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 don't think it's quite so. To tolerate does not mean to agree. I tolerate the Protestant life around me; moreover, I vastly prefer it to the neo-pagan self-indulged yahoos that have taken over the commanding heights in this country. I do however know that Protestantism is a error -- a counterscriptural heresy.
Due to its foundational errors, Protestantism was not able to maintain the beautiful America it created. One by one, traditional Protestant denominations are snuffed out and go over to the dark side, often in the name of "tolerance". The left no longer fears the Protestants; it knows from experience that they can be rolled over. So America needs a renewal. It is true religion that renews. Catholicism is true religion. It will renew.
it will never be put back together again
The prospects of reunification are great for all authentic Christian Churches, best we had in centuries. It is quite possible that the Orthodox and the Catholics will reunite within a generation or two; there is plenty of goodwill on the side of Rome and there has been for quite some time. Now we see a warm sisterly response form the Orthodox Churches. That is not surprising: we share the same theology and the same view on the world outside of the Church. We are natural political allies. Likewise, many pre-Chalcedon Churches seek to mend the old rift and find their place in either communion with Rome or with one or another Orthodox Church. While the Protestant world is dissipating, the Catholic world is consolidating. There is a hand of God in that.
Mary bodily assumed into heaven?
Paul says flesh and blood cannot inherit God's Kingdom
(1 Cor. 15:50)
Mary free from sin?
Paul says all have sinned. (Rom. 5:12)
“But especially Eve, the mother of all the living (Genesis 3:20), is considered as a type of Mary who is the mother of all the living in the order of grace [16].” (Catholic Encyclopedia)
Paul says grace was a free gift from God and came through Christ. (Romans 5:15) Did Paul overlook Mary?
Paul discusses type and anti-types extensively but nowhere does he compare Mary to Eve.
Of Eve Paul says she, being “deceived was in the transgression.” (1 Tim. 2:14)
I think it's clear in this and so many other teachings Paul is at odds with Catholic doctrine and teaching.
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.
Yes, the Roman church's definition of grace is VERY different from the unmerited favor given to sinners thru faith, definition we are used to.
There are 2 types of grace in the Catholic system, sanctifying and actual grace. All these graces necessary for salvation were merited by Jesus on the cross and are distributed normally by the church thru the sacraments.
Sanctifying grace to a Roman Catholic is grace that is recieved at baptism and makes the soul pleasing to God. It is analagous to what we would call being regenerated(a new creation in Christ).
It can also be recieved at all the other sacraments to further the purification an sanctification of the soul.
Actual grace is the drawing of the sinner by the Father to repent and be baptized or to repent from mortal sin at confession. Mortal sin destroys sanctifying grace and makes the sinner degenerate or unregenerate again until such time as the actual grace from God draws him back to repentance at the sacrament of confession where he gets sanctifying grace or regeneration.
These graces enable a person to co-operate to achieve or maintain their own salvation.
The works a Catholic must perform to achieve salvation is called a "grace", Eph 2:10, or rather enough grace is "freely" given to them to perform the works. That is why the claim is salvation by grace alone.
I believe these graces are kept by the church in the "treasury of merit", where the graces earned by Jesus, Mary and all the saints over and above what they needed for salvation, are doled out to Catholics by the church.
I love all the authors of the NT, they all have added so much to our knowledge of God .
exactly
Just bring Mother Theresa or Sister Angelcia into the equation and watch the FRoman Catholics come out of the woodwork!
lol. Yep. We're told in order to be saved a person must believe in the Roman Catholic church and its teachings.
Therefore it's reasonable to wonder why Judith Ann would believe that the apostle Paul was "likely mentally unbalanced."
Perhaps Rome now teaches that Paul was "likely mentally unbalanced." (This would certainly be indicative of how little the Scriptures are esteemed in Rome.)
Or has Rome changed so much that it now permits its members to believe...anything?
AMEN!
Exactly... WORKS WORKS WORKS
BTW, I saw poor Mother Angela hold up a bible and tell the audience that we can never understand it until we die.. and the example she gave was so sad
She said for instance why Jesus told us he was the bread of life, and that was true, but that when he said he was the gate it was just a saying
She chooses not to see the church has twisted scripture and instead wants to call it a mystery
LOLOL. Amen.
Looks like I missed a great Friday.
AMEN!!!
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist." -- Colossians 1:16-17 "For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
Those two verses put our lives and everything in time and space into the single and true perspective -- Jesus Christ alone.
So did I.
But don’t worry, I have archived some of the gems!
It was unbelievable, an acknowledgment that Rome sometimes canonizes the insane. It is just unfortunate that the really crazy ones get a pass
In the same passage St. Paul goes on to say that "the dead shall rise again incorruptible: and we shall be changed. [53] For this corruptible must put on incorruption", so this teaches that not only Mary but everyone who is saved will rise in the glorified body.
Paul says all have sinned. (Rom. 5:12)
In one place he says "all", right next he says "many". That is a generalized statement about human condition not intended to assign sin to everyone.
Paul says grace was a free gift from God and came through Christ. (Romans 5:15)
Yes. How is that not Catholic?
nowhere does he compare Mary to Eve.
