Veritas et Sapientia-Archbishop Chaput: Catholics Have Traded Loyalty To Christ For Loyalty To Ambition

Mandeville, LA – “Americans aren’t fools.  They have a good sense of smell when things aren’t right.  And one of the things wrong with our country right now is the hollowing out and retooling of all the key words in our country’s public lexicon; words like democracy, representative government, freedom, justice, due process, religious liberty and constitutional protections.  The language of our politics is the same.  The content of the words is different.  Voting still matters.  Public protest and letters to members of Congress can still have an effect.  But more and more of our nation’s life is governed by executive order, judicial overreach and administrative agencies with little accountability to Congress. 

People feel angry because they feel powerless.  And they feel powerless because in many ways they are.   When Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, he assumed that only two basic social structures were possible in the modern era, democracy and aristocracy.  Because of its mass appeal, democracy would be the winner.  Once we assume that power flows from the people, the ordinary citizen, not some self-styled nobility, obviously has the right to rule.

Or at least that’s the theory.  Reality is more complex.  Tocqueville noted that even in America, both “aristocratic [and] democratic passions are found at the bottom of all parties.”  These passions might be hidden from view.  But they’re very much alive and well.  It’s worth noting that aristoi is just the Greek word for “the best,” and in practice, social elites come in all shapes and sizes. 

The 2016 election is one of those rare moments when the repellent nature of both presidential candidates allows the rest of us to see our nation’s pastoral terrain as it really is.  And the view is unpleasant.  America’s cultural and political elites talk a lot about equality, opportunity and justice.  But they behave like a privileged class with an authority based on their connections and skills.  And supported by sympathetic media, they’re remaking the country into something very different from anything most of us remember or the Founders imagined.

The WikiLeaks email release last week from the Clinton entourage says a lot about how the merit-class elite views people like those in this room.  It’s not friendly.

But what does any of this have to do with our theme?  Actually quite a lot.  G.K. Chesterton once quipped that America is a nation that thinks it’s a Church.  And he was right.  In fact, he was more accurate than he could have guessed.  Catholics came to this country to build a new life.  They did exceptionally well here.  They’ve done so well that by now many of us Catholics are largely assimilated to, and digested by, a culture that bleaches out strong religious convictions in the name of liberal tolerance and dulls our longings for the supernatural with a river of practical atheism in the form of consumer goods.

To put it another way, quite a few of us American Catholics have worked our way into a leadership class that the rest of the country both envies and resents.  And the price of our entry has been the transfer of our real loyalties and convictions from the old Church of our baptism to the new “Church” of our ambitions and appetites.  People like Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Kennedy, Joe Biden and Tim Kaine are not anomalies.  They’re part of a very large crowd that cuts across all professions and both major political parties.” – Archbishop Chaput at Notre Dame, REMEMBERING WHO WE ARE AND THE STORY WE BELONG TO

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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