Posted on 09/18/2010 8:26:32 PM PDT by markomalley
One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.
So goes the tale. What this has actually meant for the direction of American life, however, is another matter. Catholic statistics once seemed impressive. They filled many of us with tribal pride. But they didn’t stop a new and quite alien national landscape, a “next America,” from emerging right under our noses.
While both Barna Group and Pew Research Center data show that Americans remain a broadly Christian people, old religious loyalties are steadily softening. Overall, the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, about 16 percent, has doubled since 1990. One quarter of Americans aged 18-29 have no affiliation with any particular religion, and as the Barna Group noted in 2007, they “exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade . . . the Christian image [has] shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people.”
Catholic losses have been masked by Latino immigration. But while 31 percent of Americans say they were raised in the Catholic faith, fewer than 24 percent of Americans now describe themselves as Catholic.
These facts have weight because, traditionally, religious faith has provided the basis for Americans’ moral consensus. And that moral consensus has informed American social policy and law. What people believe—or don’t believe—about God, helps to shape what they believe about men and women. And what they believe about men and women creates the framework for a nation’s public life.
Or to put it more plainly: In the coming decades Catholics will likely find it harder, not easier, to influence the course of American culture, or even to live their faith authentically. And the big difference between the “next America” and the old one will be that plenty of other committed religious believers may find themselves in the same unpleasant jam as their Catholic cousins.
At first hearing, this scenario might sound implausible; and for good reason. The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:
We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.
The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.
But beginning in the nineteenth century, riding a crest of scientific and industrial change, a different view of the Puritans began to emerge. In the language of their critics, the Puritans were seen as intolerant, sexually repressed, narrow-minded witch-hunters who masked material greed with a veneer of Calvinist virtue. Cast as religious fanatics, the Puritans stood accused of planting the seed of nationalist messianism by portraying America as a New Jerusalem, a “city upon a hill” (from Winthrop’s homily), with a globally redemptive mission. H.L. Mencken—equally skilled as a writer, humorist and anti-religious bigot—famously described the Puritan as a man “with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
In recent years, scholars like Christian Smith have shown how the intellectual weakness and fierce internal divisions of America’s Protestant establishment allowed “the secularization of modern public life as a kind of political revolution.” Carried out mainly between 1870 and 1930, this “rebel insurgency consisted of waves of networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist or theologically liberal; who were well educated and socially located mainly in the knowledge-production occupations, and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism, positivism and the privatization or extinction of religion.”
This insurgency could be ignored, or at least contained, for a long time. Why? Because America’s social consensus supported the country’s unofficial Christian assumptions, traditions and religion-friendly habits of thought and behavior. But law—even a constitutional guarantee—is only as strong as the popular belief that sustains it. That traditional consensus is now much weakened. Seventy years of soft atheism trickling down in a steady catechesis from our universities, social-science “helping professions,” and entertainment and news media, have eroded it.
Obviously many faith-friendly exceptions exist in each of these professional fields. And other culprits, not listed above, may also be responsible for our predicament. The late Christopher Lasch argued that modern consumer capitalism breeds and needs a “culture of narcissism”—i.e., a citizenry of weak, self-absorbed, needy personalities—in order to sustain itself. Christian Smith put it somewhat differently when he wrote that, in modern capitalism, labor “is mobile as needed, consumers purchase what is promoted, workers perform as demanded, managers execute as expected—and profits flow. And what the Torah, or the Pope, or Jesus may say in opposition is not relevant, because those are private matters” [emphasis in original].
My point here is neither to defend nor criticize our economic system. Others are much better equipped to do that than I am. My point is that “I shop, therefore I am” is not a good premise for life in a democratic society like the United States. Our country depends for its survival on an engaged, literate electorate gathered around commonly held ideals. But the practical, pastoral reality facing the Gospel in America today is a human landscape shaped by advertising, an industry Pascal Bruckner described so well as a “smiling form of sorcery”:
The buyer’s fantastic freedom of choice supposedly encourages each of us to take ourselves in hand, to be responsible, to diversify our conduct and our tastes; and most important, supposedly protects us forever from fanaticism and from being taken in. In other words, four centuries of emancipation from dogmas, gods and tyrants has led to nothing more nor less than to the marvelous possibility of choosing between several brands of dish detergent, TV channels or styles of jeans. Pushing our cart down the aisle in a supermarket or frantically wielding our remote control, these are supposed to be ways of consciously working for harmony and democracy. One could hardly come up with a more masterful misinterpretation: for we consume in order to stop being individuals and citizens; rather, to escape for a moment from the heavy burden of having to make fundamental choices.
