Catholics and the Next America

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:

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”:

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.

“So what remains in question?”

Why you say Paul, “uses “all” in the sense of “many” because in v 18 he says “all” and in the next verse he repeats the same though and says “many”....”

WHEREAS the Catholic Catechism says just the opposite!

“402 All men are implicated in Adam's sin, as St. Paul affirms: “By one man's disobedience many (that is, all men) were made sinners”: “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.”289 The Apostle contrasts the universality of sin and death with the universality of salvation in Christ. “Then as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men.”290”

In the first sentence: “many (that is, all men)” not “all” in the sense of “many”! Do you see that difference?

“The Church teaches that grace displaces sin.”

But not for Mary. The Catholic Church teaches she is exempt from sin and therefore had no sins to remit or displace.

“Mary was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin at the first moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.”

But Paul's “all” is inclusive without exemption for Mary since she, like all sinners, would grow old and die.

The woman of Rev. 12 is un-named and she gives birth in heaven

“But she gives birth to Christ, and toward the end of the chapter is described as the mother of all who keep His testimony and obey God. So, however poeticized the account in Rev 12 is, it is sufficient ground by itself to call Mary the Mother of the Holy Church”

Nay, not so, as Paul in Galatians names that woman, “the Jerusalem above” (4:26) and in 4:31 says, ‘We are children of the free woman’. Therefore the “woman” at the end of the Rev. 12 is not Mary.

Was my previous explanation too difficult for you?

“It did not explain anything and you referred to a different verse. Please explain why do you think verses 12 and 19 refer to different things. I understand that the language is different. Please explain what the difference signifies.”

You had previously said, “He uses “all” in the sense of “many” because in v 18 he says “all” and in the next verse he repeats the same though and says “many”:

Uhhh...No. In vs. 19 Paul speaks of two groups, one that was constituted sinners by Adams disobedience and 2, those, who by the obedience of Christ, were constituted just.
One group to the exclusion of the other, the rest of mankind as Thayer’s lexicon comments on “the many” in these vss.
In vss. 18, 19 Paul is not just repeating himself but expresses a slightly different aspect of his argument.
In vs. 18 Paul says a decision, a judgment is made for acquittal from condemnation,
While in vs. 19 Paul uses the word kathistemi (made or constituted) instead of eis (result or intent) as in vs. 18.
Thus in vs. 19 those many are considered righteous.

and this was my conclusion: Thus Paul doesn't equate “all” with “many” nor was he a Talmudist. He had a grasp of the Greek language that is missed in your quotes and comments.
That would mean Mary is part of that “all”, a sinner, contrary to Catholic teaching.

I referred only to vss. 18, 19 since those were the ones under discussion in the above.

“You, I, St. Peter ans St. Paul will receive our bodies at the second coming of Christ. Mary however received her glorified body following her death. There is a difference; but the difference does not amount to a contradiction with what St. Paul wrote.”

Then since Peter and Paul's corporeal bodies (or what remains of them) are still in their graves then they were raised to heaven with what? Are they still awaiting their heavenly bodies? If so, what kind of bodies were they resurrected with, neither corporeal nor glorified heavenly ones?

“You, I, St. Peter ans St. Paul will receive our bodies at the second coming of Christ.”

reading way more into the passage than the context justifies.

Again, the context is words of dying Christ so the mutual adoption of the disciple and Mary has to have a greater significance than a mere economic arrangement. It is your side that ignores the context and the peculiarities of the wording. On this score, we just read what is written.

Chapter and verse? [for the assumption of Mary]

There is none; the Assumption of Mary is the teaching of the Church that is not in the scripture. For the obvious reason: the lives of saints are not the focus of it.

Why is it so important to Catholics that Mary be considered sinless and perpetually virgin?

It is important because it is true. It is a part of the saving faith. Is it logically important for some other dogma? I don't think so. But I am happy with the knowledge that Mary was singled out by God in this way.

the Catholic Catechism says just the opposite!

