Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Political Vocation
ARCHBISHOP CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. CAP.
The following lecture was delivered on Monday evening, February 23, 2009, to a standing-room only audience in St. Basil’s Collegiate Church on the campus of the University of Toronto.
Some excerpts:. . . We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty -- these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it's never an end itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil. Likewise, democratic pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about serious moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square -- peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. Anything less is bad citizenship and a form of theft from the public conversation. . .
. . . I like clarity, and there's a reason why. I think modern life, including life in the Church, suffers from a phony unwillingness to offend that poses as prudence and good manners, but too often turns out to be cowardice. Human beings owe each other respect and appropriate courtesy. But we also owe each other the truth -- which means candor. . .
. . . and there's no easy way to say it. The Church in the United States has done a poor job of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years. And now we're harvesting the results -- in the public square, in our families and in the confusion of our personal lives. I could name many good people and programs that seem to disprove what I just said. But I could name many more that do prove it, and some of them work in Washington.
. . . Seventy years ago the great French writer Georges Bernanos published a little essay called "Sermon of an Agnostic on the Feast of St. Théresè." Bernanos had a deep distrust for politics and an equally deep love for the Catholic Church. He could be brutally candid. He disliked both the right and the left. He also had a piercing sense of irony about the comfortable, the self-satisfied and the lukewarm who postured themselves as Catholic -- whether they were laypeople or clergy. . . .
1 comment:
What he will not say though is the very thing that keeps the situation this way: that in the end is was Rome's job to make sure the faith was taught rightly for these past 40 years. We protect the very top and blame all those beneath the very top and that is an arrestation of a culture. Paul confronted Peter and Peter grew in Galatians; we now see confronting the Pope as non loyalty. Pope John Paul II was in office for 20 of those 40 years and we call him Great and the 20 years of parish teaching under him we call not great. Why didn't he correct it?
He was great as an author and this Pope is too. But we don't need Popes to be authors if there are problems they are not fixing as administrators.
We need Popes to administrate and in detail. Of the 265 Popes, many were administrators only...try finding bulls or encyclicals on the majority of Popes.
This Pope should among other things be working on stopping Catholic pols from supporting abortion. If that means correcting canon law, then he should do that rather than writing the next book. If books are more important in the long run, why did not the writing of Popes a hundred years ago correct the past 40 years of bad catechesis by way of the long run effect. We need a Pope who "visitates" colleges and prevents their having unseemly authors as speakers instead of our have blog after blog reporting on such speakers while never noting that the Pope should stop such things....after that he can write a book...not write a book while these administrative problems occur decade after decade. Catholic pols being pro choice should not even be present as a reality by now all the way since Cuomo. John Paul should have corrected canon law in such a way as to make it impossible. Instead he was writing very well on more general themes...but that is why we have authors not Popes. Paul the non Pope was the writer par excellance in the NT and Aquinas a non Pope was the writer par excellance in the whole history of the Church.
We need Popes to work every day not on books but on these problems.
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