Getting Charles Chaput Badly Wrong

[Valin]

First Things:

Matthew J. Franck

8/21/13

 

Charles J. Reid, Jr., who teaches law at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, recently posted something at a blog (tellingly called www.religiousleftlaw.com), which the National Catholic Reporter picked up and ran as an op-ed, in print and online, under the title “Archbishop Chaput’s right-wing funk.” Responding to an interview that the archbishop had given to the Reporter’s John L. Allen, Jr. in Rio during World Youth Day, Reid describes Chaput himself as feeling an “anxiety” about Pope Francis’s “extraordinary popularity.” Reid further claims that Chaput is “worrie[d] . . . in particular” that “outsiders are thrilled by the new pope’s friendliness and his warmth.”

 

(Snip)

 

It is plain in every line of Chaput’s interview with Allen that he himself is unequivocally delighted with Pope Francis. Literally his first comment on the Holy Father is, “Thanks be to God that the Lord has given us a pope with such universal appeal to so many people.” The very next thing he says is this:

 

My sense is that practicing Catholics love him and have a deep respect for him, but they’re not actually the ones who really talk to me about the new pope. The ones who do are nonpracticing Catholics or people who aren’t Catholic or not even Christian. They go out of their way to tell me how impressed they are and what a wonderful change he’s brought into the church. It’s interesting to see that it’s the alienated Catholic and the non-Catholic and the non-Christians who have expressed their enthusiasm more than Catholics have. It’s not that Catholics aren’t impressed, too, but they’re ordinarily impressed with the pope.

(Snip)

 

I see where Reid is coming from, I think, but it is a place quite alien to my experience (though, as an academic, I’ve seen it a lot). For my part, I am a prodigal son, who abandoned the faith for many years. For converts like my wife and “reverts” like me, the fact that contemporary American Catholicism is led by the likes of Chaput, Dolan, George, Lori, Cordileone, Gomez, and O’Connell, “JPII men” shaped by the theology of Benedict XVI and full of the joy of Pope Francis, is a large part of the reason why we are in the Church today and not in the wilderness. That, and the fact that the faith is brought to life in American parishes by steadfastly orthodox young priests of the kind Charles Reid would call “right wing.” In fact, everyone I know who has either come into the Church or returned to it in the last 20 years has done so because of all the things that Charles Reid would reject and call “right wing,” things that are in fact unclassifiable by such ossified and brittle ideological categories.

 

(Snip)

 

 

 

Ouch!