Archbishop Chaput Challenges
Catholics
A Book Review
"Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our
Catholic Beliefs in Political Life
by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Doubleday, 2008
By
Phil Sevilla
Let’s start with gold medal quotes from Archbishop Chaput’s book, Render
unto Caesar:
"A republic of
self-absorbed compromises with Volvos and good alibis is probably
not what the founders had in mind when they gambled their lives on
the Revolution." (p. 214)
"The majority
of voters can be uninformed or biased or simply wrong. Thus, to
survive, American democracy depends on people of character
fighting for their beliefs in the public square - legally,
ethically, and nonviolently, but forcefully and without apology.
Anything less is a form of theft from the nation's
health."(p.147)
"The argument
that pursuing our Catholic beliefs vigorously in public affairs
could lead to a fundamentalist theocracy or a Christian Taliban is
dishonest at its root. For one thing, it's bad history."
(p.214)
These quotes represent the general theme the Archbishop draws out over
233 pages. It’s difficult to put the book down once you get to
chapter two, titled “Men Without Chests”. How’s that for an
attention grabber? The book flows well, in extremely readable,
straight-forward prose and I would speculate that’s exactly how
the Archbishop wanted this work to come across, to be widely read
by citizens of all ages and walks of life, not only Catholics.
Archbishop Chaput must have
thought about this book for some time. His speech given almost a
year ago at St. John’s University School of Law in Queens, New
York, drew on similar themes. The title of his talk there was "Church
and State Today: What Belongs to Caesar, and What Doesn't."
The good Archbishop is certainly setting a high bar within the
American hierarchy with this timely publication. In print and in
bookstores barely three months before the 2008 national elections,
surely one of the Archbishop’s objectives was to get this book
out into the hands of American Catholics in time for what is
shaping up to be a white-knuckled, nail-biting election, at least
at the presidential level.
While
Archbishop Chaput is no Johnny-come-lately to the subject of the
cultural wars in America, the ever widening chasm
between faith and a culture which has grown more coarsened,
vulgar, and profane as the post-60s sexual revolution decades go
by has been measured
and recorded by other
Jeremiahs in the clergy going on for over forty years now. We’ve
seen admirable efforts by stalwart churchmen like John Cardinal
O’Connor of New York , Father Paul Marx, founder of Human Life
International, Monsignor George Kelly, and Bishop John Myers (of
Peoria then when he wrote the great pastoral letter in 1990
titled, The Obligations of
Catholics and the Rights of Unborn Children) to name a few,
who (some as early as the 1960s and 1970s) were manning the
watchtowers and wildly ringing the bells warning that the
barbarians not only breached the walls but were overrunning the
elitist institutions in academia, journalism and mass media,
government, and industry.
Let’s
not forget the great 20th century Florence-born
Catholic theologian, Dr. Deitrich von Hildebrand, who narrowly
escaped the Nazi dragnet before escaping Germany. In Trojan
Horse in the City of God, he wrote in 1967 addressing opposing
traditionalist and progressive forces rending asunder unity within
the post-conciliar Church: ”One
can be progressive and a Catholic but one cannot be a progressive
in one’s Catholic faith. The idea of a progressive Catholic in
this sense is an oxymoron, a ‘contradictio in adjecto.’”
The
Archbishop asks in one chapter of Render
unto Caesar, “What Went Wrong?” He does a masterful job,
in this writer’s opinion, dissecting but avoiding overstating
the powerful post-WWII forces, especially politics and social
sciences that “invaded the church’s understanding of
herself”, a time
when “aggiornamento”, a welcoming Church’s
accommodation of the modern world was thought by many to be
the road to a hopeful future for better relations between church
and state.
Chemical
contraception introduced in 1960 exploded like a grenade dividing
and scattering theologians in the Church, some who jumped the gun
before the Pope and the papal commission completed their studies
on the moral issues surrounding the pill. This pseudo-magisterial
cadre of theologians declared their approval in a full paged ad in
the New York Times and attempted to force their increasingly
popular though erroneous opinion on the Pope. Pope Paul VI
declared in 1968 that the pill was immoral and envisioned a future
of devastated marriages and widespread immorality and
illegitimacy. He was proven right.
Archbishop
Chaput’s book is not a polemical piece in search of villains to
pillory and cast into the darkest corner of Gehenna. Rather the
Archbishop explores the lives of noble men of courage and
character to inspire us to become great and excellent Catholics
today. You will enjoy reading his vignettes about St. Thomas More,
Emperor Constantine, Martin Luther King, even concentration camp
survivor, Viktor Frankl, who found as a brutalized prisoner of the
Nazis, the sublime meaning of human life: “’I grasped the
meaning of the greatest secret than human poetry and human thought
and belief have to impart: The
salvation of man is through love and in love.’”