Now, where do Catholics fit into this story?
The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.
The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.
In the years since Kennedy’s election, Vatican II and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, two generations of citizens have grown to maturity. The world is a different place. America is a different place—and in some ways, a far more troubling one. We can’t change history, though we need to remember and understand it. But we can only blame outside factors for our present realities up to a point. As Catholics, like so many other American Christians, we have too often made our country what it is through our appetite for success, our self-delusion, our eagerness to fit in, our vanity, our compromises, our self-absorption and our tepid faith.
If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.
The “next America” has been in its chrysalis a long time. Whether people will be happy when it fully emerges remains to be seen. But the future is not predestined. We create it with our choices. And the most important choice we can make is both terribly simple and terribly hard: to actually live what the Church teaches, to win the hearts of others by our witness, and to renew the soul of our country with the courage of our own Christian faith and integrity. There is no more revolutionary act.
Charles J. Chaput is the archbishop of Denver.
I've read through the entire thread and it's just mind numbing to see the same Genevans saying the same things over and over again without variation, never correcting or adjusting their words. May as well call it what it is and have done with it, it's hate speech. Whether by accident or design it's degrading and offensive.
It's an orgiastic feast of ignorance.
When I watch secularists carry on like that it's depressing to know that creatures of God have sunk so low, to see it in people who profess Christ in one breath and total ignorance in the next it's just horrifying.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of a scene in the Madness of King George:
[Margaret Nicholson has attempted unsuccessfully to kill the King]
Margaret Nicholson: I have a property due to me from the Crown of England! Give me my property or the land will be drenched in blood!
George III: Will it, madam?
[he picks up the extremely small knife]
George III: Well, not with this it won't. It's a fruit knife, wouldn't cut a cabbage.
[pause]
Margaret Nicholson: [quietly] Oh.
Somehow they need to understand that all they're armed with is a fruit knife and they're stabbing themselves with it.
Exactly. The TRUTH is that up until about three hundred years ago the Christian world had a legal system that is not unlike what Islam has today. By our standards it was truly barbaric, but it was also nothing more than a carryover from Mosaic law.
This reminds me of Mr. Roger’s tagline
And they won't. To them this is not about historical or theological truth. They have no knowledge and little concern for the actual truth. To them this is an exercise in Catholic baiting. They have developed a list of hot button items sure to rile Catholics and they go to their list frequently, recycling the same arguments.
Why? I call it Crosier Envy. They are jealous of the prestige and Godliness of the Church, but are unwilling to forgo their beliefs in their status as elect and submit themselves to God for judgment. They are resentful for Catholics not accepting them as special as they have convinced themselves they are.
We cannot change them, except by prayers to God, Mary and the saints to change their hearts.
I do need to ask though, what about the many millions of Protestants whose belief in the Real Presence is nearly indistinguishable from Catholic beliefs? Are they not "born again" enough for you?
Historically, The closest prots get is Luthers consubstantiation.
The majority of prots believe in a spiritual presence, not a literal.
"Do this in rememberance of Me", the text tells us it is meant as a memorial of Lord's Sacrifice, AND a proclamation, 1 cor 11:26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
The RCC did not declare the bread and wine to be literal until the 10th or 11th century. Both symbolic an literal understandings existed until then. Augustine understood them to be symbols.
Yea, I am no fun.. do you know there are actually people that do not like me?
I was discussing the definition of "protestants " used by Catholics.. My point was unlike Catholics that want to count everyone as catholic that was ever baptized.. in non Catholic churches we have a broad spectrum of churches..some are specifically "born again" churches like Baptists , Holiness, reformed , and some community churches.. other churches are liberal and more work oriented like the UCC or Methodists
Probable 50% of Americans are unchurched.. so we can not fill in the blanks about what faith voted how if there are no studies on it In the more liberal churches I am sure there was a significant liberal vote..not so in the more fundamental or reformed churches
me too
Wag Catholic doctrine on this is accomplished by proof texting and taking it completely out of context
Jesus preformed a miracle where thousands were fed bread. He then went away from the crowd.
