Charles Chaput,
Catholic Archbishop of Denver Colorado, addressed the first session
of the 15th symposium for the Canon Law Association of Slovakia on
Tuesday. He called upon Catholics in America and in Europe, to
resist the world's intolerance of Christianity.
Tertullian once famously said that the blood of martyrs is the seed
of the Church. History has proven that to be true. And Slovakia is
the perfect place for us to revisit his words today. Here, and
throughout central and eastern Europe, Catholics suffered through 50
years of Nazi and Soviet murder regimes. So they know the real cost
of Christian witness from bitter experience -- and also,
unfortunately, the cost of cowardice, collaboration and
self-delusion in the face of evil.
I want to begin by suggesting that many Catholics in the United
States and Western Europe today simply don’t understand those costs.
Nor do they seem to care. As a result, many are indifferent to the
process in our countries that social scientists like to call
“secularization” – but which, in practice, involves repudiating the
Christian roots and soul of our civilization.
American Catholics have no experience of the systematic repression
so familiar to your Churches. It’s true that anti-Catholic prejudice
has always played a role in American life. This bigotry came first
from my country’s dominant Protestant culture, and now from its
“post-Christian” leadership classes. But this is quite different
from deliberate persecution. In general, Catholics have thrived in
the United States. The reason is simple. America has always had a
broadly Christian and religion-friendly moral foundation, and our
public institutions were established as non-sectarian, not
anti-religious.
At the heart of the American experience is an instinctive “biblical
realism.” From our Protestant inheritance we have always – at least
until now -- understood that sin is real, and men and women can be
corrupted by power and prosperity. Americans have often been tempted
to see our nation as uniquely destined, or specially anointed by
God. But in the habits of daily life, we have always known that the
“city of God” is something very distinct from the “city of man.” And
we are wary of confusing the two.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, wrote:
“Despotism can do without faith, but liberty cannot . . .”
Therefore, “What is to be done with a people that is its own master,
if it is not obedient to God?”1
America’s founders were a diverse group of practicing Christians and
Enlightenment deists. But nearly all were friendly to religious
faith. They believed a free people cannot remain free without
religious faith and the virtues that it fosters. They sought to keep
Church and state separate and autonomous. But their motives were
very different from the revolutionary agenda in Europe. The American
founders did not confuse the state with civil society. They had no
desire for a radically secularized public life. They had no intent
to lock religion away from public affairs. On the contrary, they
wanted to guarantee citizens the freedom to live their faith
publicly and vigorously, and to bring their religious convictions to
bear on the building of a just society.
Obviously, we need to remember that other big differences do exist
between the American and European experiences. Europe has suffered
some of the worst wars and violent regimes in human history. The
United States has not seen a war on its soil in 150 years. Americans
have no experience of bombed-out cities or social collapse, and
little experience of poverty, ideological politics or hunger. As a
result, the past has left many Europeans with a worldliness and a
pessimism that seem very different from the optimism that marks
American society. But these and other differences don’t change the
fact that our paths into the future are now converging. Today, in an
era of global interconnection, the challenges that confront
Catholics in America are much the same as in Europe: We face an
aggressively secular political vision and a consumerist economic
model that result – in practice, if not in explicit intent -- in a
new kind of state-encouraged atheism.
To put it another way: The Enlightenment-derived worldview that gave
rise to the great murder ideologies of the last century remains very
much alive. Its language is softer, its intentions seem kinder, and
its face is friendlier. But its underlying impulse hasn’t changed --
i.e., the dream of building a society apart from God; a world where
men and women might live wholly sufficient unto themselves,
satisfying their needs and desires through their own ingenuity.
This vision presumes a frankly “post-Christian” world ruled by
rationality, technology and good social engineering. Religion has a
place in this worldview, but only as an individual lifestyle
accessory. People are free to worship and believe whatever they
want, so long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and do not
presume to intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on the workings of
government, the economy, or culture.
Now, at first hearing, this might sound like a reasonable way to
organize a modern society that includes a wide range of ethnic,
religious and cultural traditions, different philosophies of life
and approaches to living.
