“...there’s no need for any of us to get bent out of shape at anything he says for it’s unlikely to influence church policy, be it Orthodox or Catholic, in any way, right?”
Wrong, the embrace of political Catholicism in America hurts the entire Church. It speaks volumes, as do the comments on this thread and, to be fair, the same sort of comments on left wing sites, that so may of you Latins measure the “orthodoxy” of the teachings of your hierarchs by their political pronouncements. We have to assume that what really motivates the movers and shakers in the American Latin Church are either right wing loudmouths like Chaput and formerly Martino, or nuns in pantsuits demonstrating for abortion rights or doing a pathetic imitation of vestal virgins in LA. People like Chaput won’t influence Latin Church policy on the transnational level, like I said, he’s considered a joke, but his actions do make trouble for the Vatican at a number of levels, among them in relation to the Orthodox precisely because he, like the nuns in pantsuits, gives voice to a mindset which is foreign, indeed antithetical to what we see as a Christian phronema. We won’t have anything to do with that.
1. He's a lightweight and nobody listens to him.
2. He's making trouble for the entire Church.
Help me out here.