A couple of All Saints' Day reflections on Archbishop Chaput's call for hope despite the digestion of American Catholics by culture

Today, the Feast of All Saints, is a day of radical Christian hope. It is a daunting day. The feast's reminder of the universal call to holiness unsettles our accustomed ways of settling for less from ourselves.

In thinking about Christian hope this morning, I'm reminded of Archbishop Chaput's bracing remarks at Notre Dame a couple of weeks ago. Here's what he said about hope, in contrast with the "twin forms of self-deception" known as pessimism and optimism:

In describing a hard time, the words can easily sound dark and distressing.  That’s not my intention at all.  Optimism and pessimism are twin forms of self-deception.  We need instead to be a people of hope, which means we don’t have the luxury of whining.

There’s too much beauty in people and in the world to let ourselves become bitter.  And by reminding us of that in The Joy of the Gospel, his first apostolic exhortation, Pope Francis gives us a great gift.  One of his strongest qualities -- and I saw this at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia -- is his power to inspire confidence and joy in people while speaking candidly about the problems we face in a suffering world.

Serenity of heart comes from consciously trying to live on a daily basis the things we claim to believe.  Acting on our faith increases our faith.  And it serves as a magnet for other people.  To reclaim the Church for the Catholic imagination, we should start by renewing in our people a sense that eternity is real, that together we have a mission the world depends on, and that our lives have consequences that transcend time.  Francis radiated all these things during his time in Philadelphia.

If men and women are really made for heroism and glory, made to stand in the presence of the living God, they can never be satisfied with bourgeois, mediocre, feel-good religion.  They’ll never be fed by ugly worship and shallow moralizing.  But that’s what we too often give them.  And the reason we do it is because too many of us have welcomed the good news of Vatican II without carving its demand for conversion onto the stone of our hearts.  In opening ourselves to the world, we’ve forgotten our parts in the larger drama of our lives—salvation history, which always, in some way, involves walking past St. Cyril’s serpent.

Hope, joy, confidence, heroism, glory. The Christian has much to live for.

Archbishop Chaput asserts that "serenity of heart comes from consciously trying to live on a daily basis the things we claim to believe." This is worth holding on to, especially for those of us who feel consumed by the election. One way of living the things we claim to believe in times like these may be precisely to put aside worries about the election and to focus more on how we can live in salvation history. And this can be uncomfortable for many of us in ways that it wasn't for generations of American Catholics before us. Here's Archbishop Chaput again: 

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.

Doesn't this hit a bit too close to home? Even so, we should repent but not despair. As my Twitter timeline helpfully reminded me earlier today, via the intervention of Fr. William Dailey, CSC, today's Feast is "a joyous, hopeful celebration as every saint has a past and every sinner a future. Alleluia!"