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Catholics and the Next America
First Things ^ | 9/17/2010 | Charles J Chaput

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.


TOPICS: Catholic
KEYWORDS: freformed
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To: annalex

I have know the religious history of some posters and choose not to engage them...their religious History, even when they remove links from their page so as not to make that known or referred to, does leave one to wonder what other things might be suspect or attempting to hide.

My post was directed toward Judith and she answered quite well and in an understanding way. I choose to keep that dialogue seperate from some I much prefer not to dialogue with. But thank you for your interest just the same.


661 posted on 09/26/2010 3:19:39 PM PDT by caww
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To: bkaycee
Do you also believe that Jesus is a literal Lamb as observed by John the Baptist?

Is Jesus going to give literal "living water" to the samaritan women at the well and she must literally drink it?

Each passage needs to be examined for its content, effect on the audience, and the context. It is true that some passages are spoken allegorically. It does not mean that all passages are spoken allegorically. For example, Christ really went to Jerusalem and overturned the tables of the moneychangers, was really crucified, really died and really rose again. As Catohlics, we attempt to read each passage literally and if the passage shows sign of allegiorical speach then we see if an allegorical meaning is not a better one.

The passage in John 6 second half contains its own proof: if it were spoken allegorically as not really food, then "food indeed" repeated several time, attached no nothign less than salvation, under a double amen, would be not an allegory but outright lie, and God does not lie. Further, the very questions of the Jews was "how can you give us your flesh to eat". If the answer were "allegorically, that's how" then that would have ended the discussion. But instead Christ repeated what he said with greater emphasis on the real food and His real flesh, adn endured loss of some disciples over this point.

Regarding other passages that you ask. Christ is the passover lamb according to the meaning of the Passover: He is the innocent victim through Whose death we are liberated from bondage of sin. But no, He is not a zoological lamb, ad the passage cannot be read with such literalism, since the lamb in question is qualified as "lamb of God", which is not an animal.

The living water promised to the woman is contrasted to the water she draws from the well, so again it is clear that the meaning is allegorical. Further, in context, the woman sees in Jesus a prophet and not a doctor with a medicine, so she did not take Him literally. Lastly, the reference is to baptism, with is in the form of water and gives us a new and everlasting life, so the allegory is resolved in the wide context.

Gate and shepherd are spoken in close succession and so they are all metaphors, as all two indicate the role of Christ in the Catholic Church, and He cannot be both. There is also a parable of the sheep, that extends to the teaching on salvation in Matthew 25. If that were to be taken as literal sheep then we all would be either sheep or goats. In Matthew 25 the sheep help the stranger and feed the hungry, something literal sheep cannot do.

Jesus indeed literally healed disease, so He is literally a physician as well as a teacher (doctor).

We don't anticipate literal wine to be avaiable in heaven, and Jesus did not call that heavenly wine to be His blood. The consecration was done on the wine (and bread) at the table. So, no, not literal wine and not blood of Jesus either is referred to in Matt 26;27. It is possible though that the reference is made to the Eucharistic union with Christ that occurs at every Mass, in which case it is a union with Him through His Precious Blood.

We read in 1 Cor. 11 and know from early Church history that the early Church took Jesus' words regarding the Eucharist literally. So while it is certain that He taught the Apostles many things that did not get recorded in the Scripture -- hence the need for both Scripture and Tradition in the formation of the faith -- what He taught on the Eucharist is what the Church teaches today.

662 posted on 09/26/2010 3:30:55 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: UriÂ’el-2012; bkaycee

Without the saving grace Christ made available to us on the altar of the Cross, all out works are indeed like filthy rags, as the consequence of the Fall which made us “unclean”.


663 posted on 09/26/2010 3:33:07 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: RFEngineer
You cannot get beyond that there is a wide array of Protestant denominations. You fail to ask “why” though, which is interesting.

Why? They are a "wide array" because noither of them is lead by the Holy Ghost. I answered that early on this thread, but perhaps not in conversation with you.

have the good form to be religiously tolerant

Tolerance have nothing to do with it. I have my opinions and I voice them. It is a forum designed for this activity. We can get together and sing kumbaya someplace else, and living in muticultural America you can be assured that I do.

664 posted on 09/26/2010 3:37:25 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: annalex; bkaycee
Without the saving grace Christ made available to us on the altar of the Cross, all out works are indeed like filthy rags, as the consequence of the Fall which made us “unclean”.

Amen !

Call on His NAME: Yah'shua

YHvH (is)be my salvation.

Jewish Cross

shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
665 posted on 09/26/2010 3:43:50 PM PDT by Uri’el-2012 (Psalm 119:174 I long for Your salvation, YHvH, Your law is my delight.)
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To: boatbums; bkaycee
what would be the motive for us "Protestants" to trick people from what the Gospel says?

Luther had the motive to prevail with his theological fantasy of "faith alone" and "scripture alone". Since he could not do so in honest debate with Card. St. Cajetan, he proceeded to teach the semiliterate German public. A good example is how he attempted to insert "faith alone" in this German translation of Romans 3:28.

Since then, the foundational lies of the Reformation enabled countless Protestant pastors to teach whatever pleases them to teach without being held accountable to anyone. The Reformation empowered the figure of a pastor as a small businessman, who makes a living by teaching what the flock wants to hear.

