Posted on 09/18/2010 8:26:32 PM PDT by markomalley
One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.
So goes the tale. What this has actually meant for the direction of American life, however, is another matter. Catholic statistics once seemed impressive. They filled many of us with tribal pride. But they didn’t stop a new and quite alien national landscape, a “next America,” from emerging right under our noses.
While both Barna Group and Pew Research Center data show that Americans remain a broadly Christian people, old religious loyalties are steadily softening. Overall, the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, about 16 percent, has doubled since 1990. One quarter of Americans aged 18-29 have no affiliation with any particular religion, and as the Barna Group noted in 2007, they “exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade . . . the Christian image [has] shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people.”
Catholic losses have been masked by Latino immigration. But while 31 percent of Americans say they were raised in the Catholic faith, fewer than 24 percent of Americans now describe themselves as Catholic.
These facts have weight because, traditionally, religious faith has provided the basis for Americans’ moral consensus. And that moral consensus has informed American social policy and law. What people believe—or don’t believe—about God, helps to shape what they believe about men and women. And what they believe about men and women creates the framework for a nation’s public life.
Or to put it more plainly: In the coming decades Catholics will likely find it harder, not easier, to influence the course of American culture, or even to live their faith authentically. And the big difference between the “next America” and the old one will be that plenty of other committed religious believers may find themselves in the same unpleasant jam as their Catholic cousins.
At first hearing, this scenario might sound implausible; and for good reason. The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:
We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.
The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.
But beginning in the nineteenth century, riding a crest of scientific and industrial change, a different view of the Puritans began to emerge. In the language of their critics, the Puritans were seen as intolerant, sexually repressed, narrow-minded witch-hunters who masked material greed with a veneer of Calvinist virtue. Cast as religious fanatics, the Puritans stood accused of planting the seed of nationalist messianism by portraying America as a New Jerusalem, a “city upon a hill” (from Winthrop’s homily), with a globally redemptive mission. H.L. Mencken—equally skilled as a writer, humorist and anti-religious bigot—famously described the Puritan as a man “with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
In recent years, scholars like Christian Smith have shown how the intellectual weakness and fierce internal divisions of America’s Protestant establishment allowed “the secularization of modern public life as a kind of political revolution.” Carried out mainly between 1870 and 1930, this “rebel insurgency consisted of waves of networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist or theologically liberal; who were well educated and socially located mainly in the knowledge-production occupations, and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism, positivism and the privatization or extinction of religion.”
This insurgency could be ignored, or at least contained, for a long time. Why? Because America’s social consensus supported the country’s unofficial Christian assumptions, traditions and religion-friendly habits of thought and behavior. But law—even a constitutional guarantee—is only as strong as the popular belief that sustains it. That traditional consensus is now much weakened. Seventy years of soft atheism trickling down in a steady catechesis from our universities, social-science “helping professions,” and entertainment and news media, have eroded it.
Obviously many faith-friendly exceptions exist in each of these professional fields. And other culprits, not listed above, may also be responsible for our predicament. The late Christopher Lasch argued that modern consumer capitalism breeds and needs a “culture of narcissism”—i.e., a citizenry of weak, self-absorbed, needy personalities—in order to sustain itself. Christian Smith put it somewhat differently when he wrote that, in modern capitalism, labor “is mobile as needed, consumers purchase what is promoted, workers perform as demanded, managers execute as expected—and profits flow. And what the Torah, or the Pope, or Jesus may say in opposition is not relevant, because those are private matters” [emphasis in original].
My point here is neither to defend nor criticize our economic system. Others are much better equipped to do that than I am. My point is that “I shop, therefore I am” is not a good premise for life in a democratic society like the United States. Our country depends for its survival on an engaged, literate electorate gathered around commonly held ideals. But the practical, pastoral reality facing the Gospel in America today is a human landscape shaped by advertising, an industry Pascal Bruckner described so well as a “smiling form of sorcery”:
The buyer’s fantastic freedom of choice supposedly encourages each of us to take ourselves in hand, to be responsible, to diversify our conduct and our tastes; and most important, supposedly protects us forever from fanaticism and from being taken in. In other words, four centuries of emancipation from dogmas, gods and tyrants has led to nothing more nor less than to the marvelous possibility of choosing between several brands of dish detergent, TV channels or styles of jeans. Pushing our cart down the aisle in a supermarket or frantically wielding our remote control, these are supposed to be ways of consciously working for harmony and democracy. One could hardly come up with a more masterful misinterpretation: for we consume in order to stop being individuals and citizens; rather, to escape for a moment from the heavy burden of having to make fundamental choices.
