Common Good and the Order of Charity

Beating a dead horse, the Latin bishops.

RC social teaching unmoored from the order of charity and a full understanding of the common good becomes easily changed into liberal morality and SJW activism. Let Latin bishops return to teaching the order of charity and the Natural Law before they talk about political matters.

CNA: ‘Never accept’ separation of faith from political engagement, Chaput says (also posted at CWR)

Still Trying...

CNA: Chaput: ‘Rebuild a Christian society without divided loyalties’

But why would anyone want to embrace a weak, enemic sort of Christianity that has no real political consequence? We are not in a time of murderous persecution yet.

Just Because a Bishop Said It

Doesn't mean it's true. Sacred Tradition does not encompass the understanding of particular historical circumstances nor historical analysis, and the Holy Spirit does not confer a special competence to bishops to do either task.

CNA Archbishop Chaput: When we forget faith, we forget our humanity In an address at the Faith and Reason Institute at Gonzaga University, the Archbishop of Philadelphia says loss of faith has a detrimental impact on three areas: sex, technology, and basic premises.

Did Augustine do the same in City of God? Was he wise enough to be able to do so well? Would it be better for bishops to refrain from doing so, unless they demonstrated extraordinary wisdom?

Joshua Mitchell Should Talk to Archbishop Chaput

AmConMag: Fashioning a Post-Fusionist Christian Politics by Emile A. Doak
As the traditional conservative coalition unravels, the faithful must provide a better way. A recent AEI panel discussed the possibilities.

Christian anthropology is relational; man flourishes in a community properly ordered towards the common good. And like most things worthwhile, community and the common good have limits. The increasingly ridiculous notion of Facebook as a legitimate global community illustrates the former. As for the latter, as Reno argued, the language of the “common good” is ill-suited to global realities. Sure, there are global goods, things like peace, prosperity, family—things that are as true in America as they are in Afghanistan—but these are not the same as the singular, indivisible, communal, and limited common good that is the proper object of all political and social life. The common good emerges from the relationships, traditions, and cultures that provide purpose to a polity. And these elements can only develop when rooted in a specific place over time. It’s no wonder that introducing a massive influx of new people with new relationships, traditions, and cultures has caused such anxiety among those already navigating the most fragile social fabric—the most fraught common good—in American society. While the topic of mass immigration understandably draws sympathy for the immigrant seeking a new and better life, this sympathy must be balanced with a renewed awareness of the effect that mass immigration has on the social fabric of communities tasked with absorbing it.

This is the new Christian political project. Working towards electoral goals with regard to select hot-button issues, while laudable, is increasingly a relic of a past age. Western democracy has reached a tipping point, leaving Christians—the laity especially—to imagine a new political paradigm that protects both subsidiarity and solidarity, one that buttresses against the ill effects of both state and market, globalism and ethnic nationalism. In a world where global managers have severely eroded our sense of place and home, and a “dangerous romanticized [ethnic] nationalism,” to quote Mitchell, is on the rise in response, we need another option. To find one, we on the right will need to engage in the same kind of unorthodox debate that was on display at AEI Wednesday evening.

Archbishop Chaput at It Again

Pushing his erroneous immigrant myth about the United States -- Things To Come: Faith, State, and Society in a New World

The full text of the inaugural Religion and Public Life Lecture delivered today at the Matthew J. Ryan Center at Villanova University.

RISE

CWR: A new program challenges Catholic men to “RISE” by Jim Graves

“There’s never been a more important time than now for men to step up.”

website

Blue pill?

CNA: We must become 'new men,' Archbishop Chaput says

The archbishop said “Christian equality” understands “the reality of the differences and mutual dependencies of real men and women.”

“As men, we’re hardwired by nature and confirmed by the Word of God to do three main things: to provide, to protect, and to lead – not for our own sake, not for our own empty vanities and appetites, but in service to others.”

Edit.
Here is the full text of the speech: Memory, Sex, and the Making of "The New Man"

"Just as memory anchors each person’s individual story, history plays the same role for cultures, nations and communities of faith. History is our shared memory."

Yes, it is. So why is the Latin hierarchy pushing for multiculturalism in the U.S.?

We men – all of us, both clergy and lay — bear a special responsibility because the Gospel tasks us as leaders. That doesn’t make us better than anyone else. It takes nothing away from the genius of women or the equality of women and men. But human beings are not identical units. We’re not interchangeable pieces of social machinery. Christian equality is based not in political ideology but in the reality of the differences and mutual dependencies of real men and women. As creatures we’re designed to need each other, not replicate each other. And this, by the way, is a key reason why modern culture is so conflicted about the body.

The egalitarianism can be explained with respect to "human dignity" or the dignity of their ultimate vocation. But is this more "complementarian" than patriarchical?

This is arguably blue pill:

Those are some of the don’ts. The dos are equally obvious. Do love the women in your life with the encouragement, affection, support and reverence they deserve by right. Do be faithful to your wife in mind and body. Do show courtesy and respect to the women you meet, even when they don’t return it. Chivalry is dead only if we men cooperate in killing it – and given the vulgarity of our current national environment and its leaders, we certainly need some kind of new code of dignity between the sexes.

