Archbishop Charles Chaput and “Strangers In A Strange Land”

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show:

Hugh Hewitt

Feb. 13 2017

 

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has a new book out: Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith In a Post-Christian World. It is a must-read for all Christians in the United States. He is my guest in the second hour Monday, for a preview, and you ought to pre-order the book now. (It releases next Monday next.)

 

Audio

 

(Snip)

CC: Yeah, that’s right. You know, I grew up in the 1950s in Kansas, and really believed everything that I was taught in school, and by my community. And I believe that patriotism is a virtue, close to the virtue of loving our families. And I really believed in the narrative about where the United States came from and where we were supposed to go. And that still is, in some ways, deep in my personality and my person. I still want to believe that with all my heart. But you know, we face the reality of a world around us that has changed hugely. And the reason I wrote the book is to try to explain this to myself, actually. You know, I think many of us who do writing and speaking a lot actually write for ourselves and speak to ourselves trying to figure out the world in which we live. And that’s what this book is about. It’s written for ordinary people who are surprised where we are in terms of the culture around us. And it’s a description of what it used to be and how we got where we are today.

 

HH: In fact, when you write that it’s been 50 years since Vatican II, and the world is a bloody and fractured place, some of these fractures reach deeply into the Church itself. We’ve lived the same 50 years, and it’s been, you know, I’m 60. You’re a couple of years on me, but it’s the same arc where the perfect Catholic culture of the 50s and 60s that Ross Douthat described in Bad Religion has fractured, but so has the country’s culture fractured. And obviously, the sins of segregation, etc., had to be dealt with, and we had to create a just society, and we’ve done so in many ways. But it’s been, wow, many dams have broken, and the results are horrific.

 

CC: They are. Just last week, I was in Dallas at a meeting sponsored by the National Catholic Bioethics Center for Bishops of the Catholic Church, and the topic was transgenderism. And you know, that’s certainly an interesting topic which reflects the changes in our society. Who would have thought even five or ten years ago that we would be remaking ourselves in terms of our sexuality?

 

HH: And gender would be a construct. And that’s, you know, that may be a bridge too far for the left. I believe that most people, while sympathetic to folks who are experiencing identity issues are not willing to wholesale jettison the idea of gender. Our friend, Matt Tynan, tells me as well, though, there was another gathering in Texas recently, the FOCUS, Fellowship Of Catholic University Students in San Antonio last month.

 

CC: I was there, yeah.

 

HH: …had 13…oh, you were there, 13,000 people?

 

CC: 13,000 young Catholics from college campuses, not just Catholics, but mostly Catholics came together to celebrate their faith and to learn from one another and be encouraged in the alternative view of the world that Christians have.

 

HH: That alternative view of the world is that there’s an old story. God loves man. You say man betrays God, then God calls him back to His friendship.

 

(Snip)

 

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We Conservatives & Religious Conservatives Are The Modern Counter-Culture.

[Valin]

Strangers in a Strange Land
The archbishop of Philadelphia delivers the 2014 Erasmus Lecture by Charles J. Chaput
January 2015

The video recording of the 2014 Erasmus Lecture can be viewed here.

I’ve always had an affection for French Canada. My father’s family began there. When I was growing up in Kansas in the 1950s, Quebec was deeply Catholic, one of the most profoundly Catholic cultures in the world. The province had 90 percent church attendance. Catholic education, health care, and social services pervaded daily life.

All of that has changed. A young Catholic friend recently moved to Quebec from Washington, D.C., with her husband. When she asked some of her new friends if they’d like to join her for Mass, the answer she got was: “What is a Mass?”

Today, barely 6 percent of Quebeckers attend Sunday services. Only 9 percent of high school–age young people identify as Catholic. About thirty-eight abortions occur for every hundred live births. Nearly half of newborn children go unbaptized. And many of those who are baptized will grow up without seeing the inside of a church. In just fifty years since Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, an entire Catholic culture has collapsed.