Now, where do Catholics fit into this story?
The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.
The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.
In the years since Kennedy’s election, Vatican II and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, two generations of citizens have grown to maturity. The world is a different place. America is a different place—and in some ways, a far more troubling one. We can’t change history, though we need to remember and understand it. But we can only blame outside factors for our present realities up to a point. As Catholics, like so many other American Christians, we have too often made our country what it is through our appetite for success, our self-delusion, our eagerness to fit in, our vanity, our compromises, our self-absorption and our tepid faith.
If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.
The “next America” has been in its chrysalis a long time. Whether people will be happy when it fully emerges remains to be seen. But the future is not predestined. We create it with our choices. And the most important choice we can make is both terribly simple and terribly hard: to actually live what the Church teaches, to win the hearts of others by our witness, and to renew the soul of our country with the courage of our own Christian faith and integrity. There is no more revolutionary act.
Charles J. Chaput is the archbishop of Denver.
I’ve been using my Boxflex Keyboard to build up my typing strength so I should be good to go.
Does Mavis Beacon have calesthetics for that keyboard?
That’s Cheap Grace. No risk, no exposure.
lol. So Christ's call to preach the Gospel to all men is "cheap grace?"
Though it doesn't cost as much as gilded rosaries or Prada shoes, it is priceless.
ROTFLOL!
Which explains the typos.
Oh Honey, you aren’t spreading the Gospel. You are spreading lots of out of context Bible snippets and parsing, and the persecution that some on these threads “suffer” is all in their imaginations of martyrdom.
The only thing spreading on the comfy-chair keyboard jockeys, I can imagine.
You wrote:
“Get a Bible that contains John 6:63”
Already have many that do. Don’t know of any that don’t. But I, unlike you apparently, actually understand the verse. If you’re going to say that the flesh is of no avail in anything, then you cannot be saved. Why? Because Christ became flesh - and He died in the flesh. His sacrifice of the life of His flesh is what is at the root of our salvation (Eph. 2:13—16, Hebrews 10:10). First you should look at 6:51. Then to look deeper you should compare 8:15 to 14:26.
Like most Protestants you didn’t think this through. You misunderstood the verse and made Christ’s sacrifice worthless in the process - if you actually stick to your own logic.
Mavis Beacon I don’t know but how about “Little One, Lean One, Long One.....?”
You wrote:
“So which Hebrew and Aramaic words DID Christ use at the Last Supper?”
The same ones used at the liturgy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mn6Ltcv978
You wrote:
“I will take their testimony over your recommended books.”
No, you won’t. You’ll take the claims of Protestants over what the inspired authors ACTUALLY SAID:
http://www.searchgodsword.org/lex/grk/view.cgi?number=2076
Good night, Vladi, thanks for that semi-amusing post.
There is no such thing as "Cheap Grace"....The cost to Christ was everything but that. The bible states in the NT that if you fail to keep one of the laws you have broken them all. This is the very reason we are under grace.......The purpose of the law is to make one guilty. ....So many do good works because they think it is demanded of them, instead of it flowing out of natural lifestyle of faith.
(Rom. 6:14..." for you are not under law but under grace.").... The Law is not given to the Christian as the standard to live by, but to show the unbeliever how BELOW the standard we do live.(Tim.1:9 The Law is for the unrighteous.) Rom. 4:5 But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his FAITH IS ACCOUNTES FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Rom. 3:21 We know that today, Christ is "the end of the law for righteousness." Any requirement any command all that God asked Christ fulfilled.
The law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor (teacher for the immature)..... The law looks appealing today, but it separates those who embrace it from the Spirit of grace..... Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. Rom. 10:3-4.......with the heart one believes to righteousness. Rom. 10:5-6, 1.0
Many there are who think that the law is the gospel, and who teach that men by good works of benevolence, honesty, righteousness, and sobriety, may be saved. Some maintain that the law and the gospel are mixed, and that partly by observance of the law, and partly by God’s grace, men are saved. These men understand not the truth, and are false teachers.