But we’re immediately struck by two unpleasant details.
First, “freedom of worship” is not at all the same thing as “freedom
of religion.” Religious freedom includes the right to preach, teach,
assemble, organize, and to engage society and its issues publicly,
both as individuals and joined together as communities of faith.
This is the classic understanding of a citizen’s right to the “free
exercise” of his or her religion in the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. It’s also clearly implied in Article 18 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In contrast, freedom of
worship is a much smaller and more restrictive idea.
Second, how does the rhetoric of enlightened, secular tolerance
square with the actual experience of faithful Catholics in Europe
and North America in recent years?
In the United States, a nation that is still 80 percent Christian
with a high degree of religious practice, government agencies now
increasingly seek to dictate how Church ministries should operate,
and to force them into practices that would destroy their Catholic
identity. Efforts have been made to discourage or criminalize the
expression of certain Catholic beliefs as “hate speech.” Our courts
and legislatures now routinely take actions that undermine marriage
and family life, and seek to scrub our public life of Christian
symbolism and signs of influence.
In Europe, we see similar trends, although marked by a more open
contempt for Christianity. Church leaders have been reviled in the
media and even in the courts for simply expressing Catholic
teaching. Some years ago, as many of you may recall, one of the
leading Catholic politicians of our generation, Rocco Buttiglione,
was denied a leadership post in the European Union because of his
Catholic beliefs.
Earlier this summer we witnessed the kind of vindictive thuggery not
seen on this continent since the days of Nazi and Soviet police
methods: the Archbishop’s palace in Brussels raided by agents;
bishops detained and interrogated for nine hours without due
process; their private computers, cell phones, and files seized.
Even the graves of the Church’s dead were violated in the raid. For
most Americans, this sort of calculated, public humiliation of
religious leaders would be an outrage and an abuse of state power.
And this is not because of the virtues or the sins of any specific
religious leaders involved, since we all have a duty to obey just
laws. Rather, it’s an outrage because the civil authority, by its
harshness, shows contempt for the beliefs and the believers whom the
leaders represent.
My point is this: These are not the actions of governments that see
the Catholic Church as a valued partner in their plans for the 21st
century. Quite the opposite. These events suggest an emerging,
systematic discrimination against the Church that now seems
inevitable.
Today’s secularizers have learned from the past. They are more
adroit in their bigotry; more elegant in their public relations;
more intelligent in their work to exclude the Church and individual
believers from influencing the moral life of society. Over the next
several decades, Christianity will become a faith that can speak in
the public square less and less freely. A society where faith is
prevented from vigorous public expression is a society that has
fashioned the state into an idol. And when the state becomes an
idol, men and women become the sacrificial offering.
Cardinal Henri de Lubac once wrote that “It is not true … that man
cannot organize the world without God. What is true, is that without
God, [man] can ultimately only organize it against man. Exclusive
humanism is inhuman humanism.”2
The West is now steadily moving in the direction of that new
“inhuman humanism.” And if the Church is to respond faithfully, we
need to draw upon the lessons that your Churches learned under
totalitarianism.
A Catholicism of resistance must be based on trust in Christ’s
words: “The truth will make you free.”3 This trust gave you insight
into the nature of totalitarian regimes. It helped you articulate
new ways of discipleship. Rereading the words of the Czech leader
Václav Havel to prepare for this talk, I was struck by the profound
Christian humanism of his idea of “living within the truth.”4
Catholics today need to see their discipleship and mission as
precisely that: “living within the truth.”
Living within the truth means living according to Jesus Christ and
God’s Word in Sacred Scripture. It means proclaiming the truth of
the Christian Gospel, not only by our words but by our example. It
means living every day and every moment from the unshakeable
conviction that God lives, and that his love is the motive force of
human history and the engine of every authentic human life. It means
believing that the truths of the Creed are worth suffering and dying
for.
Living within the truth also means telling the truth and calling
things by their right names. And that means exposing the lies by
which some men try to force others to live.