The crowd followed him, but not because they sought Christ as teacher or Savior, not because they knew he was the Christ, but because they wanted to get their stomachs full of bread.
Read the rebuke of Christ to them
Jhn 6:25 And when they had found him on the other side of the sea, they said unto him, Rabbi, when camest thou hither?
Jhn 6:26 Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.
It was then He began to teach that they were looking for a miracle that would fill their stomachs ( as did the nation of Israel in the desert) and not for His presence or teaching. They only wanted their temporal needs met.
Jhn 6:27 Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed.
Jhn 6:28 Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?
Jhn 6:29 Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.
Jesus laid out that salvation was by FAITH, and that Faith was a work of the Father
Then then decided to put Christ to a test ...Give us PROOF. It was THEY that brought up the manna (bread) Not Christ
Jhn 6:30 They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work?
Jhn 6:31 Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.
Jesus clarified where salvation comes from;
Jhn 6:32 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven
He was pointing out that the "bread from heaven " that kept their fathers only gave them physical life.. HE on the other hands was sent from the Father to give them eternal spiritual life.
They did not "get it" they were looking for REAL bread to give them physical life as had happened in the desert, they were looking for tangible bread like manna, justy as they were looking for an earthly savior not a divine salvation.
Jhn 6:34 Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.
Jesus then patiently explained to them that His flesh is life for the world.. His crucified body was what was going to bring eternal life, not a temporal one
Jhn 6:35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.
Jhn 6:36 But I said unto you,That ye also have seen me, and believe not.
Jhn 6:37 All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.
Jhn 6:38 For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.
Jhn 6:39 And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.
Jhn 6:40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.
The entire message is on salvation by faith .
The listeners did not get it , they were hung up on another point .
Jhn 6:41 The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven.
Jhn 6:42 And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven?
Notice the focus of the crowd was not on Him being the BREAD or eating Him but that He said he came down from heaven ( a claim of divinity )
Jhn 6:43 Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, Murmur not among yourselves.
Jhn 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.
Jhn 6:45 It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.
Jhn 6:47 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.
Jhn 6:48 I am that bread of life.
Jhn 6:49 Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.
Jhn 6:50 This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.
Jhn 6:51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
Jesus here declares that the manna was a TYPE of Christ.. The manna gave physical life, His flesh is for the eternal life of men
Jhn 6:52 The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat?
Jhn 6:53 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
Jhn 6:54Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
Jhn 6:55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. Jhn 6:56 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
Jhn 6:57 As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.
Jhn 6:58 This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.
Keep in mind He had already taught at some length that He that believed on Him would be saved. He has already taught that the man that is taught by the Father comes to him and are saved. So to interpret this as other than a metaphor of being saved by His soon to be broken body and his shed blood, by internalizing the fact of the atonement in faith is not a good reading and it is not the understood by the new church
Jhn 6:60 Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard [this], said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?
61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said to them, "Do you take offense at this?
62 Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before?
THIS IS A CLAIM OF DIVINITY, that was blasphemy to the Jews ,now see their reaction
63 It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
64 But there are some of you that do not believe." For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe, and who it was that would betray him.
65 And he said, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father."
Men can not save themselves GOD has to grant it to them
66 After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.
It was not the bread, that they understood that as an analogy, that Jesus was saying He was like the manna that fed their ancestors. But then He made it clear that he had come from the Father and would return there.
67 Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?"
68 Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life;
69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God."
Now does Peter talk about the bread? NO he addresses what the others left over, the divinity of Christ, Peter heard the message that one would be saved by BELIEVING in Christ as He had taught in this discourse.
It opened because the crowd wanted PROOF, a SIGN, and so they asked for food. Jesus made the transition to the manna because of the demand of the crowd for food to prove what he said. This discourse is on faith without signs , it is on being saved by faith.
Jhn 6:29 Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent
Jhn 6:40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day. Jhn 6:47 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.