If one continues to look to the law for their guidance, then true successful Christian living cannot really occur. Practicing this runs the risk of consciously or unconsciously thinking they have obtained or are keeping salvation by the works of the law. But it actually which separates them from Christ. (Galatians 5:4)
As Walter Martin had said," Now, we don't begin our day saying,..... "Today I am going to make the effort to keep the Ten Commandments."..... We begin our day saying, "Lord Jesus, give me the grace that I may walk with you." Because if I am going to walk with Christ, I'll be obeying the will of God and the law of God."
So are we without law? Absolutely not,..... The holy Spirit becomes our instructor in the word and in our personal walk in what is beneficial and what is not......It is by the work of Christ that we are accepted, not by anything we can do. This is the content of the Gospel.
Why do people look to their own works instead of accepting Gods grace?.... Its easier to look at ones self obedience to gauge how they are doing spiritually than to rest in Christ's work for them. If we stop trying to live it in your own strength and let Christ live it through us by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can see the results of the new life. We will understand it is all by grace. Which is found by Jesus suffering and death on the cross.
The cross is hidden to those who think they are wise..... It is foolishness to those who are perishing but to us who are saved by faith we know it is the power of God. It is going through the cross (and the one who died on it)for ones relationship to be restored to God. Exactly where Jesus pointed to and where all the apostles pointed too as well. The Cross, was a symbol of shame to the Romans but glory to the Christian who is saved through it. Which is why so many cults focus on their works they do not see the glory that is in the cross.
The fallen nature loves religion,... the gospel is the opposite of religion,... Religion is mans answer to God, Christ is Gods answer to man. The fallen nature of man tries to justify itself by doing deeds to prove it is worthy. But then this would mean Christ died in vain if we could reform ourselves by law or works.
In view of what you have posted here, what then is your approach to the Beatitudes?
As you know well, the Beatitudes were Our Lord’s opening discourse indicating their great importance; and each of the Beatitudes indicated the benevolence of certain specific actions and attitudes that He wanted His disciples to know and live. Each one also offers a promise of reward.
I also believe that “the law” is written on our hearts, and that as surely as we break one of them, we know in our hearts that we have sinned.
How can we not believe that we are bound to be truthful and avoid lying? How can we not believe that we are bound not to take from another person what is theirs? How can we not know that we sin when we are unfaithful in marriage? And so on.
Our Lord said He came, not to do away with the law, but to fulfill it. That does not excuse us from honoring those laws, which He also told us were written on our hearts.
Yes, we have been redeemed by the Cross, but we are also called to hear the law that is spoken to our hearts.
The Beatitudes call us to a greater refinement of living that out in our daily lives. They are the Lord’s certain counsel on how we are to live and echo the law that is written on our hearts.
You wrote:
“STOP THE PRESSES!!! The Last Supper and youtube had a place at the table!!!”
You asked for the Aramaic and you got it. You were proved wrong.
“Good night, Vladi, thanks for that semi-amusing post.”
I also find proving you wrong so easily to be amusing.
In fact, the Protestants themselves say that Protestantism was better suited for the post-medieval period. The idea that one can be an authorty onto himself without divine appointment was beginning to be popular in the early 1500’s.
It is true that every human institution is open to corruption, but it is Protestantism that is corrupt by definition. The Catholic Church is dogmatically oriented toward the 1c. when she was conceived by Christ. We systematically reject any power that is not apostolic in nature. Yes, there has always been an element of abuse in the Church.
What makes you think I am simply seeking controversy? I have my opinions and I express them. I rarely disagree with the Orthodox, on the other hand, and so I am quite congenial with them.
No, of course not. I do not accuse all Protestants of mercantilism. My point was that the so-called prosperity gospel is one example of something totally contrary to the True Gospel, yet Protestant tolerate it among their fellow Protestants. This is, in my opinion, indifference to the truth, so long as the team colors match.
“What makes you think I am simply seeking controversy?”
Because your comments on Protestantism are deliberately as offensive as you can make them. You just want to incite a retort about your religion - and you’ll probably get one - but not from me because I practice Protestant religious tolerance - like any good American does.
