Category Archives: United States

What Separation of Church and State” Does Not Mean

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Archbishop Charles J, Chaput, speaking in Toronto -excerpt:

The “separation of Church and state” does not mean — and it can never mean — separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be “leaven in the world” and to “make disciples of all nations.” That kind of radical separation steals the moral content of a society. It’s the equivalent of telling a married man that he can’t act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won’t stay married.


Even more recent Chaput from the Anchoress

America Historically Is Not A Secular State

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More Archbishop Charles J. Chaput from his speech in Toronto.  He is speaking as an American, a Catholic and a bishop about “Rending Unto Casaer”

Excerpt from speech:

Here’s the second point, and it’s a place where the Canadian and American experiences may diverge. America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was “born Protestant.” It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a “secular” country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we also cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.

Here’s the third point. We need to be very forceful in clarifying what the words in our political vocabulary really mean. Words are important because they shape our thinking, and our thinking drives our actions. When we subvert the meaning of words like “the common good” or “conscience” or “community” or “family,” we undermine the language that sustains our thinking about the law. Dishonest language leads to dishonest debate and bad laws.

Here’s an example. 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.

Here’s the fourth point. When Jesus tells the Pharisees and Herodians in the Gospel of Matthew (22:21) to “render unto the Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” he sets the framework for how we should think about religion and the state even today. Caesar does have rights. We owe civil authority our respect and appropriate obedience. But that obedience is limited by what belongs to God. Caesar is not God. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. Our job as believers is to figure out what things belong to Caesar, and what things belong to God — and then put those things in right order in our own lives, and in our relations with others.

So having said all this, what does a book like “Render Unto Caesar” mean, in practice, for each of us as individual Catholics? It means that we each have a duty to study and grow in our faith, guided by the teaching of the Church. It also means that we have a duty to be politically engaged. Why? Because politics is the exercise of power, and the use of power always has moral content and human consequences.

Even more recent Chaput from the Anchoress



American Consumer Culture – A Powerful Narcotic

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I’m hoping that our present crisis will encourage  thinking.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput speaking in Toronto:

Obviously, I’ll be speaking tonight as an American, a Catholic and a bishop — though not necessarily in that order. Some of what I say may not be useful to a Canadian audience, especially those who aren’t Catholic. But I do believe that the heart of the Catholic political vocation remains the same for every believer in every country. The details of our political life change from nation to nation. But the mission of public Christian discipleship remains the same, because we all share the same baptism.

I’ve learned from experience, though, that Henry Ford was right when he said that “Two percent of the people think; three percent think they think, and 95 percent would rather die than think.

“Ford had a pretty dark view of humanity, which I don’t share. Most of the people I meet as a pastor have the brains and the talent to live very fulfilling lives. But Ford was right in one unintended way: American consumer culture is a very powerful narcotic. Moral reasoning can be hard, and TV is a great painkiller. This has political implications. Real freedom demands an ability to think, and a great deal of modern life — not just in the United States, but all over the developed world — seems deliberately designed to discourage that. So talking about God and Caesar, even if it wakes up just one Christian mind in an audience, is always worth the effort.

I think the message of “Render Unto Caesar” can be condensed into a few basic points.Here’s the first point. For many years, studies have shown that Americans have a very poor sense of history. That’s very dangerous, because as Thucydides and Machiavelli and Thomas Jefferson have all said, history matters. It matters because the past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. If Catholics don’t know history, and especially their own history as Catholics, then somebody else — and usually somebody not very friendly — will create their history for them.

Let me put it another way. A man with amnesia has no future and no present because he can’t remember his past. The past is a man’s anchor in experience and reality. Without it, he may as well be floating in space. In like manner, if we Catholics don’t remember and defend our religious history as a believing people, nobody else will, and then we won’t have a future because we won’t have a past. If we don’t know how the Church worked with or struggled against political rulers in the past, then we can’t think clearly about the relations between Church and state today.

Even more recent Chaput from the Anchoress

No Perspective – No Compunction!

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Does the Mainstream Media feel any guilt for the media basis that is now part and parcel of its product and its legacy?  Do their heavy-hitters feel any compunction for putting Barak Hussein Obama, a relative unknown with little experience and a shady past into the White House as President of the greatest Nation on this earth.  The answer is “No!” and “Hell, no! respectively.  Perspectively, they have no perspective!

Bernard Goldberg of “A Slobbering Love Affair” fame, reminds us of the “bubble” in which these guys live.  A “Vast Left-wing Conspiracy” has not been organized, but they live and move and have their being
as though there were one.  According to Goldberg, “The problem, in a word, is group-think.” An “institutional bias,” that is insidious because it is “too  comfortable” and “dulls the senses,” is turning “even well-
educated journalists into narrow-minded provincial rubes.”

In a time of national crisis, those the 1st amendment intended to protect the Nation by
manning the watchtowers, are in denial and worse. They are in lockstep, much as the spaced-out fictional
Borg, zombies acting, but not thinking critically.

Enter Stage Left – Enter Insanity

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Michelle Malkin covers the comedic to the hysterical:

” ….the curtains have opened on the most elaborate farce of the year. Welcome, taxpayers, to the Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage — where D.C.’s histrionic enablers of taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts compete for Best Performance of Hypocritical Indignation.”

If Washington’s new-found opponents of rewarding failure want to do taxpayers a favor, how about giving back their automatic pay raises? How about returning all their AIG donations? How about taking back all the bailout money to all the failed enterprises, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG, the automakers, and the big banks? Barry? Harry? Nancy? John? Chris? Bueller? ‘Bueller?

Meanwhile the Anchoress calls these antics more than Kabuki:

This is a full-on assault on reality by the office of the Most Powerful Person in the World, fully supported by the pretend-press, and it is alternately tedious and terrifying.

If only there was some one off-stage with cajones and a hook.

Come To The Tea Party – Endorses Gingrich

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Newt’s on the bandwagon says Instapundit.

American Solutions for Winning the Future today ” announced their endorsement and support of the Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party, an event spanning the nation in over 150 cities and towns across America on April 15….”

“The American people are fed up with Washington’s irresponsible spending spree,” said Newt Gingrich, General Chairman of American Solutions. “There are better solutions than big government and higher taxes to create jobs and get the economy moving again.”