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.
Catholics comprise only 24% of the US population. Slightly more than half of them vote Democrat. The plain and simple math is that far more Protestants voted for a Protestant Obama than did Catholics.
Nice to see that First Things is still going strong even with Neuhaus gone.
You wrote:
“”The state” did not conduct the many and varied Inquisitions, such as the Roman Inquisition and the Medieval Inquisition. The papacy in Rome did.”
False. The only inquisition under the direct control of the papal administration was the Roman one. The other inquisitions were all run either by local bishops or - as in the case of Spain - the Spanish state.
“Even the Spanish Inquisition, while supposedly under control of the Roman Catholic monarchs, was instituted to maintain Roman Catholic control of those conquered.”
False. The inquisition was instituted by the Spanish state and it was used to maintain the purity of faith and to root our violations of the natural law in Spanish territories.
“And you say you want to introduce America to these Inquisitions.”
I wouldn’t mind. Neither should you if you ever wanted to punish those who abused children. If an inquisition existed, the abuse would never have happened or at least would never have been covered up by anyone. I guess you don’t care as much about fighting the abuse as you claim.
“No wonder the RCC is fading in this country.”
It isn’t. But dream on. You’ll probably just make it up if reality doesn’t work for you.
Protestant countries like Zimbabwe, Congo, Malawi, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Rawanda, Swaziland, and Tuvala?
A thousand thank-you's for confirming to us that priests can, indeed, be defrocked.
We've heard from various RCs around here who tell us this is not only unnecessary but incorrect nomenclature.
Welcome to the revolution.
"Local bishops" who were not under the papal rule?
Yeah, right. lol. Just like today, huh?
A veritable Italian free-for-all.
“And you say you want to introduce America to these Inquisitions.”
I wouldn’t mind.
Et tu, Brute?
Pathetic.
And some wonder why we should be worried about a Supreme Court dominated by Roman Catholics.
I can’t imagine why a majority of Catholics voted for Obama. The priest at my local parish repeatedly insisted that supporting candidate Obama (or any of his fellow Democrats or Rudolph W. Giuliani [after his pro-abortion stance became irrefutably clear]) in any way—via campaign contributions, volunteer time, ideological compatibility, speech or argumentation, votes at the ballot box, or any other form of material support—constitutes a mortal sin. If not confessed, mortal sin leads to HELL.
Now, I know that many Catholics didn’t get that same message in Mass, but there’s always Evangelium vitae (John Paul II, 1995-03-25) for your reading pleasure. Still, I concede that even some Mass-going Catholics likely lack the information (regarding either Faith or politics or both) necessary to understand the error and horror that the Democratic Party presents to the vitality of the American people, especially the most vulnerable.
But the Catholics who voted for Obama largely are self-identified “Catholics” who lack any connection to the Church beyond a “checkbox” identity. These people don’t go to Mass every Sunday (or the vigil Mass on Saturday evening) or even most Sundays, and they generally lack “grave reason” (e.g., living in a remote area without Catholic Churches, comatose or unconscious, amid emergency surgery, on intelligence missions or military expeditions).
Worse still, the children of these “checkbox Catholics,” who seemingly only acknowledge their putative Catholicism when checking boxes in a survey, fail to get the importance of the Faith that their parents fail (or, increasingly, parent fails) to live in everyday life. If a parent never or almost never attends Mass and doesn’t take God or the Church or His commandments seriously or even acknowledge them more frequently than rarely in the presence of her or his children, then the children fail to grasp the real importance of God from the parent, whatever her or his other faults.
Because of this trend of Catholics fleeing from the Faith, a comparable trend not absent in Protestant circles, the populous loses its connection to and dependence on God with every successive generation and devolves into atheism. These burgeoning numbers of passive, effective, or active atheists and quasi-atheists actively seek God—the longing of every human heart—and create a veritable quasi-deity of their own in big government in an ineffective substitute for the One True God.
In truth, the deadly Inquisition tortured and slaughtered Protestants and Jews by the hundreds of thousands.