PETER HEARD WHAT CHRIST WAS TEACHING. HE MADE A PROFESSION OF FAITH, HE DID NOT ASK FOR BREAD
Which is a far cry from dismissing it as a "metaphor" and what of the High Church Anglicans whose belief is nearly identical to the Catholic Church's.
"Do this in rememberance of Me", the text tells us it is meant as a memorial of Lord's Sacrifice, AND a proclamation, 1 cor 11:26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
That makes no sense in light of St. Paul's use of the words unworthily and guilt in the subsequent verses.
The RCC did not declare the bread and wine to be literal until the 10th or 11th century. Both symbolic an literal understandings existed until then. Augustine understood them to be symbols.
Have you actually got writings by Saint Augustine where he dismisses the Eucharist as merely symbolic?
Meant to ping you to 129
I know that the Catholic church is highly evangelized by the Catholic church..thanks for the stats
No! You don’t say....
To: RnMomof7
Just at a glance, The Congo is about 50% Catholic with the rest being native and Protestant religions.
Rwanda (bloody Rwanda) is majority Catholic,
Zimbabwe has religions that try to mix native belief and traditional Christianity as the majority.
Malawi has Catholics and Presbyterians as the majority religion. Malawi also has a history or religious persecution.
Anyway, that’s enough to show whoever made that list doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
(Some of the information came from CIA Factbook on each country.)
114 posted on September 21, 2010 11:23:30 AM EDT by count-your-change (You don’t have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 104 | View Replies | Report Abuse]
Ditto.
Which is what Protestants do at the Lords table.
Have you actually got writings by Saint Augustine where he dismisses the Eucharist as merely symbolic?
I do not know if he does but I do
"It may be also understood in this way: 'The poor ye will have always with you, but me ye will not have always.' The good may take it also as addressed to themselves, but not so as to be any source of anxiety; for He was speaking of His bodily presence. For in respect of His majesty, His providence, His ineffable and invisible grace, His own words are fulfilled, 'Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.' But in respect of the flesh He assumed as the Word, in respect of that which He was as the son of the Virgin, of that wherein He was seized by the Jews, nailed to the tree, let down from the cross, enveloped in a shroud, laid in the sepulchre, and manifested in His resurrection, 'ye will not have Him always.' And why? Because in respect of His bodily presence He associated for forty days with His disciples, and then, having brought them forth for the purpose of beholding and not of following Him, He ascended into heaven and is no longer here. He is there, indeed, sitting at the right hand of the Father; and He is here also, having never withdrawn the presence of His glory. In other words, in respect of His divine presence we always have Christ; in respect of His presence in the flesh it was rightly said to the disciples, 'Me ye will not have always.' In this respect the Church enjoyed His presence only for a few days: now it possesses Him by faith, without seeing Him with the eyes." (Augustine, Lectures on the Gospel of John, 50:13)
Would you like more?
The normal definition of Protestant has been those denominations that came out of the Protestant Reformation. The term Protestant comes from the declaration read by noblemen who were followers of Luther at the Diet of Speyer that began with the words, "we protest." There is nothing negative about the term, the word Lutherans was used negatively by Catholics for a long time but that has since ended.
My point was unlike Catholics that want to count everyone as catholic that was ever baptized.
I'm not quite sure where this myth originated (though I am fairly certain who is responsible for spreading it like a cancer on FR), but it is not true and constantly repeating it will never make it true.
in non Catholic churches we have a broad spectrum of churches..some are specifically "born again" churches like Baptists , Holiness, reformed , and some community churches.. other churches are liberal and more work oriented like the UCC or Methodists
I am well aware of this, is there a point?
Probable 50% of Americans are unchurched.. so we can not fill in the blanks about what faith voted how if there are no studies on it In the more liberal churches I am sure there was a significant liberal vote..not so in the more fundamental or reformed churches
Fine, I will rephrase my question and perhaps you can answer it:
Would the Catholics who DID NOT vote for Obama be saved or unsaved? And what of the non-Catholic Christians who DID vote for Obama, are they saved?
LOL
Both saved and unsaved make choices based on preferences.. so some would choose on the basis of their faith or political leanings and some would choose based on their desire for a big government sugar daddy
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