PHILADELPHIA (PA)
The Philly Post
Richard Rys
In a recent story about Tuesday’s release of Archbishop Charles Chaput’s e-book, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it an “e-lamentation.” It’s really a challenge to today’s Catholics who, Chaput says, share the blame for the moral and spiritual weakness of our country. “We … helped shape it with our eagerness to fit in,” Chaput writes, “our distractions and overconfidence, and our own lukewarm faith.” And while Philadelphia’s top priest never mentions any candidates by name, he makes reference to the importance of this election year. Chaput isn’t just calling out his congregation; he’s issuing a political and societal call to arms. Consider his choice of quote from Father John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian who wrote this in 1940: “In view of the fact that American culture is built on the negation of all that Christianity stands for, it would seem that our first step toward the construction of a Christian culture should be the destruction of the existing one. In the presence of Frankenstein, one does not reach for baptismal water, but for a bludgeon.”
That’s some tough talk, and in the course of Chaput’s compact essay, he smartly and eloquently states his case for what he sees as a growing sense of religious intolerance in this country, stoked by an ill-informed and biased media and a populace that’s turned its collective back on faith. He writes of “the inhuman parody we call ‘modern American culture’” and “sexual minorities [who] now routinely use the state’s power and friendly mass media to break down traditional definitions of marriage and family.” Chaput wistfully remembers the good old days, “when the word gay had more connection to joy than sexual identity.” …
Chaput, the church and its lobbyists want to shape this country to fit their morality. The oppressed—if you believe that’s what Catholics in America have become—intend to be the oppressors. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has orchestrated a cover-up of child sexual abuse that spans the globe and reaches all the way up to the Pope himself. As we hear the horror stories in our own back yard, like those of disgraced Archbishop Ryan principal Charles Newman, and read grim daily testimony from the trial of Msgr. William Lynn and Rev. James Brennan, it seems an awfully curious time to declare the way the rest of us live to be “inhuman.”
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