Chaput, "Catholics in the Next America"

Archbishop Chaput has a worth-reading essay over at First Things, which provides a useful complement to the sometimes-too-quickly-accepted "Catholics finally made it in America after the election of Kennedy and Vatican II" narrative:

. . . In the years since Kennedy’s election, Vatican II and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, two generations of citizens have grown to maturity. The world is a different place. America is a different place—and in some ways, a far more troubling one. We can’t change history, though we need to remember and understand it. But we can only blame outside factors for our present realities up to a point. As Catholics, like so many other American Christians, we have too often made our country what it is through our appetite for success, our self-delusion, our eagerness to fit in, our vanity, our compromises, our self-absorption and our tepid faith. . . .

Read the whole thing.