Thomas Peters from American Papist puts it:

"I will never tire of saying this: read everything Archbishop Chaput writes."

He is correct. You should read everything that Archbishop Chaput writes. Everything.

Recently, Archbishop Chaput gave a talk that was the keynote address as part of the University of Notre Dame student-organized Right to Life lecture series. You can find that talk here in essay form: Chaput Keynote Address in Essay. [NB: Following the directives that Peters and I have laid out, you should read this.]

What was said during a follow up Q&A session after this talk was even more telling on exactly how orthodox this Bishop is, and just how far gone other Bishops are. For example his answer regarding Abortion, Communion and Bishops, taken from the Boston Pilot [my comments]:

"There is unity among the bishops about abortion always being wrong, and that you can't be a Catholic and be in favor of abortion -- the bishops all agree to that -- but there's just an inability among the bishops together to speak clearly on this matter and even to say that if you're Catholic and you're pro-choice, you can't receive holy Communion," Archbishop Chaput said.

Individual bishops probably do take such a stand privately more often than anyone knows, the archbishop noted, and he said he is not in favor of refusing Communion without giving private notice ahead of time to the person. He emphasized, however, that Catholics who support keeping abortion legal should be told that they will not be given Communion, and not to present themselves to receive. [Amen!]

Archbishop Chaput said he and others have been trying to move the U.S. bishops' conference to speak clearly on this issue for a number of years. However, there is a fear, he said, that if they do so, the bishops might somehow disenfranchise the Catholic community from political life, making it difficult to get elected if a Catholic politician has to hold the church's position on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. [Bishops live in fear of politics? No wonder the American Church is where it stands today... what a disgrace!]

The strategy clearly has failed, he continued, "So let's try something different and see if it works. Let's be very, very clear on these matters," and he asked the audience to "help me to convince the bishops on that subject." [Wow... he's right, these young folks probably do know better than the Bishops for the enemy is within.]

Chaput isn't afraid to say what needs to be said. There is a reason that he wasn't elected the President of the USCCB and this is it. He is a bold and orthodox leader and the dissident Bishops do what they can to marginalize him. Why? Because he acts on his beliefs and those beliefs are rooted in the true teachings of the Church.

"We act on what we really believe," Archbishop Chaput said. "If we don't act on our beliefs, then we don't really believe them."

The idea that the separation of church and state should force us to exclude our religious beliefs from guiding our political behavior makes no sense at all, he continued:

"If we don't remain true in our public actions to what we claim to believe in our personal lives, then we only deceive ourselves, because God certainly isn't fooled: He sees who and what we are. God sees that our duplicity is really a kind of cowardice, and our lack of courage does a lot more damage than simply wounding our own integrity; it also saps the courage of other good people who really do try to publicly witness what they believe. And that compounds the sin of dishonesty and the sin of injustice."

Amen Archbishop, Amen. If only we had more like him...

***UPDATE***:
The Heterodox National Catholic Reporter has posted an article by none other than Michael Sean Winters. If you don't know what this means... lucky you. He essentially calls our Archbishop Chaput and claims that Chaput is in a small minority of Bishops that think the way he does about Canon 915. He goes further to say that Chaput should bring up the issue during his ad limina visit ("State of the Diocese Visit") and he will find that the Holy Father and the Vatican are in disagreement with his "theology" concerning Canon 915. He does make a point about Cardinal Levada, but aside from that he post is more about his feathers being ruffled than anything. What he doesn't say and can't say is that Canon 915 was written to do exactly what Chaput indicates, but that Bishops have since ignored it to the point that the norm no longer reflects the intent. As St. John Chrysostom, Athanasius, John Eudes and many others have informed us... much in hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.


You can find Archbishop Chaput's book: "Render Unto Caesar" here, and you can read his homilies and writings at his Archdiocesan website here. 

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Abp. Chaput's Ash Wednesday Message

Because you more than likely got a watered down homily this Ash Wednesday, here is something that resembles a real homily - (The Denver Catholic Register):

This Lent, accept God's love, reflect it to others

“The first Sunday of the Lenten journey reveals our condition as human beings here on earth.  The victorious battle against temptation, the starting point of Jesus’ mission, is an invitation to become aware of our own fragility in order to accept the grace that frees [us] from sin and infuses new strength in Christ—the way, the truth and the life.”

—From Pope Benedict XVI’s  Lenten Message for 2011

Lent is a time when God invites all of us as Christians to enter into a deeper relationship with himself. Lent is our pilgrimage to Golgotha, and beyond that, to Easter and eternal life. Jesus came into the world to save us; to show us that our lives have meaning; that God loves us; that despite all our sins, no matter how dark, God treasures us as his sons and daughters; that suffering has meaning; that each person no matter how broken or disabled has dignity; and that death is never the end of who we are.

Each of us is born with an ache for “something more.” We all have an inherent hunger for happiness, but we can’t be happy alone. We were made for friendship with one another, and for communion with our Creator.

On the other hand, all of us are selfish. Each of us is a sinner. Again and again, despite our best intentions, we make wrong choices, do bad things and hurt those we love. And on the heels of our personal failures always comes the temptation to despair of ever really changing. We’re tempted to shrug off holiness as a “good idea” that just doesn’t work.

Catholics should know better because we have the example of the saints. The more deeply we know the stories of the saints, the better we realize that most of them were very much like us. They were ordinary people who slowly made a habit of remembering the meaning of their baptism; of making the right choices and doing good actions. Day by day, they wove extraordinary lives out of ordinary material.