The Catechism also teaches that Mary was free from all sin, so in the end both my analysis and the Catechism agree that the passages in Romans 5 do not implicate Mary in any sin.

But not for Mary

It is true that in her case grace had filled her since conception, whereas ordinarily graced diplaces sin already in place. That is called the doctrine of Immaculate Conception.

We are children of the free woman’ [Gal 4:31]

That woman is Sara, Abraham's wife, of whom both we descend spiritually. The passage has nothing to do with Mary.

In vs. 18 Paul says a decision, a judgment is made for acquittal from condemnation, While in vs. 19 Paul uses the word kathistemi (made or constituted) instead of eis (result or intent) as in vs. 18. Thus in vs. 19 those many are considered righteous

I still see not difference in substance between either verses 18 and 19 or verses 12 and 15. Also, we are not talking of the many that are justified, but of those -- either all or many -- who sinned.

"ALL" used	"MANY" used
[12] Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.	[15] ...by the offence of one, many died
[18]...by the offence of one, unto all men to condemnation	[19]...by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners

they were raised to heaven with what? Are they still awaiting their heavenly bodies?

Sts. Paul and Peter, and all the elect are raised as souls, and they are awaiting the glorified bodies today. Mary is the exception in that she preceded us in heaven in the glorified body.

“The Catechism also teaches that Mary was free from all sin, so in the end both my analysis and the Catechism agree that the passages in Romans 5 do not implicate Mary in any sin.”

That Catechism that you refer to also contradicts what you say about “the many and all”, doesn't it?

“That woman is Sara, Abraham's wife, of whom both we descend spiritually. The passage has nothing to do with Mary.”

Precisely, so Mary is not called ‘the mother of those obey the commandments of God’ while Sarah figuratively is in Scripture.

“Sts. Paul and Peter, and all the elect are raised as souls, and they are awaiting the glorified bodies today.”

Not according to 1 Cor. 15:42-44 where Paul says that those resurrected are “raised a spiritual body”, That is the resurrection from the dead for them, not going to heaven and waiting to receive a body later. By Paul's words they have been given that “spiritual body” upon resurrection.

“1017 “We believe in the true resurrection of this flesh that we now possess” (Council of Lyons II: DS 854). We sow a corruptible body in the tomb, but he raises up an incorruptible body, a “spiritual body” (cf. 1 Cor 15:42-44).”

It's a fleshly body, it's a spiritual body. The “flesh we now possess”, ignores Paul's word revelation that “flesh and blood cannot inherit God's Kingdom”. (1 Cor. 15:50)

“Mary is the exception in that she preceded us in heaven in the glorified body.”

Nothing in Scripture so indicates but as the Catholic Encyclopedia writes of the Catholic Churce’s teaching on Mary:
“The belief in the corporeal assumption of Mary is founded on the apocryphal treatise De Obitu S. Dominae, bearing the name of St. John, which belongs however to the fourth or fifth century. It is also found in the book De Transitu Virginis, falsely ascribed to St. Melito of Sardis, and in a spurious letter attributed to St. Denis the Areopagite.”

In short , “”Mary is the exception in that she preceded us in heaven in the glorified body.” is a teaching based upon fraud and myth.

That Catechism that you refer to also contradicts what you say about “the many and all”, doesn't it?

The essential point in our argument is that "all" in Romans 5 does not refer to Mary. Neither did I mean that "many" in Romans 5 means people commonly are born and live without sin.

so Mary is not called ‘the mother of those obey the commandments of God’ while Sarah figuratively is in Scripture

Mary (the mother of Christ) is called that in Rev 12, and one thing does not exclude the other.

By Paul's words they have been given that “spiritual body” upon resurrection.

