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 was scrubbing my screen until I realized what that was.
Christ’s sacrifice was on a cross.
Nowhere did God command to rescrifice Him on an altar.
Only satanists offer human sacrifices on altars.
Christ’s sacrifice was on a cross.
Nowhere did God command to re-sacrifice Him on an altar.
Only satanists offer human sacrifices on altars.
It appears from past replies and inquiries in assessing theological deficiencies in the area of accepting Jesus as your savior and the Gospel of Good News, one discerns some possible hesitancy and confusion.
Yes, I have noticed a hesitancy from RC's when I as them what the Gospel is.
This is the second time in 2 days I have asked a Catholic on this forum what the Gospel is and have recieved only one curt reply, saying something about pearls before swine.
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.
Certainly.
What does this phrase mean to you and how have you incorporated Jesus into your life? You thought processes on these matters might provide the same enlightenment as Paul enjoyed on the road to Damascus.
Well, I was born into a Canadian Catholic family, baptized, first communionized, catechized, confirmed, attended mass every Sunday, went to Catholic school for 12 years.
At age 27 got married and was working for a defense contractor. One of my friends at work was a part time baptist minister who explained the Saving Gospel of Grace to me.
It goes something like this.
God in Heaven is perfect and will only allow those who are also perfect to be in heaven with Him.
Man, because of Adam, has a sin nature and cannot bridge the gap that exists between God and himself to make it to heaven. We all know that we are sinners and cannot keep the 10 commandments perfectly.
James 2:10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.God in His mercy sent Jesus to be the propitiation for our sin. The sinless Son of God paid for my sin in full on the Cross. God accepted His sacrifice and raised Him from the dead.Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
"For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." - 2 Corinthians 5:21The only way to recieve this gift of salvation is thru Faith, trusting God at His word, to save us because of what Christ did for us."But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many." - Romans 5:15 NKJV
"But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior" - Titus 3:4-6 NKJV
"But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." - John 1:12-13 NKJV
Romans 10:9, "that if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. 11As the Scripture says, "Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame." 12 For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, 13for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
Salvation, the forgiveness of sins, is available to anyone who will trust in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
The final aspect to salvation is the results of salvation.
Romans 5:1 "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."Because of Jesus' death on our behalf, we will never be condemned for our sins.Romans 8:1 "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."
Romans 8:38-39, "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
That day I read the scripture I repented of my sin and cried out to God to Save me. I told God I knew I could never be good enough(perfection). I totally believed that Jesus paid the penalty for my sin and rose from the dead and pleaded with God to save me because of Christ's work.
He did it! I literally was on cloud nine for about 6 months. I tried to tell my family about the free offer of salvation or anyone else who would listen for that matter.
My wife thought I was crazy, but 13 years later my Jewish wife is also a believer in Jesus.
I will forever serve my Lord and proclaim His excellencies above all else. This is the least I can do for the captain of my soul, who has rescued me from perdition. I do indeed know the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Indeed.
Comparatively. The US laws on abortion are about as barbaric as it gets; most countries, certainly most dominantly Catholic countries are doing much better. You are probably confusing barbarity with poverty, judging by your previous posts to me. There are some other criteria, for example, the crime rate and predictability of laws, and on these we do not do well.
Religious tolerance is a good thing, and the Catholics tolerate Protestants -- all of them -- and Jews and the Muslim and the Atheists just as much as the Protestants do. What sets the Catholics apart is not the denial of a right to preach and worship by non-Catholic groups, but the presence of well-defined dogmatic beliefs that allow us to say with precision what is and what is not Catholic. That is because we care for the truth. The Protestants don't seem to.
You missed the part that says that we are saved not by faith alone, but by grace alone through faith and good works (James 2:17-26, Matthew 25:31-46, Eph. 2:4-10).
You also missed that belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is necessary for salvation (John 6:41ff, 1 Cor. 11:27-29).
You missed that the Church and not the scripture alone is the rule of faith (Matthew 18:18, Acts 20:28, 2 Thess. 2:14).
All these are foundational Protestant heresies: Sole Fide, anti-clericalism, and anti-sacramentalism Sola Scriptura, — that render your faith severely damaged.
You keep referring to material prosperity of some Protestant countries as if that proves superiority of Protestant theology, whereas the gospel teaches just the opposite. If, however, you no longer think that material prosperity is damaging your chances of salvation then I am glad you are coming around.
You can explain the Real Presence in philosophical terms, but you don’t have to, just like one can take advantage of your verbal presence without being able to explain how the Internet works.
Of course you don’t believe in the Real Presence: you don’t think that Jesus’ words “this is my body” were meant literally. In fact, editor-surveyor thinks it’s a “bisquit”.
Mexican drug cartels are indeed a problem, but not to the tune of a million murders per year as abortion is.
Besides, American appetite for drugs is culpable as well.
> “Of course you don’t believe in the Real Presence”
.
