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.
Great post . . . but maybe you could go into it in depth another time . . . ;-)
“Mexico to this day has a ban on abortion, exceptions being carved out in some municipalities, under pressure from outsiders. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829. When it comes to barbarity, post 1973 we are the world leader, and the Catholic Church is one thing athwart it, and often the only one.”
So you are going with “Virtuous Mexico, Barbarous USA” already?
“Protestant “tolerance” is simply indifference to right and wrong.”
You don’t understand religious tolerance, and it’s Protestant roots.
“Protestant” is not monolithic - there being many individual sects - all freely able to be practiced along with Judaism, and Catholicism.
You characterize “right and wrong” to be “Catholic and non-Catholic” - which you are free to do within your religion (and all do to some extent).
However, our founding fathers were scholars of history, and understood the mayhem and death that follows an absence of religious tolerance in the places they left.
They chose tolerance and life to intolerance and death.
You should too.
I try. LOL.
Heh. :)
But you don’t believe. If you believed in Jesus, “one Who is sent” you would believe in the entirety of His gospel, not just selected verses and Luther’s theological fantasies. Protestant belief system is of faith, to be sure, but it is a deliberately crippled faith. You want the fullness of Christian faith, come to the Church and study.
Offcourse, I believe the Gospel of Grace.
What parts of the Good News do you think I am missing?
"The real presence" is not synonymous with the foul teaching of transubstantiation which is heretical to Christianity by presuming the body of Christ leaves heaven where He sits next to the Father and inhabits flour and lard.
The grace exhibited in the Lord's Supper is real because Christ indwells His children spiritually.
Christ said "I am the door."
But He's not made of wood and nails.
Or perhaps He is to some literalist Roman Catholic who doesn't understand Scripture.
Vlad, do you even read what you cut-and-paste? Even the bulk of your post, snippets taken out of context, agrees with me...
Philip Schaff on Augustine’s view of the Eucharist as sacrifice—
“It is not a new sacrifice added to that of the cross, but a daily, unbloody repetition and perpetual application of that ONE ONLY sacrifice. Augustine represents it, on the one hand, as a -sacramentum memoriae-, a symbolical commemoration of the sacrificial death of Christ; to which of course there is no objection [Contr Faust Manich 1.xx.18 Latin given].
“But, on the other hand, he calls the celebration of the communion -verissimum sacrificium- of the body of Christ. The church, he says, offers (immolat) to God the sacrifice of thanks in the body of Christ, from the days of the apostles through the sure succession of the bishops down to our time. But the church at the same time offers, with Christ, herself, as the body of Christ, to God. As all are one body, so also all are together the same sacrifice [De civit Dei x.20 Latin given].” (Schaff, vol 3, pg 507)
I think Roman Catholics don't have a clue as to what most Protestants believe about the Lord's Supper (which is the correct, Scriptural view of the sacrament.)
“’You know,’ he said in another sermon [Serm 9:14], ‘what you are eating and what you are drinking, or rather, WHOM you are EATING and WHOM you are DRINKING.’
Protestants do not deny Christ is present in the bread and wine at the Lord's Supper. Thank God, He is spiritually present as we remember the weight of the sins that body and blood bore for our sake.
It doesn't take too much work to realize why Rome insists on the alchemy of the mass. If "another priest," duly appointed by Rome, is the ONLY person who can morph the bread and wine into the elements for salvation, then blinded men and women who don't read the Bible will stay shackled to the authority figure it presumes dispenses God's grace.
And that is a lie. The Holy Spirit dispenses God's grace to individuals who in turn make up Christ's church on earth.
Your finale with citing the Council of Trent is pretty hilarious but so appropriate. Rather than correct itself of its many errors and abuses in the 16th century, Rome dug its heels in the sand went even further into stubborn heresy, superstition and magic as articulated by Trent.
The fact that people believe flour and lard materialistically change into the body of the Savior is emblematic of Rome's witchcraft.
Flee from it.
No one said your “prosperity is in your bank account.”
I’m surprised RCs hare having trouble with the concept of “increase.” What is charity, if not giving to others?
Read the parable of the talents, annalex, and learn what Christ commands of us.
Silliness is the least of the problem.
lol First you say the Lord's Supper is philosophically explainable, and then you say it is a mystery and cannot be explained.
Caught between the proverial papist rock and a hard place. Rome vs. the word of God.
Protestants do not deny "the real presence." The "real presence" of Jesus Christ is spiritual. He is really present at the table spiritually.
Rome does not seem to understand the spiritual things of God, and therefore Rome looks to the material world.
To its shame.