The Inquisitions began in the 12th century against the Cathars and the Waldensians. Rome then branched out to conduct the Medieval Inquisition, the Episcopal Inquisition, the Papal Inquisition, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition right up to the Roman Inquisition of the 16th century and onward to this very moment when we have Roman Catholic apologists longing for a return to Rome's blood-thirsty, murdering glory days.
Rome rewrites history. And not very well.
For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith." -- Galatians 5:4-5"Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.
Rome elevates authority. Bible-believing Christians embrace faith.
Do Roman Catholics even read the Bible? Have you ever heard of the parable of the talents? Christ says increase is good because with it we help our fellow man.
The Roman Catholic church hordes gold and silver and jewels. So we know where Rome's heart lies.
Protestants believe in dedicating their work and their lives to Christ. Therefore work glorifies God. God's bounty increases the individual good as well as the general good. More begets more.
It's really pathetic how comfortable middle class Roman Catholics defend the abject poverty of Latin America as something favorable to their salvation.
I suppose it does work to Rome's advantage to keep them barefoot and illiterate.
"For if I by grace be a partaker, why am I evil spoken of for that for which I give thanks? Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." -- 1 Corinthians 10:30-31
"Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again." -- Luke 6:38 "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." -- Isaiah 55:11
AMEN!
It's no coincidence that as the Protestant work ethic fades, socialism flourishes.
We either serve God or man.
“It’s really pathetic how comfortable middle class Roman Catholics defend the abject poverty of Latin America as something favorable to their salvation.”
A few centuries of domination by the Roman Catholic Church has worked out pretty well for Mexico, hasn’t it? Well, hasn’t it? Property AND salvation?
Thanks for your pings and valiant efforts.
Now we know what a modern day Inquisition would look like.
***Ironic, isn’t it. Calvinists are criticized and condemned for not being more like Catholics and when they are, they’re criticized and condemned for that as well.***
What or FRoman Catholic FRiends always seem to forget is that Calvin was trained as a Catholic priest. Nothing to see here really. He was a Reformer but every once in a while he reverted to his training.
What Calvinists always seem to forget is where their bitterness originates. What's seldom talked about by any follower of Calvin is that his father and brother both worked for the bishopric of Noyon in Picardy as a treasurer and lawyer.
Calvin's father, Gerard, was involved in some financial misdeeds and refused to provide the financial records to the Bishop of Noyon . Gerard was excommunicated for his misdeeds and later on so was his son Charles.
Gerard then made John Calvin leave his theological studies to become a French Lawyer, which is very apropos considering what John learned from his father. John's ever growing bitterness against the Church for the excommunication of his father and brother forced him to leave the Church altogether.
And now you know the roots of Calvinism and its bitterness.
The inquisitions were usually instituted by the Church indeed, with the noble cause of eliminating heresy from the ranks of the Church. The state, usually, cooperated because the state, too, has an interest in making things right. The punishments were chosen and imposed by the state and not by the Church. A modern inquisition will have to deal with the modern state which would not punish, for example, abortion promoters, so I don’t expect priests will be burned at a stake. However, it would have been much better if ten years ago, if not sooner, those found guilty of child abuse were excommunicated immediately and send over to the state for prosecution as child molestation is a crime recognized by the state.
A priest can be laicized, barred from celebrating public Mass, hearing confessions, sent to a monastery to repent his crimes, excommunicated, etc. He can also be given over to the civil authority for prosecution. Many priests died as a result. Remember the Holy Inquisition, of blessed memory -- we just discussed it?
A priest cannot be made non-priest any more than you can be made un-baptized.
Your confusion is probably lack of familiarity with technical terms and the irreversible character of the sacrament of the Holy Orders. If you really need to understand it, ask.
If thiose Protestants and Jews, and Waldensians pretended to teach and practice as Catholics, which in the earlier period was common deception.
See for example, The New Inquisition: Spanish Inquisition does not live up to reputation of injustice
You are recycling silly Protestant myths.
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