None of this is news. First Things has been covering French Canada’s religious terrain for two decades, and the recent fight over a “Quebec Charter of ­Values” put Quebec’s Catholic history back in the spotlight. But for anyone coming from the United States for the first time, the wreckage of Quebec’s Catholic life—a once-great Church almost completely expunged from a people’s daily environment—can be a shock. And that shock ties us to our theme: In the developed world, more and more people of faith, people for whom God is the anchor of their lives, people who once felt rooted in their communities, now feel like strangers, out of place in the land of their birth.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Archbishop Charles Chaput and “Strangers In A Strange Land”
Hugh Hewitt
Monday, February 20, 2017

Audio

(Snip)

HH: It’s so, would you tell people about that? It’s so shocking.

CC: Well, I think he’s an author that isn’t actually acknowledged by many people at all. They don’t even know his name. And you know, it’s one of the convictions that many Christians have that the presence of evil in the world hides itself and it pretends to be good. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis was an example of the Devil actually bragging about, you know, people not, tempting people not to believe in him so he could be more active in the world. And so I think being aware of the reality of evil is also an important part of dealing with our culture, because if we see our culture as neutral or primarily good, we are in danger of ignoring the forces of evil, because they really can overwhelm us if we’re not aware and protecting ourselves from them. The Christians have always understood themselves spiritually as being in a spiritual battle, spiritual warfare. And I think it’s important for us to develop the kind of defense mechanisms in that warfare to protect people in our world today.

HH: I want to read the Kolakowski excerpt, which you have on Page 234. He’s addressing Christians cynically, the Devil is. “Where is there a place in your thinking for the fallen angel? Is Satan only a rhetorical figure? Or else, gentlemen, is he a reality, undeniable, recognized by tradition, revealed in Scriptures, commented upon by the Church for two millennia, tangible and acute? Why do you avoid me, gentlemen? Are you afraid that the skeptics will mock you, that you will be laughed at in satirical late night reviews? Since when is the faith affected by the jeers of heathens and heretics? What road are you taking? If you forsake the foundations of the faith for fear of mockery, where will you end?” It goes on, but I bring it up now, because you write that one of the biggest problems earlier in the book is that people are genuinely afraid of being mocked for believing in Jesus or the Devil or any part of Christianity.

 

(Snip)

 

HH: I was curious by the negative reaction our conversation last week sparked by a * columnist who’s got an axe to grind. Do you think he actually read your book, because when we come back from break and we talk about nothing but the truth, I can’t believe he actually read your book. Or if he…

 

CC: No, no, he didn’t read the book. He read an article in the newspaper here that quoted me talking to you. So it really was our conversation on the radio last week that people are quoting, not the book itself. But I have a group of people in the press here in Philadelphia who just love to jump on everything I say without reading the context of what I say. And that was the result. I got a lot of mail last week because of our conversation, and I’m grateful for our conversation. But it gave me a lot of work, Hugh

 

(Snip)

 

HH: It’s a rebuke, by the way. I want my conservative friends to understand this is a rebuke of both conservatives and liberals, and the tribalism of conservatives and liberals that you assail for living in constructed universes where they keep themselves walled off from uncomfortable true facts.

 

CC: That’s right, and an ability to actually have an honest, intellectual discussion with people we disagree with. You know, there’s a tendency in our culture today to do all that we can to destroy the enemy, and to silence those who are not sufficiently conservative or sufficiently progressive. ** And unfortunately, that affects all people. And you know, part of, you know, one of the things that Jesus taught us was that the truth sets us free. So if that’s true, then we shouldn’t be afraid to explore the truth, and then to live in it, and be willing to share the truth with other people. Now that has a cost, Hugh.

 

HH: Yup.

 

 

* Newall: More meddling political science from Archbishop Chaput
Updated: February 14, 2017 — 4:35 PM EST

 

** Memo To TOS!