You can’t help it. You don’t know any better - but most Catholics are good Americans and do know better. You should talk with one of them, or maybe a priest to learn about your religion and how it interacts productively and in a Christian manner with other religions.
When you mature in your Christian journey you’ll be embarrassed at some of the things you’ve said on this thread about other religions.
Good luck to you.
James is talking about the KIND of faith one has
Yes, you can say that. You can say that true mature faith is one that is accompanied by good works. But what you cannot say, because on that passage alone, that we are saved by faith alone. We are saved by faith and by good works.
the treatment of the Lord's followers shall be the basis of determining one's relationship to their Head, which is Christ
Yes; in short, our salvation is judged by our works. It is our works that bring us in communion with Christ. Again, without denying the role of faith, this passage is a direct contradiction of "sola fide".
We are created/saved to do Good works, NOT TO BE Saved, but out of Love and obedience to the one what has rescued us.
This is not what Eph 2:8-10 say. It says that we are saved by grace alone; that grace is not from works but is a gift of God, therefore we should not boast of it; that both faith and our good works come from God as a result of faith. In short, we are saved by grace alone but not by faith alone. Grace produces both faith and good works for those who obey God. Nowhere does that passage say that we are saved first and then do works, even though your translation incorreclty uses past perfect tense for "σεσωσμενοι". Young's Literal Translation has it "ye are having been saved". King James has it "are ye saved". Salvation is a process that starts with the Cross and extends through the entirety of one's life.
Observe, too, how your interpretation in all three cases attmepts to get away from the direct meaning of the passage and into some marginalization of what it says. That is not faith.
How is that "clearly"? Christ says repeatedly in that passage that His flesh is "food indeed".
Do you believe that anyone/everyone who recieves the RC Eucharist HAS eternal life?
Yes. Anyone who receives the Holy Communion worthily (cf 1 Cor 11:29) is reconciled to Christ and is ready to die and be justified. He may fall off later, due to a commission of sin, but until such time he is assured of life everlasting in heaven.
The "literal" meaning indicates they HAVE, are in possesion of Eternal Life
And they are. Your eternal life began at your conception.
“My point was that the so-called prosperity gospel is one example of something totally contrary to the True Gospel, yet Protestant tolerate it among their fellow Protestants. “
So you suggest we hold a Protestant inquisition and burn the prosperity gospel folks at the stake?
Protestant religions are autonomous and could care less what another Protestant religion or what Catholics think about it’s practices.
It’s part and parcel of religious freedom. You have a decidedly immature understanding of it.
You don’t get to decide how everyone worships. You can tell them you don’t approve and attempt to take corrective action, but they may punch you in the nose.
That said, Prosperity Gospel is pretty crazy stuff, but I’ll defend their right to worship their crazy stuff against all comers.
It does. It shows that any dispute is to be resolved decisively by the Church. Note that the authority to bind and loose had alredy been given to St. Peter as the ehad of theChurch in Matthew 16, and there it was given in the context of entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a very broad mandate that the Church possesses.
Being good shepherds of the flock does not relate has little to do with the rule of Faith or doctrine.
But the passage is, again, very broad. It simply says that the bishops "rule the Church of God"; it does nto restrict it the way you do.
Care to list the substance of what was passed on by word of mouth?
Initially, in the first 2-3 centuries of the existence of the Church, virtually everything, since the Church operated without canonical scripture wahtsoever. Later, what could be traced to the Holy Apostles and what also conformed with already existing deposit of faith became canonized scripture. But the interpretation of the scriptural passages is left open at times; Many aspects of the life of the Church are completely outsode of the scripture. We barely know how to baptize (OK to baptize children? In what manner?); the Liturgy is described in purely poetic terms in the Revelation; we know nothing of the early saints outside of the circle of the apostles and first deacons; we know very little of Mary in her later years (only from a poetisized Rev 12). Often what we know from the scripture was not how the Church developed, -- Christians in fact did not turn over their possession to the Church contrary to the scriptural account, for example. So all this knowledge, interpetations, decision making, practices, iconography and hymnody -- was passed on as a Holy Tradition. Surely, by now all of it is written down in patristic literature, so it is no longer purely or even primarily oral.
To ALL: I will get to the rest of your much appreciated posts to me tomorrow.
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