"There’s no right to happiness and liberty without a right to life."

A number of recent quotes from Archbishop Charles J. Chaput have been making the rounds, and here are a couple of snippets that caught my attention, posted here for folks who haven't seen them yet. First, from the August 7th edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper:

OSV: One of your new hometown papers recently tried to fit you into conservative/liberal paradigm, and said you were “downright progressive” on some issues and also “a vocal, politically engaged proponent of hard-line Catholic orthodoxy.” You don’t like those labels. How would you define yourself?

Archbishop Chaput: I just define myself as a Catholic bishop, and I don’t know why anyone would expect Catholic bishops not to be faithful to the teachings of the Church.

It seems like so much of the media doesn’t have the categories that are necessary to describe us because they define us as political creatures rather than teachers of the Gospel.

OSV: Surveying the public square, what do you see as the most critical issue for the Catholic Church?

Archbishop Chaput: The underlying issue here for so many of these situations is religious freedom and what it means to be a community of faith and to live that faith in the public square. If the government limits our ability to be who we are as a Church, that’s a limitation of religious freedom and I think we ought to deal with that upfront and directly in our political discussions in our country.

In terms of the practical issues, I think the issue of marriage is foundational because it influences the whole of society.

Our broader society is built on the staple of family life and anything we do that makes the family life unstable is to destabilize our broader social communities.

There’s no right to happiness and liberty without a right to life, so that’s a foundational issue, too. ... They equally have huge impacts on the self-understanding of our community.

Read the entire interview on the OSV site. The second is from the Archbishop's homily at the 129th Knights of Columbus Convention in Denver:

Something similar can be said about conflicts in the modern church. Bishops, priests, and deacons are too often weak and sinful. They need to be held to high standards. Some deserve to be chastised. The clergy’s leadership in the Church should always be marked by humility and service, and never by a sense of entitlement. But men and women didn’t found the Church, they don’t own her; and they have no license to reinvent her. The Church belongs to Jesus Christ, and the different roles with the Christian community – clergy, laity, and religious life – have equal dignity but different purposes. Sin and failure, including by the clergy, need to be named. But when people deride their bishops and priests out of pride and resentment or some perverse desire for they perceive as “power,” they undermine the Church herself, and they set themselves against the God whose vessel she is. And that, as Scripture suggests, leads in a painful direction.

All real reform in the Church requires two things. Today’s Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 51 – gives us the first thing. We find it in the lines “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow;” and “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” Renewal begins not in vilifying others, but in examining ourselves honestly, repenting of our sins and changing ourselves. This applies to every baptized person, from the Pope to the average man or woman earning a wage. We are all sinners. We are all in need of repentance and God’s mercy. When we really understand that, we can speak to each other with both honesty and love, and restoring the mission of the Church can begin.

Today’s Gospel gives us the second thing needed for any lasting reform: faith. Not faith as theology, or faith as a collection of doctrines and practices; but faith as a single-minded confidence in God; faith as the humility – and in a sense, the imprudence, the passion, the recklessness – to give ourselves entirely to Jesus Christ. That kind of faith changes people. That kind of faith shifts the world on its axis, because nothing can stand against it. As long as Peter keeps his eyes and his heart fixed on Jesus Christ, he can do the impossible – he can walk on the water. The moment he gives in to doubt and fear, he begins to sink. So it is with our personal faith, and so it is with life and the health of the Church.

Read the entire homily on the Knights of Columbus site. For more bracing reading, see Archbishop Chaput's book, Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life.

Comments

[Laura]

We are blessed to have Archbishop Chaput!