In
the context of this chapter on the meaning of life, Archbishop
Chaput exhorts Catholics to engage the world, dismissing the idea
that asking “Catholics to keep their faith out of public affairs
amounts to telling them to be barren; to behave as if they were
neutered.” I totally agree. I would add that for Catholics to
withdraw our voices from the public square for fear (let’s be
honest) of endangering the Church’s tax exempt status or invite
public criticism and scorn would be tantamount to Catholics
withdrawing into our
own Catholic ghettos. This is unacceptable especially if we
voluntarily put on the shackles ourselves. But
there are real threats, aren’t there? I recently watched on the
popular Hannity and Colmes TV talk show, former Minnesota Governor
and professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, snarl that pastors
should have no part in influencing their congregations to vote one
way or another or their tax-exempt status should be revoked if
they do! Now considering the source, we don’t need to overreact
but what was shocking was Catholic Hannity had nothing to say to
refute the implied threat to our religious liberties.
There’s
a great story in the chapter, Constantine’s
Children, about New Orleans Archbishop Joseph Rummel
(1935-1964) who excommunicated prominent Catholics, a Judge,
political writer, and a community organizer for publicly opposing
and defying the Church’s laudable leadership role in ending
discrimination and segregation in parochial schools in the South
during the 1950s.
In
contrast to Archbishop Rummel in the ‘50s, Archbishop Raymond
Burke’s experience has been very different. His forthright,
authoritative and unambiguous public stand on pro-abortion
politicians has garnered widespread criticism and scorn. What are
we to make of this? According to Archbishop Chaput, “Catholics,
in seeking to live their faith, can’t follow convenience.”
Reality in America and the body politic today is such that “in
recent American politics, the line that divides “prophetic
witness’ from ‘violating the separation of church and state’
usually depends on who draws the line, who gets offended – and
by what issue. The line wanders conveniently.”
As
Catholics we all owe Archbishop Charles Chaput a debt of
gratitude, our respect and appreciation for helping us understand
the spiritual and temporal consequences of our responsibilities
and obligations as citizens and as members of the universal
Church. Responsibility to whom? Firstly, to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,
and, secondly, to our neighbor. He emphasizes that if we “really
believe that the Gospel is true, we need to embody it in our
private lives and our public choices.” So true. Responsibility
and obligation of Catholic voters? In
the Archbishop’s words:
“We sin if we support ‘pro-choice’ candidates without a truly
proportionate reason for doing so – that is, grave enough to
outweigh our obligation to end the killing of the unborn.” (p. 230)
Father John Corapi,
S.O.L.T., puts it in similar stark and urgent terms:
“We share in
the good and evil of those we place in office. The Catechism of
the Catholic Church teaches that, although ‘sin is a personal
act, we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others
when we cooperate in them.”
We’ll
let Archbishop Chaput have the last words to help cut through the
confusion many Catholics seem to fall into nowadays. Decisions are
not always easy to make:
“Committed Catholics can make very different but equally
valid choices: to vote
for the major candidate who most closely fits the moral ideal, to
vote for an acceptable third-party candidate who is unlikely to
win, or to not vote at all.”
Whatever
we do, according to the Archbishop: “We need to keep fighting.
Otherwise we become what the Word of God has such disgust for:
salt that has lost its flavor.”
I’d like to get a copy of Render Unto Caesar to everyone I
know. Every Catholic should inform his conscience in all matters
of his private and public life and seriously consider the
consequences of complacency, ambivalence, obstinacy, and downright
ignorance. Choosing to be ignorant and turning a blind eye or deaf
ear to the truth or just simply rejecting it is all too common
today. Harsh words, but it’s true. Calling yourself an ardent,
practicing Catholic when you willfully support the murder of
unborn children and same sex marriage is an astounding example of
hubris of the worst kind, much worse than lukewarmness, a terrible
state of the soul. (Rev 3:16) In the words of the Archbishop,
“Saying you’re Catholic and then rejecting Catholic teaching
is dishonest; it shows a lack of personal integrity.” Thank you,
Archbishop Chaput, for calling us to be better Catholics and
better citizens.
(Phil
Sevilla is the Executive Director of Project Defending Life, a
pro-life ministry in Albuquerque, NM, and the President of New
Mexicans for a Moral and Constitutional Government, a 501(c)(4)
non-profit educational organization.
Visit website: www.catholicsvotecatholic.com)
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