Two of the biggest lies in the world today are these: first, that
Christianity was of relatively minor importance in the development
of the West; and second, that Western values and institutions can be
sustained without a grounding in Christian moral principles.
Before I talk about these two falsehoods, we should pause a moment
to think about the meaning of history.
History is not simply about learning facts. History is a form of
memory, and memory is a foundation stone of self-identity. Facts are
useless without a context of meaning. The unique genius and meaning
of Western civilization cannot be understood without the 20
centuries of Christian context in which they developed. A people who
do not know their history, do not know themselves. They are a people
doomed to repeat the mistakes of their past because they cannot see
what the present – which always flowers out of the past -- requires
of them.
People who forget who they are can be much more easily manipulated.
This was dramatized famously in Orwell’s image of the “memory hole”
in his novel 1984. Today, the history of the Church and the legacy
of Western Christianity are being pushed down the memory hole. This
is the first lie that we need to face.
Downplaying the West’s Christian past is sometimes done with the
best intentions, from a desire to promote peaceful co-existence in a
pluralistic society. But more frequently it’s done to marginalize
Christians and to neutralize the Church’s public witness.
The Church needs to name and fight this lie. To be a European or an
American is to be heir to a profound Christian synthesis of Greek
philosophy and art, Roman law, and biblical truth. This synthesis
gave rise to the Christian humanism that undergirds all of Western
civilization.
On this point, we might remember the German Lutheran scholar and
pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote these words in the months
leading up to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943: “The unity of the
West is not an idea but a historical reality, of which the sole
foundation is Christ.”5
Our societies in the West are Christian by birth, and their survival
depends on the endurance of Christian values. Our core principles
and political institutions are based, in large measure, on the
morality of the Gospel and the Christian vision of man and
government. We are talking here not only about Christian theology or
religious ideas. We are talking about the moorings of our societies
-- representative government and the separation of powers; freedom
of religion and conscience; and most importantly, the dignity of the
human person.
This truth about the essential unity of the West has a corollary, as
Bonhoeffer also observed: Take away Christ and you remove the only
reliable foundation for our values, institutions and way of life.
That means we cannot dispense with our history out of some
superficial concern over offending our non-Christian neighbors.
Notwithstanding the chatter of the “new atheists,” there is no risk
that Christianity will ever be forced upon people anywhere in the
West. The only “confessional states” in the world today are those
ruled by Islamist or atheist dictatorships -- regimes that have
rejected the Christian West’s belief in individual rights and the
balance of powers.
I would argue that the defense of Western ideals is the only
protection that we and our neighbors have against a descent into new
forms of repression -- whether it might be at the hands of extremist
Islam or secularist technocrats.
But indifference to our Christian past contributes to indifference
about defending our values and institutions in the present. And this
brings me to the second big lie by which we live today -- the lie
that there is no unchanging truth.
Relativism is now the civil religion and public philosophy of the
West. Again, the arguments made for this viewpoint can seem
persuasive. Given the pluralism of the modern world, it might seem
to make sense that society should want to affirm that no one
individual or group has a monopoly on truth; that what one person
considers to be good and desirable another may not; and that all
cultures and religions should be respected as equally valid.
In practice, however, we see that without a belief in fixed moral
principles and transcendent truths, our political institutions and
language become instruments in the service of a new barbarism. In
the name of tolerance we come to tolerate the cruelest intolerance;
respect for other cultures comes to dictate disparagement of our
own; the teaching of “live and let live” justifies the strong living
at the expense of the weak.
This diagnosis helps us understand one of the foundational
injustices in the West today -- the crime of abortion.
I realize that the abortion license is a matter of current law in
almost every nation in the West. In some cases, this license
reflects the will of the majority and is enforced through legal and
democratic means. And I’m aware that many people, even in the
Church, find it strange that we Catholics in America still make the
sanctity of unborn life so central to our public witness.
Let me tell you why I believe abortion is the crucial issue of our
age.