> Protestants do not deny “the real presence.” The “real presence” of Jesus Christ is spiritual.
.
And constant!
We need no present day Pharisee to conjur up our Savior in a biscuit.
We don’t dilute our Savior with prayers to deceased humans.
.
You wrote:
“None of your remarks by Augustine support transubstantiation.”
They all do. If it is a sacrifice, then it is transubstantiation. St. Augustine makes it pretty clear it is a sacrifice.
Though the trend was to see the communion elements as the actual body and blood of Christ, there is another strain as well that used symbolic vocabulary to refer to the elements of the Lord's Supper. Serapion (died 211 AD) refers to the elements as "a likeness."7 Eusebius of Caesarea (died c. 339 AD) on the one hand declares, "We are continually fed with the Savior's body, we continually participate in the lamb's blood," but on the other states that Christians daily commemorate Jesus' sacrifice "with the symbols of his body and saving blood," and that he instructed his disciples to make "the image of his own body," and to employ bread as its symbol.8 The Apostolical Constitutions (compiled c. 380 AD) use words such as "antitypes" and "symbols" to describe the elements, though they speak of communion as the body of Christ and the blood of Christ.
Other Fathers who mix Real Presence vocabulary with symbolic terms include Cyril of Jerusalem (died 444),10 Gregory of Nazianzus (died 389),11 and Macarius of Egypt (died c. 390 AD).12 Athanasius clearly distinguishes the visible bread and wine from the spiritual nourishment they convey.13 The symbolic language did not point to absent realities, but were accepted as signs of realities which were present but apprehended by faith.
While St. Augustine (died 430) can be quoted to support various views of the Lord's Supper, he apparently accepted the widespread realism theory of his time,15 though in some passages he clearly describes the Lord's Supper as a spiritual eating and drinking.
An Open Controversy
However, the uses of symbolic language cited above are exceptions. More and more the more popular, vividly materialistic theory was adopted that regarded the elements as being converted into the Lord's body and blood. Though the Latin church had been moving toward the view of the Real Presence for some time, the first person who clearly taught the doctrine of transubstantiation (though not using that term) was Paschasius Radbertus (785-865), abbot of the monastery at Corbey, France, in a book On the Body and Blood of the Lord (831). His chief opponent among several was Ratramnus, another monk at Corbey, who wrote a tract asserting a sacramental rather than literal sense in which the elements were the body and blood of Christ.17 Radbertus was later canonized as a saint and Ratramnus' book banned by the Roman Church.
In reaction to Radbertus' assertion of the corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Berengar (d. 1088) defended Ratramnus openly, but when threatened with trial and excommunication recanted. By the mid-eleventh century, transubstantiation was a dogma of the Latin church and was officially accepted in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).
http://www.jesuswalk.com/lords-supper/history-real-presence.htm
Clearly transubstantiation was not an early church doctrine. Several views existed! Quoting ECF's who mention the REAL Presence, does not prove transubstantiation at ALL. Protestants readily see a real presence (spiritual).
Then if it is a sacrifice and the wine is in reality Christ’s blood and the bread in reality his flesh then he is being sacrificed over and over again by definition of that idea of transubstantiation is a sacrifice, whereas the Scriptures say Christ was sacrificed once for all time. (Heb. 9:23-28)
You wrote:
“Quoting ECF’s who mention the REAL Presence, does not prove transubstantiation at ALL. Protestants readily see a real presence (spiritual).”
Sorry, but you posted nothing of value. All Protestants do not see a spiritual presence in their mock re-enactments of the Lord’s Supper. I have had them tell me so. I have no reason to believe they are lying on that score.
And yes, “Quoting ECF’s who mention the REAL Presence” does in fact prove there was a general belief in Transubstantiation in the early Church even if that term itself was not used.
You wrote:
“Then if it is a sacrifice and the wine is in reality Christ’s blood and the bread in reality his flesh then he is being sacrificed over and over again by definition of that idea of transubstantiation is a sacrifice, whereas the Scriptures say Christ was sacrificed once for all time. (Heb. 9:23-28)”
No. There is only ONE sacrifice. Jesus is not sacrificed over and over again. The ONE sacrifice is re-presented again and again instead.
“If it is a sacrifice, then it is transubstantiation. St. Augustine makes it pretty clear it is a sacrifice.”
Either it is or isn't, either it's repeated over and again or it isn't.
According to Paul's words the only presentation of Christ's sacrifice was made in heaven and Jesus commanded it be ‘remembered’ (Luke 22:19) not “re-presented”.
You wrote:
“Either it is or isn’t, either it’s repeated over and again or it isn’t.”
