[Several comments on the speech here, including this by Paul Baumann, editor of Commonweal:]
I attended the Fordham conference on Kennedy’s speech, and remember
well Shaun Casey’s rebuttal to those, such as Chaput, who insist that
the speech was an effort to “privatize” religion. “After the [Kennedy]
speech there was a question-and-answer period,” Casey said, “The
transcript of the Q&A session is actually three times as long as
the speech itself. The exchanges there, in particular, I think helped
knock down the argument that somehow Kennedy was declaring his
Catholicism to be purely private, and hence irrelevant. He embraces his
Catholicism. He says he’s not renouncing his church. At the very end,
he said, ‘I don’t think I made any converts to my church in the process
of this meeting, but I don’t repudiate my faith.’”
So it seems clear to me that Chaput’s reading of the speech is
anachronistic at best. Chaput’s talk is also studded with provocative
but vague declarations about the false faith of others: “It’s a form of
lying,” “They’re not optional,” “I wonder if we’ve ever had fewer of
them who can coherently explain how their faith informs their work, or
who event feel obligated to try,” “Too many live their faith as if it
were a private idiosyncrasy—the kind that they’ll never allow to become
a public nuisance. And too many just don’t really believe.” This
doesn’t strike me as the kind of language one uses when trying to
persuade those who might disagree with you, let alone fellow
Christians. In any event, Chaput fails to make a plausible case that
Kennedy’s speech “profoundly undermined the place not just of
Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and
political conversation.” Even if you accept the notion that religious
believers have been marginalize in this way—which I don’t—it’s quite a
stretch to lay the blame at Kennedy’s door.
As many contributors to this blog know, long-time Commonweal
columnist John Cogley was an important adviser to Kennedy and a
speechwriter Ted Sorenson for the Houston address. Cogley concluded his
1973 book “Catholic America” as follows: “While Catholicism can coexist
very well with separation of church and state, its best representatives
will always refuse to separate religion and life. And that makes all
the difference.”
If you are not reading the "Front Porch Republic" blog (
here), you should be.