Indeed, but the resurrection of the dead in their bodies is generally going to happen as the Second Coming of Christ and not right after death. The soul is taken up to heaven right after death, and then it remains separated from the body till the consummation of this world.

is a teaching based upon fraud and myth

It is a teaching not reflected in the scripture. It is however belief of the Early Church which has been recognized dogmatically at Vatican I because, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Catohlic faithful kep the belief. The "De Obitu S. Dominae" is a witness to the ancient nature of that belief. The fact that is in not canonical that is to say, is apocryphal, -- nothing of 4c. is canonical -- is irrelevant. All patristic writings serve a similar purpose: unless we see heresy in them, they testify to a belief of the Early Curch and therefore teach us what to believe. This is a fundamental difference we Catholic have compared to the Protestants: out beliefs did not come from 15c charlatans, but rather form the Holy Apostles and their immediate pupils.

“It is a teaching not reflected in the scripture. It is however belief of the Early Church which has been recognized dogmatically at Vatican I because, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Catohlic faithful kep the belief. The “De Obitu S. Dominae” is a witness to the ancient nature of that belief. The fact that is in not canonical that is to say, is apocryphal, — nothing of 4c. is canonical — is irrelevant. All patristic writings serve a similar purpose: unless we see heresy in them, they testify to a belief of the Early Curch and therefore teach us what to believe. This is a fundamental difference we Catholic have compared to the Protestants: out beliefs did not come from 15c charlatans, but rather form the Holy Apostles and their immediate pupils.”

“It is a teaching not reflected in the scripture......”

Precisely! Jesus warned that the fine wheat planted would be oversown with the poisonous pseudo wheat or weeds and Paul said that,
“For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock.
Also of your own selves shall men arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them. (Acts 20:29, 30)

“All patristic writings serve a similar purpose: unless we see heresy in them, they testify to a belief of the Early Curch and therefore teach us what to believe.”

Who do you think Paul was talking to and about?
He was talking to the “older men, the elders” of the Ephesians, men who had been taught by an apostle, from those leaders of the flock would arise men who spoke perverse and twisted things, things not taught in God's word.

“The essential point in our argument is that “all” in Romans 5 does not refer to Mary. Neither did I mean that “many” in Romans 5 means people commonly are born and live without sin.”

The essential point is that what you have been taught and have argued is unscriptural and based upon a false teaching of men, a teaching based upon fraud and myth, by the Catholic Church’s own statement.

A 4th. century charlatan is in no way superior to a 15th. century one. But as Jesus further said in his illustration, when the weeds and wheat were fully developed in this harvest time then it would clear one from the other.

“The fact that is in not canonical that is to say, is apocryphal, — nothing of 4c. is canonical — is irrelevant.”

Not if we take Jesus’ own words at John 4:24 seriously about worshiping God “in truth”, That “truth” being God's word. (John 17:17)

Regardign Romans 5, you started by saying that St. Paul somehow was contradicted by the teachings of the Church regarding Mary. You now have seen that it is your interpretation of Romans 5 that is contradicted, but not the text itself.

Regarding the authority of the Church, — it is in the Scripture. See for example the authroty to “bind and loose” that Christ gave the Church, and the promise of continuing divine councel in John 14. The idea that unless we find something in the scripture it should not be taught, however, is not itself in the scripture. It is also absurd, because, naturally, lives of saints, including the Virgin Mary, exceed the scope of the Scripture.

The criterion for orthodoxy is not what is and what is not in the scrupture, but rather:

1. Is the teaching compatible with other infallible doctrines?
2. Is the teaching compatible with the Scripture (this is nto really a separate requirement but I list it separately for clarity)
3. Is the teaching of apostolic origin in some form?

On the assumption of Mary, all three are satisfied.

On the fallacies of Luther all three fail. Most notably, the doctrine of “sola fide” is directly contradicted by the scripture, and “sola scriptura” is at best not supported by it, and clearly contradicts the scripture when it is used to deny the authority of the Church.

There are many warning in the scripture about false doctrines of men. They all apply to Mohamedanism and Protestantism amply and prophetically.

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