First, because abortion, too, is about living within the truth. The
right to life is the foundation of every other human right. If that
right is not inviolate, then no right can be guaranteed.
Or to put it more bluntly: Homicide is homicide, no matter how small
the victim.
Here’s another truth that many persons in the Church have not yet
fully reckoned: The defense of newborn and preborn life has been a
central element of Catholic identity since the Apostolic Age.
I’ll say that again: From the earliest days of the Church, to be
Catholic has meant refusing in any way to participate in the crime
of abortion -- either by seeking an abortion, performing one, or
making this crime possible through actions or inactions in the
political or judicial realm. More than that, being Catholic has
meant crying out against all that offends the sanctity and dignity
of life as it has been revealed by Jesus Christ.
The evidence can be found in the earliest documents of Church
history. In our day -- when the sanctity of life is threatened not
only by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, but also by embryonic
research and eugenic temptations to eliminate the weak, the disabled
and the infirm elderly -- this aspect of Catholic identity becomes
even more vital to our discipleship.
My point in mentioning abortion is this: Its widespread acceptance
in the West shows us that without a grounding in God or a higher
truth, our democratic institutions can very easily become weapons
against our own human dignity.
Our most cherished values cannot be defended by reason alone, or
simply for their own sake. They have no self-sustaining or
“internal” justification.
There is no inherently logical or utilitarian reason why society
should respect the rights of the human person. There is even less
reason for recognizing the rights of those whose lives impose
burdens on others, as is the case with the child in the womb, the
terminally ill, or the physically or mentally disabled.
If human rights do not come from God, then they devolve to the
arbitrary conventions of men and women. The state exists to defend
the rights of man and to promote his flourishing. The state can
never be the source of those rights. When the state arrogates to
itself that power, even a democracy can become totalitarian.
What is legalized abortion but a form of intimate violence that
clothes itself in democracy? The will to power of the strong is
given the force of law to kill the weak.
That is where we are heading in the West today. And we’ve been there
before. Slovaks and many other central and eastern Europeans have
lived through it.
I suggested earlier that the Church’s religious liberty is under
assault today in ways not seen since the Nazi and Communist eras. I
believe we are now in the position to better understand why.
Writing in the 1960s, Richard Weaver, an American scholar and social
philosopher, said: “I am absolutely convinced that relativism must
eventually lead to a regime of force.”
He was right. There is a kind of “inner logic” that leads relativism
to repression.
This explains the paradox of how Western societies can preach
tolerance and diversity while aggressively undermining and
penalizing Catholic life. The dogma of tolerance cannot tolerate the
Church’s belief that some ideas and behaviors should not be
tolerated because they dehumanize us. The dogma that all truths are
relative cannot allow the thought that some truths might not be.
The Catholic beliefs that most deeply irritate the orthodoxies of
the West are those concerning abortion, sexuality and the marriage
of man and woman. This is no accident. These Christian beliefs
express the truth about human fertility, meaning and destiny.
These truths are subversive in a world that would have us believe
that God is not necessary and that human life has no inherent nature
or purpose. Thus the Church must be punished because, despite all
the sins and weaknesses of her people, she is still the bride of
Jesus Christ; still a source of beauty, meaning and hope that
refuses to die -- and still the most compelling and dangerous
heretic of the world’s new order.
Let me sum up what I’ve been saying.
My first point is this: Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have
bad consequences. Today we are living in a world that is under the
sway of some very destructive ideas, the worst being that men and
women can live as if God does not matter and as if the Son of God
never walked this earth. As a result of these bad ideas, the
Church’s freedom to exercise her mission is under attack. We need to
understand why that is, and we need to do something about it.
My second point is simply this: We can no longer afford to treat the
debate over secularization -- which really means cauterizing
Christianity out of our cultural memory -- as if it’s a problem for
Church professionals. The emergence of a “new Europe” and a “next
America” rooted in something other than the real facts of our
Christian-shaped history will have damaging consequences for every
serious believer.
We need not and should not abandon the hard work of honest dialogue.