666 posted on 09/26/2010 3:47:22 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: bkaycee
This passage, even rightly interpreted, contains nothing inconsistent with Protestant theology

My argument is that Eph 2:1-10 is consistent with the Catholic theology. Whether or not it is also consistent with the Protestant theology was not a subject treated by me in any way. If some Protestants agree with it, good for them.

667 posted on 09/26/2010 3:49:54 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: boatbums; bkaycee

We are saved by grace alone but not by faith alone; we are saved by grace alone by our faith and our good works. I never said anything different on this thread or anyplace else.


668 posted on 09/26/2010 3:54:00 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: bkaycee
What does that word, faith, mean a RC?

Faith is a conviction that things witnessed and taught by the Church are true, chief among them is that Christ is a Person of God Who chose to become incarnate man and son of Mary, suffered and died for our sin past and future, rose again, ascended into Heaven, calls us to conversion, and will come to judge us. This is the best expression of Catholic Faith, dating from early 4c:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son].
With the Father and the Son
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.

Minor variations exist, most important one is that "and of the son" is sometime omitted.

Faith, being an internal disposition of man, is very different from Grace, which is love of God, which God gives us and out of out of which all good things come.

669 posted on 09/26/2010 4:06:20 PM PDT by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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To: annalex
We are saved by grace alone but not by faith alone; we are saved by grace alone by our faith and our good works.

My opinion is that to say this is to have no real idea what the word GRACE means. It comes from the Greek word charis and means: good will, loving-kindness, favor, of merciful kindness.

My pastor gave a sermon about the difference between grace and mercy that made it crystal clear to me. The story was about a man who had embezzled a great sum of money from the company in which he worked. The owner spoke to him in his office and said, "I know you have stolen from me and deserve to go to jail and pay back every cent you stole. Instead of pressing charges, though, I forgive you, but you must never come back here again." This is MERCY.

In the same analogy, the owner instead says to the man, "I know you have stolen from me and deserve to go to jail and pay back every cent you stole. Instead of pressing charges, though, I forgive you and I want you to continue to work here and I am promoting you to vice-president. This is GRACE.

It is undeserved, unmerited, even illogical to us because we cannot even imagine such love yet it is exactly the term our Lord uses to describe how he will deal with us.

670 posted on 09/26/2010 5:25:59 PM PDT by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to him.)
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To: Judith Anne; Dr. Eckleburg
I do not dismiss St. Paul, nor do I think he contradicts Rome. I think he was likely mentally unbalanced and I find him self-contradictory.

You know what is amazing? That the Holy Spirit inspired him to write infallible scripture.. That his words are as reliably true as the words of the gospels.. It is truly amazing that God chose such a man to be the primary teacher of the NT church

1Cr 1:27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
28 And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, [yea], and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:
29 That no flesh should glory in his presence.
30 But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:
31 That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

671 posted on 09/26/2010 5:46:59 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: Judith Anne
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I don’t LIKE St. Paul.

I heard he doesn't like you either ...LOL

672 posted on 09/26/2010 5:48:54 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: Dr. Eckleburg
No wonder Roman Catholics don't have faith in the word of God. They believe it was written by knuckleheads with emotional problems.

On the other hand..the crazy and immoral popes are prophets

673 posted on 09/26/2010 5:50:16 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: Judith Anne; Dr. Eckleburg; Gamecock; Alex Murphy; HarleyD; Forest Keeper; 1000 silverlings
And I have plenty of faith in the Word of God. Christ is the Word, St. John 1:1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." St. Paul, on the other hand, was likely a mystic with a few loose screws, who had a megalomaniac's inflated sense of his own importance.

The problem Judith is the Gospels are actually OT scripture , they reflect the OT as they recount the time before the crucification and the institution of the New Testament . The New Testament is taught by the Spirit filled writers of the NT...

As for Paul being a Mystic... LOL that is what the catholic church most values..look at your saints and your monasteries it is all about mysticism

Could you please give us the scripture that you believe reflects mysticism or insanity ? Just wondering

674 posted on 09/26/2010 5:56:09 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: RnMomof7; Running On Empty
Could you please give us the scripture that you believe reflects mysticism or insanity ?

Four posts to me...amazing. The answer is no, I'm finished discussing the topic.

675 posted on 09/26/2010 5:58:42 PM PDT by Judith Anne (Holy Mary, Mother of God, please pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.)
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To: Judith Anne
And I have plenty of faith in the Word of God. Christ is the Word, St. John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

What does that mean Judith?

676 posted on 09/26/2010 6:00:05 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: 1000 silverlings
let us list the reasons why he might not be the favorite. Number 1: They can't understand a word he says.

1Cr 1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

677 posted on 09/26/2010 6:02:09 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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To: RnMomof7

Rennie, I refuse to be interrogated by you.


678 posted on 09/26/2010 6:02:38 PM PDT by Judith Anne (Holy Mary, Mother of God, please pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.)
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To: RnMomof7

Dr. E’s post errs in the post of hers that you are quoting here; she is not speaking for the Catholic Church, who honors the writings of St. Paul in almost all of the 3-cycle Sunday Mass readings. Dr. E makes a statement about the Catholic Church based on the opinion of one individual Catholic.

That is not credible, and not just.

It would also be almost impossible to back up this statement with proof: “Roman Catholics don’t have faith in the word of God.”

That also is not credible nor just.


679 posted on 09/26/2010 6:03:17 PM PDT by Running On Empty ((The three sorriest words: "It's too late"))
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To: 1000 silverlings

Thats it


680 posted on 09/26/2010 6:05:01 PM PDT by RnMomof7
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