Nope. It is re-presented over and over again. The sacrifice was once and for all. But it can be re-presented. It can’t be repeated.
“According to Paul’s words the only presentation of Christ’s sacrifice was made in heaven and Jesus commanded it be ‘remembered’ (Luke 22:19) not “re-presented”.”
John Salza addresses your error:
Then St. Paul writes something that should be striking to our non-Catholic friends. He compares the Old Covenant sacrifices with the sacrifice of Christ by referring to the New Covenant sacrifice as “sacrifices,” in the plural form. St. Paul says:
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf (Heb 9:22-24).6
Let’s examine these verses. Because God willed to be appeased through bloodshed to forgive sin, St. Paul explains that both the Old and New Covenants have a “shedding of blood” requirement. St. Paul first describes the rite of purification with blood under the Old Covenant (v.22), and then the same blood purification rite in the New Covenant (v.23). In connection with this shedding of blood, St. Paul says that those in the New Covenant are purified with better sacrifices than those in the Old Covenant.7
There is only one New Covenant blood sacrifice which purifies us and forgives our sins. That is the sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. Therefore, St. Paul reveals that Christ’s Calvary sacrifice has a plural dimension to it. This plural dimension of Christ’s sacrifice is fulfilled only in the context of its sacramental re-presentation in heaven and on earth in the Holy Mass. This is the pure, single sacrifice that is continually offered from sunrise to sunset around the world in the Eucharist as was prophesied by Jeremiah and Malachi.
St. Paul makes this connection between Christ’s sacrifice in heaven and the Eucharistic sacrifice on earth in a number of verses in his letter to the Hebrews. Before St. Paul reveals Christ’s “sacrifices” in heaven, he says that Jesus “is the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 9:15). In the context of Jesus’ mediation of the covenant, St. Paul describes how Jesus takes His blood into heaven to forgive sin. The only time Jesus uses the phrase “New Covenant” is when He instituted the Eucharist. Jesus said, “this cup is the new covenant in my blood,”8 and “this is the blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”9 The use of the terms “new covenant,” “blood,” and “forgiveness of sin” in Hebrews 9 appear together in Scripture in only one other place: in the accounts of Jesus instituting the Holy Eucharist.
This connects the “sacrifices” of Hebrews with the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Gospels. When we couple the fact that Christ’s heavenly priesthood is modeled after that of Melchizedek who offered bread and wine, we conclude that the “sacrifices” occurring in the heavenly sanctuary are the same “sacrifices” occurring in the Holy Mass. Jesus mandated that these “sacrifices” occur on earth in the Mass when He commanded His apostles at the Last Supper to “do this in memory of me.”10 The “sacrifices” of Hebrews 9:23 refer to the one sacrifice of the Mass, which is offered in a plurality of locations through the world from sunrise to sunset as revealed in Malachi 1:11. We will look at Part II of this feature in a later edition of CFN.
Excerpt modified from John Salza’s best-selling book, The Biblical Basis for the Eucharist (Our Sunday Visitor). To order, go to www.ScriptureCatholic.com.
Here are the footnotes:
6 There are no textual variants for the word “sacrifices” in the Greek manuscripts; thus, Protestants cannot deny that Paul refers to New Covenant “sacrifices,” in the plural.
7 The “copies of the heavenly things” in verse 23 refer to the people of the Old Covenant, as well as the tent, the book and the liturgical vessels that they used. The “heavenly things” in the same verse refer to the people of the New Covenant, the citizens of heaven (Eph 2:19). The focus in both usages is the “people,” since the “shedding of blood” is for the forgiveness of the people’s sins.
8 Lk 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25. See also Mt 26:28; Mk 14:24; Heb 9:20.
9 Mt 26:28; Mk 14:24; See also Lk 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25. See also Heb 9:20.
10 See Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25.
http://www.scripturecatholic.com/feature-articles/CFN_-_Devotion_to_the_Precious_Blood_and_Heavenly_Sacrifice.pdf
Where do I find this “re-presenting” in Scripture? And just how do you define this “re-presenting” if that is what is being done?
With so many falsehoods bandied about with an attendant lack of love as mentioned by Paul in I Cor 13:4, it appears the many are remiss in their incorporation of Paul's exhortations in their lives and must make an accounting of such failures to the Lord.
You thought processes on these matters might provide the same enlightenment as Paul enjoyed on the road to Damascus.
God bless
That's worked out real well for them. They don't do abortions, they just let the drug cartels slaughter people by the score when they adults.
Doesn't the Catholic church teach against corruption and murder as well?
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