Perhaps not, so what of it?
Of Eve Paul says she, being “deceived was in the transgression.” (1 Tim. 2:14)
Perhaps you don't understand the Catechism? Certainly Mary is not the type of Eve because Eve sinned, but rather she is a reversal of Eve in that both Mary and Eve were born without sin, yet Eve chose to sin and through her Adam sinned; Mary did not sin and through her Christ was born and redeemed the sin. See Romans 5 again.
There is nothing in St. Paul that is contradictory to Catholicism, but there is much in what he wrote that the Protestants do not understand.
The works a Catholic must perform to achieve salvation is called a "grace"
-- I never heard of. Grace is grace, love of God to us. The good works we do are first, not done out of obligation and second, they are not grace although they are made possible through grace.
Mary bodily assumed into heaven?
Paul says flesh and blood cannot inherit God's Kingdom (1 Cor. 15:50)
Mary free from sin?
Paul says all have sinned. (Rom. 5:12)
“But especially Eve, the mother of all the living (Genesis 3:20), is considered as a type of Mary who is the mother of all the living in the order of grace [16].” (Catholic Encyclopedia)
Paul says grace was a free gift from God and came through Christ. (Romans 5:15) Did Paul overlook Mary?
Paul discusses type and anti-types extensively but nowhere does he compare Mary to Eve. Of Eve Paul says she, being “deceived was in the transgression.” (1 Tim. 2:14)
I think it's clear in this and so many other teachings Paul is at odds with Catholic doctrine and teaching."
AMEN. Great examples.
Further, Paul would most certainly have been anathematized by Rome, as all Protestants have been, because He said He "knew whom he had believed," and that he was "confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in (him) will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ."
No wonder so many Roman Catholics don't "get" Paul.
The Catholic Catechism says Mary was taken body and soul into heaven. The Catholic Encyclopedia uses the term “corporeal” meaning “flshly” , “solid”.
Paul said in 15:42-49 that those resurrected would have spirit bodies just as Christ had been raised a spirit, vs. 45.
No corporeal body, no assumption of flesh (or blood) into heaven but resurrection as a spirit, says Paul.
Paul says all have sinned. (Rom. 5:12) after saying Christ died for us. Christ died for Mary also, she is part of that “all.”
Paul's use of the word “many” contrasts with the one, Christ, Mary is not exempted anywhere in Scripture from sin, the general human condition. Those who are descended from Adam are sinners said Paul. Mary is that.
Paul says grace was a free gift from God and came through Christ. (Romans 5:15)
How is that not Catholic? For starters the Catholic Catechism says Mary has a “saving office” and is “Meditrix”.
What “saving office”? “Meditrix”? What did she mediate?
Paul says there is one Mediator between man and God, Christ.(1 Tim. 2:5) No Mediatrix, no saving office for Mary, just Christ is Mediator between man and God.
“Perhaps you don't understand the Catechism? Certainly Mary is not the type of Eve because Eve sinned, but rather she is a reversal of Eve in that both Mary and Eve were born without sin, yet Eve chose to sin and through her Adam sinned; Mary did not sin and through her Christ was born and redeemed the sin. See Romans 5 again.”
I understand the Catechism quite well which is why I call its teaching contrary to Scripture.
Eve wasn't born and Mary was. Eve was created perfect, Mary wasn't, Eve was disobedient and deceived, Mary wasn't.
No where in Scripture is one the type of the other in any way.
The Catholic Catechism calls Mary “the Mother of the Church” but Paul said to the Galatians that
“But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.” (Gal. 4:26) not Mary.
“There is nothing in St. Paul that is contradictory to Catholicism,....”
Now all can see that isn't so whether Protestants understand Paul or not.
“No wonder so many Roman Catholics don’t “get” Paul.”
But he is loved:
“I love St. Paul: love his short tempter, knack for poetry, brainy talmudism, long complex thought process, appetite for self-denial.” annalex.
“(This would certainly be indicative of how little the Scriptures are esteemed in Rome.)”
In post #575, you wrote: “No wonder Roman Catholics don’t have faith in the word of God. They believe it was written by knuckleheads with emotional problems.”
These claims lack credibility, yet are repeated many times.
Again, I say that the opinion of one Catholic re: St. Paul and his epistles is just that—one opinion. It is NOT the teaching of the Catholic Church. Again I mention that the epistles of St. Paul are used very extensively, in the 3-year cycle of Sunday Mass readings and the 2-year cycles of daily Mass readings. These readings are matched in content with the Gospel readings and provide the material for the homilies (sermons).
However you may couch these claims with “reasonable to wonder”, and “perhaps Rome now teaches...” and “this certainly would be indicative”, the fundamental idea presented is that Rome doesn’t have faith in the word of God, and/or that the opinion of one Catholic about St. Paul should/could be translated as the teaching of the Catholic Church.
It’s just not a credible position and doesn’t serve the truth about Catholicism.
~~”I say that the opinion of one Catholic re: St. Paul and his epistles is just that—one opinion.”~~
Check out Gamecock’s homepage. It’s the “opinion” of more than “one Catholic.”
Were they all “catechized poorly?”
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