Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
November 18, 2011
Last month Pope Benedict announced a “Year of Faith” to begin next October in order to strengthen the faith of Catholics across the globe in the midst of an increasing secularization. Last Thursday, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia came to Worcester’s Assumption College and gave a very candid address on the history, present and future of Catholic faith in the United States. The weekend’s celebration of the Solemnity of Christ the King — instituted in 1925 as a response to communist pretensions that the ultimate authority is not God but the state — make Archbishop Chaput’s words on the importance of Catholic men and women publicly living by faith in an age where secularists in government are moving to restrict our religious freedom even more timely.
“The United States was never a Christian nation,” the Philadelphia prelate stated at the beginning of a crisp historical summary that every Catholic citizen should know, “but it didn’t need to be. Its public life and civic institutions were deeply informed by biblical thought, language and morality. More importantly, most Americans were Christians; most took their faith seriously; and many tried to live it, to a degree that astonished Alexis de Tocqueville. … God was left out of the U.S. Constitution, but not because He was unwelcome. In effect, God suffused the whole constitutional enterprise. Nearly all the founders were religious believers, most were Christians, and some were quite devout. … In practice, John Adams and his founding colleagues were men who … could blend the old and the new, Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either. The founders saw religious faith as something separate from government but vital to the nation’s survival.
In his farewell address, Washington stressed that ‘religion and morality are indispensable supports’ for political prosperity. He added, ‘Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.’ For John Jay, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll, John Adams, George Washington and most of the other founders — including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — religion created virtuous citizens. And only virtuous citizens could sustain a country as carefully balanced in its institutions, moral instincts and laws as the United States. The American experiment — a nonsectarian, democratic society, sustained by a strong, implicitly Christian worldview and moral vocabulary — worked well for nearly 200 years.”
In recent years, however, that American experiment has started to unravel. God, Archbishop Chaput asserted, “has been less and less welcome at the center of our common life” and the America “emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past.” He predicted that in the years ahead, “we’re going to see more and more of this trend, along with attempts by civil authority to interfere in the life of believing communities in the name of individual rights. We’ll also see less and less unchallenged space for religious institutions to carry out their work in the public square. It’s already happening with state pressure on Catholic hospitals and adoption agencies, in lawsuits attacking the scope of religious liberty, federal restrictions on conscience protections, attacks on charitable tax deductions and religious tax-exempt status, and interference in the hiring practices of organizations like Catholic Charities. It’s no accident that America’s bishops established a special committee on religious liberty earlier this year. Freedom of belief and religious practice used to be a concern that Americans had about other countries. Now it’s a concern in ours.”
Archbishop Chaput pondered the roots of the revolution that has occurred from a nation that sees religious faith as an indispensable foundation for our nation’s survival to something that is unwelcome in common life and even a threat to the nation’s flourishing; from an America in which everything used to cease on Sundays to worship God to an America that worships consumption and the libido. The principle cause, he said, happened when the notion of the individual — crucial to the Protestant theology and Enlightenment ideas on which the nation was built — became exaggerated and separated from a “common moral consensus animated and defended by a living religious community.”
Once uprooted, it devolved into a “destructive individualism and a hostility to any religious authority outside the sovereignty of personal conscience.” When this occurred, freedom became a license for selfishness, morality got relativized, and society gradually became a “collection of disconnected individuals whose appetites and needs are regulated by the only project they share in common: the state.” This regression to an America “ignorant or cynical toward religion in general and Christianity in particular” was able to happen for two reasons, he said: first, because many who did not live by this destructive individualism nevertheless abdicated their thinking to a public opinion shaped by those who did; and second, because Christians and Catholics “helped create it with our eagerness to fit in, our distractions and overconfidence, and our own lukewarm faith.”
He elaborated on the causes and consequences of that tepidity. “Too many people who claim to be Christian simply don’t know Jesus Christ. They don’t really believe in the Gospels. They feel embarrassed by their religion and vaguely out of step with the times. They may keep their religion for comfort value. Or they may adjust it to fit their doubts. But it doesn’t reshape their lives because it isn’t real. And because it isn’t real, it has no transforming effect on their personal behavior, no social force and few public consequences. … Instead of Catholics converting the culture, the culture too often bleached out the apostolic zeal in Catholics while leaving the brand label intact. Plenty of exceptions exist to that trend, but so far not enough of them to make a difference. This is why the large number of Catholics in political and economic leadership in our country has such limited effect on the country’s direction.”
If lukewarmness on the part of Christians has contributed so much to bringing about the present crisis, the response of the Church must be a fire for the faith that comes from a counterrevolution of love for Christ. “Nobody cares about embers,” Archbishop Chaput noted, “but everyone pays attention to a fire, especially when it burns in the hearts of other men and women.” He referenced Jesus’ words, “I came to cast fire upon the earth and would that it were already kindled” (Lk 12:49), and described the task of Christians as to “start that blaze and help it grow.” For those who might think his candid diagnosis of the society’s present ills sobering and pessimistic, his prescription is full of hope. “We make the future, not the other way around.”
If Catholics are going to be the salt, light and leaven of the future of America, Archbishop Chaput indicated, then two things are needed practically. First, we need “young adults on fire for Jesus Christ and deeply committed to their Catholic faith” who can help form the new America. Second, these young adults need to have that fire ignited and fanned by Catholic leaders on fire by parishes, schools, colleges and universities that “radiate confidence in the Word of God, fidelity to the Catholic faith, and a missionary zeal to make all things new in Jesus Christ, including the public square.”
The future of America, he concluded, will be decided principally by whether Christians are formed and inspired to live their faith as more than a brand label, but as something that defines their entire life, both private and public. “If we do not know and love Jesus Christ, and commit our lives to Him, and act on what we claim to believe, everything else is empty. But if we do, so much else is possible — including the conversion of at least some of the world around us.” Everything comes down to a question of faith, faith that is real. Jesus once asked whether He would find faith on earth at His return (Lk 18:8). Archbishop Chaput said that “the only question that finally matters to any of us is the one Jesus posed to his Apostles: ‘Who do you say I am?’ Everything depends on the answer. Faith leads in one direction; the lack of it in another. But the issue is faith, always and everywhere…. Do we believe in Jesus Christ, or don’t we? And if we do, what are we going to do about it?”
The Solemnity of Christ the King is an opportunity to make the public profession of our faith anew. And the upcoming Year of Faith is an opportunity for the Church in our country to commit itself to reigniting the bonfire begun on Pentecost one person at a time.