Archbishop Charles J. Chaput on Catholic charities...

... and the growing tensions between the Catholic Church and "courts, legislatures, and in federal and state bureaucracies." From the middle of an essay, "Catholic Charities Adrift," another must-read essay by the archbishop of Denver, published in the November 2009 issue of First Things:

When we look closely at Church–state conflicts in America, we see that they now often center on a group of behaviors—homosexual activity, contraception, abortion, and the like—that the state in recent years has redefined as essential and nonnegotiable rights. Critics rarely dispute the Church’s work fighting injustice, helping community development, or serving persons in need. But that’s no longer enough. Now they demand that the Church must submit her identity and mission to the state’s promotion of these newly alleged rights—despite the constant Catholic teaching that these behaviors are personal moral tragedies that can lead to deep social injustices.

As a result, the original links between freedom and truth, and between individual rights and moral duties, are disappearing in the United States. In the name of advancing the rights of the individual, other basic rights—the rights of religious believers, communities, and institutions—and key truths about the human person, are denied.

In squeezing the Church and other mediating institutions out of the public square, government naturally assumes more power over the nation’s economic and social life. Civil society becomes subordinated to the state. And the state then increasingly sees itself as the primary shared identity of its citizens. But this is utterly alien to—and in fact, an exact contradiction of—what America’s founders intended.

America’s original vision conforms closely with subsidiarity, a core principle of Catholic social teaching. Through mediating institutions like the Church, America has always sought to meet people’s needs at a local and even personal level, thereby keeping the state properly limited. As civil authorities intrude on the daily work of mediating institutions, they also substitute themselves for the role of the Church and other similar groups. These tendencies are reinforced by a strong secularist spirit among America’s knowledge classes. In education, scientific circles, and the mass media, religion is often seen as a backward social force, a source of division and violence. The language of pluralism and diversity is misused to advance the antidemocratic goal of marginalizing believers and religious communities from the national conversation.

Today’s distaste for religion among America’s leadership classes has created disarray in our civic philosophy. The American proposition, while nonsectarian in nature, has always been marked by a belief in God’s sovereignty over human affairs and the importance of religion in personal and public life. The secularization of America’s political and intellectual life has weakened these tenets that shaped our common identity. Without God, without the natural-law and the natural-rights tradition, we no longer have any broadly shared moral consensus in which to ground our politics, and from which to draw a common purpose.

Read the entire essay.

Two recent and excellent books that take up similar themes with great insight and intellectual rigor are The Tyranny of LIberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command, by James Kalb, and The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction, by J. Budziszewski, both published by ISI.

Comments

[Robert Miller]

God bless Archbishop Chaput.

He's right about everything except for one big thing.

The US state is not, nor has it ever been, something benign. It was founded by men who were complicit in regicide (Whigs). Its "propositional" patriotism is dialectically opposed to true, Christian patriotism. It is an "anti-Christendom".

JC Murray's thesis may have gotten a "Catholic" elected President, but it also elected Obama, debauched US Catholic political thought (Left and Right), and sank Ireland into a swamp of Americanist secularism.

Let's get real. The US Revolution was about Puritan anxiety in the face of British Crown concessions to the practice of the Catholic Faith in newly-acquired Quebec and about middle-colony fear that British Crown policy had turned against their program of extermination of the Indians in what are now Kentucky and Tennessee.

The US republic was founded on chattel slavery, extermination of native populations and regicide. As far as I can see, that's still the agenda today.

Got hope?

Fortunately, we have to the South the great Hispanic/Indian commonwealth that now is reclaiming its patrimony north of the US border. May its -- and Archbishop Chaput's -- tribe increase.

Arriba America catolica! Viva Cristo Rey!

[SC Phelan]

Mr. Miller,

I missed the part where Archbishop Chaput said or even implied that the state was ever benign. It was to be strictly limited (Bill of Rights was an admission that this had been an oversight of the original constitution), not benign, and certainly not the Hegelian monster that Obama and co. are trying to create.

And your oversimplification of what the revolution "was about" is not helpful, unless one shares your narrow and skewed narrative of the founding and the founders. The sins you rightly recognize (and there could be more considered here) in no way exclude the equally present and relevant virtues which also animated the founding.

And those "reclaiming ... patrimony" of the American Southwest have no more right to that land than those that they destroyed to take it in the first place, or for that matter, those who occupy it now and whose laws and infrastructure have brought prosperity that somehow has eluded our neighbors to the south.

Your bizarrely incomplete and uncharitable reading of current events following logically from the sins of the founders tells one much more about you than it does about them. Should that be the case?

[Robert Miller]

Dear SC Phelan:

You really have hit the issues "on the screws". Thank you.

Pope Alexander VI apportioned the New World to the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Accordingly, they set out to create a "new Christendom" in the New World. They did -- after first casting out (the work of Christ)the Americas' demons -- principally, human sacrifice . To be sure, being sinful humans, they committed many crimes in the process.

In contrast, the English pirated their New World settlements, set them up as counter-churches (against both Catholic and Anglican "establishments"), and enjoyed their merry little slaving, A-lettering and individualist autonomy until they needed the power of "Great" Britain to suppress the French encroachment on their lebensraum. Why do you suppose that the Seven Years War was called in these parts the "French and Indian War"? I'll tell you why: for all their faults, the French model of colonization was Catholic, not unlike that of the Spaniards and Portuguese. Catholics came to expel demons and create the conditions for a Christian Commonwealth. Puritans came as demons to enslave and exterminate non-European peoples. The American Revolution was raised to defend the "English way". And it succeeded -- here and globally.

What, then, does my reading of US history tell you, since you leave with that remark? I love my country, but not its constitutional regime. My love of my country is non- (maybe even anti-) "propositional". Kate Smith is my light in these matters: "God bless America ... stand beside her and guide her through the night with the Light from above".

God protect Louisville, my home.

Arriba America Catolica! Viva Cristo Rey!