False!
Presence of his Spirit is very real.
.
> “you don’t think that Jesus’ words “this is my body” were meant literally.”
.
Jesus himself assured them that it was not literal when he said “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”
I don’t know how he could have made it any clearer.
Because most Catholics do not have the Spirit, they do not understand this, in the same way that the disciples that said “this is an hard saying” did not and could not understand. It just was not given to them of the Father to understand it. But eleven of the twelve understood it.
.
Ok.
“The US laws on abortion are about as barbaric as it gets”
Why doesn’t the Catholic Church, since is so principled religiously on the issue excommunicate democrats that support abortion? I know what they say, and I know what they do.
You act as if it is exclusively a Catholic issue.
“Religious tolerance is a good thing, and the Catholics tolerate Protestants “
You don’t have a choice. This is America. Our Protestant forefathers made sure of that.
“You are probably confusing barbarity with poverty, judging by your previous posts to me.”
No, you are confusing Acapulco with the real Mexico. They are replete with both poverty and barbarism if you had spent any time there, or near the border, you’d know this.
“well-defined dogmatic beliefs that allow us to say with precision what is and what is not Catholic”
You decide as a religion how you worship - that’s how it works.
“That is because we care for the truth. The Protestants don’t seem to.”
No. You care for what is Catholic. Fine. Protestants are not a monolithic group. If you actually opened your eyes, you’d see this obvious fact. I don’t call it good or bad - it just is. You’d have trouble pointing out the difference between some Protestant services and Catholic ones. Some Protestant services you might think are totally insane, and some of them are crazy to most other Protestants. Yet you think you can lump them all into one group, judge it, and then sanctimoniously declare them deficient. You’re free to do that, of course, but it is disturbingly ignorant - and un-american to do so.
The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist
“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”
All this is a part of the belief in the Real Presence: the Eucharist profits the spirit and not the flesh of the one receiving it, and the words of Christ -- even those you deny -- are spirit and life.
I very much think that the Church should excommunicate the pro-abort Catholics. This is why I continually call for the Holy Inquisition in America, and get gasps and howls from the Freeper audience.
As to barbarity, I picked essentuial criteria. I know that Mexico is not perfect.
On substantive differences between Catholics and the Protestants read around, for example, this discussion on the essence of the Eucharist, or the role of priests. That the Protestants are all over the map between themselves I do not dispute, — it is in fact a prima facie evidence that they are not lead by the Holy Spirit.
“”All the *real presence* nonsense is just an explanation to excuse away why it doesn’t, which in reality just means that the bread and cup are symbols of what they claim is *really* happening.””
Every once in awhile Our Blessed Lord allows is to visually see This Miracle
Eucharist Miracle Video
http://www.dsanford.com/miraclehost.html (click top of page to see actual video)
Another is Eucharistic Miracle
Lanciano, Italy 8th Century A.D
http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/lanciano.html
The Eucharistic Miracles of the World
http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/engl_mir.htm
“As to barbarity, I picked essentuial criteria.”
Ok, I have to know. What are the elements of the “essential barbarian”?
And this is my primary objection to the Roman Catholic Church's teaching about the purpose of communion. The "sacrificial" nature over the "remembrance". It is why the Mass is a fundamental obligation and necessary for salvation and becomes another "work" that man must do to merit salvation.
It is entirely incorrect to say all Protestants do not recognize the "real presence" and that only the Catholics get it right. The very first Protestant Church (Moravian) even today accepts the real presence in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, Communion, Love Feast, Eucharist or however you want to label it. No Protestant church that I have ever attended treated this service in a flippant or unsolemn way. This is an entirely different subject, however, in insisting that a person MUST attend Mass and receive the body and blood of Christ repeatedly in order to receive the grace needed for sanctification.
When I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, I received him and, from that point on, I am justified, sanctified, made righteous, redeemed, set apart, at-one-with God, his child forever, sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, never to be lost or cast out of his hands. Participation with the body of Christ in the commemoration of Christ's sacrifice for me is an honor and privilege. It reminds me of what it cost him and causes me to examine myself and to root out any bitterness or unforgiveness I may have towards others and to confess my sinfulness and unworthiness of his grace. It is a time of praise and true worship out of a heart of gratitude for his undeserved mercy and love. Why some feel that they must belittle that is beyond me.
Priviledge and honor and also a command, “be doing” this as Luke 22:19 says.
Thanks for your comment, well said.
I think much can be explained by realizing that if it is what the "Church" teaches, it must be correct regardless if it can properly be found in Scripture or even put into words. It's almost like "they" have stated dogma and the poor schmoes are left to defend it as fact. They are threatened with excommunication - which would lead one to hell if unrepentant - if they do not accept all that they have been told. "Come and let us reason together, saith the Lord." We are not left without guidance on the major tenets of the faith.
Awesome testimony!!! Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. This is the real GOOD NEWS! Amen.
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