Thursday, June 21, 2012
Archbishop Chaput on religious liberty
I am in Indianapolis at the Catholic Media Conference. Last night, Archbishop Chaput gave the keynote. The text will be forthcoming in First Things, but here is a taste:
Here’s my fifth and final point: Politics and the courts are important. But our religious
freedom ultimately depends on the vividness of our own Christian faith – in other words, how deeply we believe it, and how honestly we live it. Religious liberty is an empty shell if the spiritual core of a people is weak. Or to put it more bluntly, if people don’t believe in God, religious liberty isn’t a value. That’s the heart of the matter. It’s the reason Pope Benedict calls us to a Year of Faith this October. The worst enemies of religious freedom aren’t “out there” among the legion of critics who hate Christ or the Gospel or the Church, or all three. The worst enemies are in here, with us – all of us, clergy, religious and lay – when we live our faith with tepidness, routine and hypocrisy.
Religious liberty isn’t a privilege granted by the state. It’s our birthright as children of God. And even the worst bigotry can’t kill it in the face of a believing people. But if we value it and want to keep it, then we need to become people worthy of it. Which means we need tochange the way we live – radically change, both as individual Catholics and as the Church.
This morning, Carter Snead (Notre Dame), Rita Joyce (General Counsel for the Pittsburgh Diocese), and I followed up with a panel on Religious Liberty in light of the lawsuits filed against the HHS mandate. I contextualized the debate within a) the broader contemprary threats to religious freedom and b) historical threats to religious liberty; Rita gave us great insight into the lawsuits themselves; and Carter addressed broader public policy issues and provided a rejoinder to some of the false claims surfacing in the public debate. The overflow crowd of Catholic journalists asked some penetrating questions, including one that raised the threats to religious liberty from the spate of state anti-immigration laws and anti-Sharia law laws.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/06/archbishop-chaput-on-religious-liberty.html
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He doesn't really have much interesting to say about the actual content of religious liberty, does he? Which is remarkable given that the Church is about to engage in a made-for-Fox-news "Fortnight for Freedom".
Practically speaking, nobody in this country is against religious liberty; all of the disagreement arises over where the boundary between religious liberty and government authority (including the authority to protect other human rights) should be drawn. Yet Chaput has zero to say about this core issue - he doesn't even acknowledge it. He simply pretends that "religious liberty" has a simple, settled identity and that some people, due to "hostility", are against the Church having this thing.
Chaput's rhetoric is inexplicable if the Bishops want to make a reasoned argument about the proper bounds of religious liberty. It is, however, completely understandable as a political gambit if the Bishops are trying to stir up thoughtless animosity toward Obama by trading on the scurrilous rumors of his supposed hatred for America and/or his hidden Islamic (read, anti-Christian) beliefs.