Christians in public | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: archbishop chaput, freedom of religion

A friend pointed me to this recent address by Denver Archbishop Chaput on religion and public life.  He approaches the subject by way of a thoughtful critique of a landmark speech by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to a group of Protestant ministers fifty years ago—a speech designed to allay fears about Kennedy’s Catholicism influencing his politics.

To his credit, Kennedy said that if his duties as President should “ever require me to violate my conscience or violate the national interest, I would resign the office.”  He also warned that he would not “disavow my views or my church in order to win this election.”  But in its effect, the Houston speech did exactly that.  It began the project of walling religion away from the process of governance in a new and aggressive way.  It also divided a person’s private beliefs from his or her public duties.  And it set “the national interest” over and against “outside religious pressures or dictates.”
For his audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy’s stress on personal conscience may have sounded familiar and reassuring.  But what Kennedy actually did, according to Jesuit scholar Mark Massa, was something quite alien and new.  He “‘secularize[d]’ the American presidency in order to win it.”  In other words,  “[P]recisely because Kennedy was not an adherent of that mainstream Protestant religiosity that had created and buttressed the ‘plausibility structures’ of [American] political culture at least since Lincoln, he had to ‘privatize’ presidential religious belief – including and especially his own – in order to win that office.”

The archbishop, again following Massa, points out that the secularization that followed as a consequence of Kennedy’s stress on separation of church and state is partly the fault of Protestant resistance to Catholics in public office.

[S]ome of the same people who worried publicly about Kennedy’s Catholic faith got a result very different from the one they expected.  In effect, “the raising of the [Catholic] issue itself went a considerable way toward ‘secularizing’ the American public square by privatizing personal belief.  The very effort to ‘safeguard’ the [essentially Protestant] religious aura of the presidency . . . contributed in significant ways to its secularization.”

Then he shifts to the remedy:  A renewal of Christian action in public life—action grounded not on a theory or program, but on the personal influence of (mostly) laymen living lives rooted in a personal relationship with Christ.

Christian faith is not a set of ethics or doctrines.  It’s not a group of theories about social and economic justice.  All these things have their place.  All of them can be important.  But a Christian life begins in a relationship with Jesus Christ; and it bears fruit in the justice, mercy and love we show to others because of that relationship.

The failure of institutions | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: archbishop chaput, institutional failure, journalism

As I mentioned below, Archbishop Chaput recently gave an address to Legatus titled “Catholics and the Fourth Estate.’”  You can read here.  I found it via the American Papist, where host Thomas Peters praises it with the words “not a single word wasted.”

When I began reading it, I expected to be writing a Linde post about the need for genuine Catholic journalism.  Up until lately it seems to me that Catholic journalism has tended either to be dissenting or to be controlled by the bishops in a way that prevents its being able to play the role it’s supposed to play, i.e., helping to shape public opinion and keeping leaders accountable.  What is desperately wanted is Catholic journalists who are faithful to the Church and unflinching in their critique of it.

But, reading the whole thing, I got mad.  It is Archbishop Chaput (whom I generally admire) preaching about the failure of the secular media to live up to its institutional vocation to inform the public truthfully.  I got mad because of all institutions to have failed to live up to their mission in society lately, I think I’d put “Catholic bishops” at the very top of the list, with “Catholic laity” a close second. 

In the size of the gap between what we are and what we should be, the mainstream media doesn’t come close.