As we celebrate Respect Life Month (October) and stand at the threshold of the November elections, we present some profound insights from Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia. He diagnoses our ills as a nation and prescribes the only path to true healing. The following excerpts come from a talk he gave at the University of Notre Dame on Sept. 15, 2016, titled “Sex, Family and the Liberty of the Church.”
After first acknowledging that we face a choice between deeply flawed presidential candidates, Archbishop Chaput goes on to note….
“[E]lections do matter. They matter a lot. The next president will appoint several Supreme Court justices, make vital foreign policy decisions, and shape the huge federal administrative machinery in ways over which Congress has little control. It’s good to remember that Congress didn’t create the politically vindictive HHS mandate. The Obama White House did that.”
[And yet] “…the task of renewing a society is much more long term than a trip every few years to the voting booth. And it requires a different kind of people. It demands that we be different people.
“I’ve been a priest for 46 years. During that time I’ve heard something more than 12,000 personal confessions…. As a priest, what’s most striking to me about the last five decades is the huge spike in people – both men and women — confessing promiscuity, infidelity, sexual violence and sexual confusion as an ordinary part of life, and the massive role of pornography in wrecking marriages, families and even the vocations of clergy and religious.
“The truth about our sexuality is that infidelity, promiscuity, sexual confusion and mass pornography create human wreckage. Multiply that wreckage by tens of millions of persons over five decades. Then compound it with media nonsense about the innocence of casual sex and the ‘happy’ children of friendly divorces. What you get is what we have now: a dysfunctional culture of frustrated and wounded people increasingly incapable of permanent commitments, self-sacrifice and sustained intimacy, and unwilling to face the reality of their own problems.
“…Weak and selfish individuals make weak and selfish marriages. Weak and selfish marriages make broken families. And broken families continue and spread the cycle of dysfunction…. A vast amount of social data shows that children from broken families are much more likely to live in poverty, to be poorly educated, and to have more emotional and physical health issues than children from intact families. In other words, when healthy marriages and families decline, the social costs rise.
“…Only a mother and father can provide the intimacy of maternal and paternal love. Many single parents do a heroic job of raising good children, and they deserve our admiration and praise. But only a mother and father can offer the unique kind of human love rooted in flesh and blood; the kind that comes from mutual submission and self-giving; the kind that comes from the complementarity of sexual difference.
“…Of course some of the worst pressures on family life come from outside the home. They come in the form of unemployment, low pay, crime, poor housing, chronic illness and bad schools. These are vitally important issues with real human consequences. And in Catholic thought, government has a role to play in easing such problems – but not if a government works from a crippled idea of who man is, what marriage is, and what a family is. And not if a government deliberately shapes its policies to interfere with and control the mediating institutions in civil society that already serve the public well. Yet this could arguably describe many of the current administration’s actions over the past seven years.
“As families and religious faith break down, the power of the state grows. Government fills in the spaces left behind by mediating institutions…. Left to itself, democracy tends toward a kind of soft totalitarianism in which even a person’s most intimate concerns, from his sexual relations to his religious convictions, are swallowed by the political process.
“We now live in a country where marriage, family and traditional religion all seem to be failing. And – inevitably — support for democracy itself has dropped. Fewer than 30 percent of U.S. millennials think that it’s vital to live in a nation ruled democratically.
“…This didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident. We behaved ourselves into this mess by living a collection of lies. And the essence of those lies is summed up in the so-called ‘mystery clause’ of the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey Supreme Court decision upholding the Roe vs. Wade abortion decision.
“Writing for the majority in Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy claimed that ‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.’ This is the perfect manifesto of a liberal democratic fantasy: the sovereign, self-creating self. But it’s a lie. It’s the very opposite of real Christian freedom. And to the degree we excuse or cooperate with it, we make ourselves liars.
“The Gospel of John reminds us that the truth, and only the truth, makes us free. We’re fully human and free only when we live under the authority of the truth. And in that light, no issue has made us more dishonest and less free as believers and as a nation than abortion. People uncomfortable with the abortion issue argue, quite properly, that Catholic teaching is bigger than just one issue. Other urgent issues also need our attention. Being pro-birth is not the same as being prolife. And being truly ‘prolife’ doesn’t end with defending the unborn child. But it does and it must begin there.
“In every abortion, an innocent life always dies. This is why no equivalence can ever exist between the intentional killing involved in abortion, infanticide and euthanasia on the one hand, and issues like homelessness, the death penalty and anti-poverty policy on the other. Again, all of these issues are important. But trying to reason or imply them into having the same moral weight is a debasement of Christian thought.
“…I said at the start of my remarks that the task of renewing the life of our nation requires a different kind of people. It demands that we be different people. The power of the powerless, Václav Havel once wrote, consists not in clever political strategies but in the simple daily discipline of living within the truth and refusing to lie.
For more resources on Faithful Citizenship, visit the diocesan website at: www.diolc.org/faithful-citizenship.
The Diocese of La Crosse does not endorse candidates or parties.