With God’s help, we can do the same. The fasting, prayer, almsgiving and mortifications of the Lenten season have a very important purpose: they help us to rediscover the meaning of our own baptism and to clear our soul of debris. They cut away the selfishness that obstructs our view of God and blocks his light from us. As Scripture says, in denying ourselves we find ourselves—because we’re incomplete and restless, we’re not fully ourselves, without God.

Lent is an invitation to dethrone the distractions that keep our hearts restless and empty. If we make room for the real King, he’ll do much more than fill the space. He’ll make us what he intended us to be: saints.  We need to approach this Lent not as a burden, but as a second chance, a joy, a way of refocusing ourselves on the one thing that really does matter eternally—friendship with God.

For each of us, there’s no better place to begin or renew that friendship than in the confessional. As Pope Benedict reminds us this Lent, these weeks before Easter are the ideal time “to recognize our weakness and to accept, through a sincere inventory of our life, the renewing grace of the sacrament of penance, and walk resolutely toward Christ.” God’s love for his people is the one love that does not and cannot fail.  Lent is our moment to turn toward that love, to accept it, and begin by our witness to reflect it to others.
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For another great Lenten Message please see:

• Musings of a Pertinacious Papist: "Lent and The Judgment of God" - Fr. Hrytsyk (St. Josaphat's, Detroit) 

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Private Faith: Palin, Kennedy, and Catholicism

In 1960 John F. Kennedy made a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association where he said that his faith was a very personal and important thing to him, but as a politician it was "private." He went on to explain further that:

"Contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic."

This was Kennedy's way of deflecting and inoculating the onslaught of what some perceived to be anti-Catholic bias in the print media. What it did was change forever the way that Americans viewed the intersection of politics and religion on a personal level.

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Archbishop Chaput [UPI]

Fast-forward to 2010 - Archbishop Charles Chaput made a speech and mentioned this Kennedy Speech. He described the above statement and the rest of the Kennedy speech, in a talk about Catholicism and its relation to society, culture, and politics, in the following way, saying that it was:

"sincere, compelling, articulate -- and wrong."

This was a rather strong statement, and created quite a stir. But he didn't stop there, he went on to explain the damage that Kennedy's speech did to Catholicism in America:

"Real Christian faith is always personal, but it's never private... [Kennedy's speech] profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America's public life and political conversation... Today, half a century later, we're paying for the damage."

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Many Catholics, wishing for a politics of "days gone by" make the statement, "Kennedy would be a Republican nowadays, he was Catholic, and was essentially conservative by today's standards." I dare say that these folks are sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong.

What party Kennedy would be in isn't the point of my post, or the point Patrick O'Hannigan made in his December 15th American Spectator article entitled: Kennedy Catholicism and Palin. The point he did make is that Kennedy did a disservice to the faith and to fellow Catholic Americans when he made his 1960 pronouncement. But Kennedy isn't around to defend himself, especially against folks like Sarah Palin that demand that politicians lay their [religious] "cards on the table." The person rushing to Kennedy's "Let's keep our faith private" defense? His niece, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. She did so in a December 3, 2010 Washington Post piece, where she defended her late uncle against charges by Sarah Palin that Kennedy's faith and philosophy were improper and harmful. O'Hannigan outlines the debate between O'Hannigan and Palin, and breaks it down in rather blunt fashion. It is a telling piece and a good piece. You don't have to love or hate Palin to respect what O'Hannigan says and to agree with the point Palin is making – Kennedy was wrong.

Palin takes Kennedy's philosophy to task in her book, America by Heart. O'Hannigan explains, that she is right about her criticism of Kennedy - regardless of what you think of her, or her politics. For this isn't about politics per se, it is about how one goes about their politics and their faith. It is about philosophy and theology as a very base level. Townsend on the other hand says that Palin is wrong, and that her religious litmus test of sorts strikes against the ideas of American freedom. She of course misconstrues what Palin says, and does so not out of a desire to defend Kennedy, but out of disdain for a person and their philosophy. Townsend also makes her argument on a flawed understanding of Catholicism and exactly the role it plays in American political life; it would serve her well to read Chaput's book on the subject: Render Unto Caesar. As O'Hannigan explains, this is not a battle that Townsend can win.

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O'Hannigan over the course of his piece describes the battle that is 50 years in the making. The players: Kennedy, his niece Townsend, Palin, Chaput and every American Catholic. The battle is over how politicians should represent themselves, represent their faith, and whether a personal faith has a place in the public life of an elected official. The winner is for you to decide, but I leave you with a quote that O'Hannigan puts in his article. You can use it however you would like; I suggest it be used as the test to determine who has the better philosophy, Kennedy and his "private faith" of Belloc, Palin, Chaput, et al.

The quote is from Hilaire Belloc and his 1906 stump speech for his candidacy in the British Parliment:

"Gentlemen, I am a Roman Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being made your representative."

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Links:

• Kennedy Catholicism and Palin - by: Patrick O'Hannigan [The American Spectator - 12.15.10]
• Sarah Palin is wrong about John F. Kennedy, religion and politics - by: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend [The Washington Post - 12.3.10]
• The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life - by: Archbishop Charles Chaput [Speech: 3.1.10]
• Address to Greater Houston Ministerial Association - by: John F. Kennedy [Speech: 9.12.60]

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