Far from it. The Church always needs to seek friendships, areas of
agreement, and ways to make positive, reasoned arguments in the
public square. But it’s foolish to expect gratitude or even respect
from our governing and cultural leadership classes today. Naïve
imprudence is not an evangelical virtue.
The temptation in every age of the Church is to try to get along
with Caesar. And it’s very true: Scripture tells us to respect and
pray for our leaders. We need to have a healthy love for the
countries we call home. But we can never render unto Caesar what
belongs to God. We need to obey God first; the obligations of
political authority always come second. We cannot collaborate with
evil without gradually becoming evil ourselves. This is one of the
most vividly harsh lessons of the 20th century. And it’s a lesson
that I hope we have learned.
That brings me to my third and final point today: We live in a time
when the Church is called to be a believing community of resistance.
We need to call things by their true names. We need to fight the
evils we see. And most importantly, we must not delude ourselves
into thinking that by going along with the voices of secularism and
de-Christianization we can somehow mitigate or change things. Only
the Truth can set men free. We need to be apostles of Jesus Christ
and the Truth he incarnates.
So what does this mean for us as individual disciples? Let me offer
a few suggestions by way of a conclusion.
My first suggestion comes again from the great witness against the
paganism of the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The renewal of
the Western world lies solely in the divine renewal of the Church,
which leads her to the fellowship of the risen and living Jesus
Christ.”7
The world urgently needs a re-awakening of the Church in our actions
and in our public and private witness. The world needs each of us to
come to a deeper experience of our Risen Lord in the company of our
fellow believers. The renewal of the West depends overwhelmingly on
our faithfulness to Jesus Christ and his Church.
We need to really believe what we say we believe. Then we need to
prove it by the witness of our lives. We need to be so convinced of
the truths of the Creed that we are on fire to live by these truths,
to love by these truths, and to defend these truths, even to the
point of our own discomfort and suffering.
We are ambassadors of the living God to a world that is on the verge
of forgetting him. Our work is to make God real; to be the face of
his love; to propose once more to the men and women of our day, the
dialogue of salvation.
The lesson of the 20th century is that there is no cheap grace. This
God whom we believe in, this God who loved the world so much that he
sent his only Son to suffer and die for it, demands that we live the
same bold, sacrificial pattern of life shown to us by Jesus Christ.
The form of the Church, and the form of every Christian life, is the
form of the cross. Our lives must become a liturgy, a self-offering
that embodies the love of God and the renewal of the world.
The great Slovak martyrs of the past knew this. And they kept this
truth alive when the bitter weight of hatred and totalitarianism
pressed upon your people. I’m thinking especially right now of your
heroic bishops, Blessed Vasil Hopko and Pavel Gojdic, and the heroic
sister, Blessed Zdenka Schelingová.
We need to keep this beautiful mandate of Sister Zdenka close to our
hearts:
“My sacrifice, my holy Mass, begins in daily life. From the altar of
the Lord I go to the altar of my work. I must be able to continue
the sacrifice of the altar in every situation. … It is Christ whom
we must proclaim through our lives, to him we offer the sacrifice of
our own will.”8
Let us preach Jesus Christ with all the energy of our lives. And let
us support each other -- whatever the cost -- so that when we make
our accounting to the Lord, we will be numbered among the faithful
and courageous, and not the cowardly or the evasive, or those who
compromised until there was nothing left of their convictions; or
those who were silent when they should have spoken the right word at
the right time. Thank you. And God bless all of you.
Endnotes:
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, pt. 2, chap.
9 (New York: Library of America, 2004), 340.
2. Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1998), 14.
3. John 8:32.
4. See Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), in Open
Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990 (New York: Knopf, 1991),
125–214.
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (London: SCM, 1983), 72–73.
6. Richard Weaver, “Relativism and the Crisis of our Times” (1961),
in In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M.
Weaver, 1929–1963 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 104.
7. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 95.
8. See “Novena to the Blessed Zdenka Schelingová,” at
www.holycrosssisters.org/s_zdenka.html.
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