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.
If I may, the word used throughout these verses of Jesus' sermon is: Blessed - μακάριος (makarios), and it means "happy". I think many people make a mistake in reading this passage and do what I call "pigeonhole" certain words. Some see Jesus saying "blessed" and assume it means "heaven", but the Greek word means happy. Look at the passage:
Matthew 5:3-12
3"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
7Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
10Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
12Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Those who come to God in meekness, not depending on their own righteousness but by the grace and mercy of God through faith will be saved.
Dear boatbums,
I am aware that blessed can be translated as “happy”.
I don’t believe that changes the essential message of the Beatitudes.
“...not depending on their own righteousness”
I believe that almost anyone who believes in the Lord Jesus and His redemptive Cross don’t depend on their own righteousness. I have never heard anyone express this thought to me or convey it to me in any overt way.
“don’t depend” should be doesn’t depend.
Okay, so what then do you believe is the "essential" message of the passage?
Additionally, he was not only speaking to the disciples but to the crowds of people, good to remember what the overall mindset of the people was at that time as well. Many pagan influences and practices then.
It was and is an attitude that all true believers can and will have when they are controlled by the Holy Spirit. Each of the attributes Jesus extolled are certainly the way he leads us to true happiness and joy of our salvation. We cannot be meek or poor in spirit, hunger and thirst for righteousness or be pure in heart without the grace of Almighty God. This is why salvation is a gift - we can never exhibit these Godly traits without him.
In short, anyone who says this clearly doesn't understand the meaning of grace.
I am gone for the weekend
Catholics, not the reformed, remember His Life, Death, and Resurrection DAILY at the MASS.
Our Crucifixes show him dying on the cross.
CHEAP GRACE IS THIS DAILY show of FAUX PIETY as the Comfy-chair proselytizers pat themselves on the back pretending to be in a mission field sacrificing their lives to spread the gospel.
This is an anonymous bulletin board. No sweat, no pain, no gain. To Pretend otherwise is SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS.
No kidding.
Rome teaches us to find Christ amidst the poor. We are, you know, Biblical faith. Compare Matthew 11:5, Matthew 25:40, Luke 6:20.
But we have saints from all walks of life. Many adopted poverty despite being born into the ruling class e.g. St. Martin, St. Catherine of Siena or St. Francis. Others gave up what youy might call middle-class existence like St. Peter, St. Matthew, or St. Teresa of Ávila. It's not what you come from that what you are willing to become that matters:
Behold, we have left all things, and have followed thee (Luke 18:28)There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)
This is the work ethic of Catholic Christians since the Sermon on the mountainm and is decidedly anti-Protestant. Don't get personal with your insults.
we know that Roman Catholics think Paul is "loony" and "deluded."
Oh, look, quotation marks. Who said that? St. Paul preaches nothing but Catholic doctrine.
Ping to my previous post.
My statement was about Protestants in general because they all, perhaps to various extents, read one thing and think another, and believe the liars that lead them. Else they would not be Protestants.
The only personal tthing about the Good Doctor was that she is a Protestant. If she is not, I apologize. I was going by her posts.
It is good that you provide links rather than simply put a few questionable words in quotes and make a general comment. However, I think you ought to ping the author of the linked post.
I should not express myself clearly? I think Protestant heresy is a damnable lie that endangered many souls, and continues to do so. This is a discussion forum. I discuss. The Gospel tells me to.
sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you (1 Peter 3:15)
your religion and how it interacts productively and in a Christian manner with other religions.
We surely do. I certainly have plenty of interaction with the Protestants especially from before my blessed wife's conversion, but also to this day. I visited Baptist churches with regularity, and some others; I went to Protestant Bible studies. I am encouraged by the cooperation of many Protestants in the pro-life work of the Church. Catholics, especially Westrn Catholics, should never forget that Protestantism is a prodigal son of Catholic Christianity; we have a fatted calf ready for all who return, but even those who are still away have the Catholic kernel of truth inside of them. They should listen to it.
Well, we know that Roman Catholics think Paul is “loony” and “deluded.”
__________
Totally dishonest and misleading statement.
I was on that thread and you know full well that ONE Catholic Freeper made those statements about Paul.
To take on persons statement and extrapolate it out to a whole group of believers is really desperate.
I know of a Calvinist who committed murder. I guess that means we know that Calvinists are a bunch of vile murderers.
We too have over 20 different rites. We do not call for uniformity of worship, and neither did I make it about style of worship. But doctrinal disagreements between Christian groups should give anyone great concern,because the Holy Ghost does not lead in different directions.
I’ll defend their right to worship their crazy stuff
This is an amazing statement. They still worship Christ, don't they? He is not "crazy stuff". Next, no one said the Prosperity Gospel preachers should have their consitutional and natural rights taken away from them. All human beings have an inalienable right to preach and worship anything so long as they do not cause violence against the innocent. The dispute between you and me is about integrity of doctrine, not legal action. Was it not clear to you?
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