Archbishop Chaput's speech was also posted at Crisis. A commentator notes that what will bring men to church is a reverent liturgy; unfortunately Archbishop Chaput is not a follower of Benedict XVI's plan for liturgical renewal.

Naturally, No Mention of Identity Politics or Its Causes

Shepherd in a Strange Land by Carl E. Olson

On Strangers in a Strange Land by Charles J. Chaput.

The Blue Pill Mindset Dies Hard

Archbishop Chaput recommends Mark Regnerus's latest.

A Representative of the Immigrant Church

that never assimilated or incultlurated properly.

CWR: Want to change the world? It starts with joy, Archbishop Chaput says

“Faith is a seed,” Archbishop Chaput told attendees of the Napa Institute Conference in California, “It doesn’t flower overnight. It takes time and love and effort.”

Crisis Magazine Will Never Reproach Bishops like Archbishop Chaput

For pushing for more "refugees" and "immigrants," and thus providing support and comfort leftists and SJWs whose agenda also includes banning what they determine to be "hate" speech.

The "institutional" Church in the United States is part of the problem.

The Future of the West: Christian or Pagan? by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

“This is our time of witness”: Abp Chaput on how American Catholics remain “strangers in a strange land” By Carl E. Olson

“It’s a time not for sadness but gratitude—and courage,” says the archbishop of Philadelphia in a discussion of his latest book on “Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World.”



Perhaps they are strangers in a strange land because they never fully assimilated and integrated with the natives...

Archbishop Chaput Has a New Book

CWR: "Facts" and "values" and darkness at noon By Abp Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap.
The moral conflicts that permeate our public policy debates are endless and irresolvable because our culture no longer has a rational, mutually accepted way of getting to moral agreement, writes Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput in this exclusive excerpt from his new book.


(Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Archbishop Charles Chaput’s forthcoming book Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World (Henry Holt and Co.). The book will be available February 21.)

CWR Dispatch: “Strangers in a Strange Land”: Chaput on Catholics weathering a sea change in American life by Michael J. Miller
In his new book, Abp Chaput writes from his unique position to examine the interface between Catholic faith and morals, on the one hand, and today’s aggressively secular American society on the other.

If this is the best that "conservative" American bishops to do, there is little reason to think that the Catholic Church will be able to do anything to change things. The American Church doesn't understand the problem, or its own complicity in creating the problem.

Archbishop Chaput on Mercy

A Jubilee Year of Mercy by Charles J. Chaput

Again, the Latin opposition between "justice" and "mercy," though some may find this more theologically erudite than the writings of the current patriarch of Rome.

Then there is this piece written by the directrix of worship for the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Jose: Why a Jubilee Year of Mercy Matters by Diana Macalintal

Do Catholic dioceses give a living wage to their employees, one that enables fathers to support their families while the mothers care for the home? In the Silicon Valley this may be difficult, but if those who are being hired (mainly women -- hence the implicit endorsement of at least "material" feminism) are hired because it is not a living wage but a second income for the family, what does this say about the adherence (or witness) of Roman Catholic chanceries to Roman Catholic social doctrine? If Roman Catholic churches cannot pay their employees, then maybe it is time to reconsider how they do things.

An Uhmerican Prelate

Chaput, Romeri and the Battle Over Music in Philadelphia by Mark Nowakowski

Preparing for the World Meeting of Families

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

Is the dedication of resources for such a hullabaloo justifiable?

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

Post by Zenit News Agency.

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

More on Chaput

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

More Church Items:

Post by Zenit News Agency.

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

Repeating a Mem

'Demographics is Destiny' Archbishop Chaput Tells Latino Catholics

Anything about assimilation?

George Weigel Reviews Russell Shaw

U.S. Catholics: Overly Assimilated?

And seems to give the nationalist, neo-Yankee proposition-nation view as the basis of his critique (which would not be surprising given his reputation as a theo-con):

To read the history of the Catholic Church in the United States as a centuries-long struggle for assimilation and acceptance certainly sheds light on one dynamic in the development of the Church in America. Yet too close a focus on the question, “Is it possible to be a good Catholic and a good American?” is to argue the question of Catholicism and America on the other guy’s turf. Once, the “other guy” challenging Catholics’ patriotic credentials was militant Protestantism; now, the other guy is militant secularism. To play on the other guy’s turf, however, is to concede at the outset that the other guy sets the terms of debate: “We (militant Protestants/militant secularists) know what it means to be a good American; you (Catholics) have to prove yourselves to us.”

That’s not the game, however. It wasn’t really the game from 1776 through the 1960 presidential campaign—when militant Protestantism was the aggressor—and it isn’t the game today. The real game involves different, deeper questions: “Who best understands the nature of the American experiment in ordered liberty, and who can best give a persuasive defense of the first liberty, which is religious freedom?”

The nineteenth-century U.S. bishops and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for American democracy Russell Shaw now views skeptically (and, yes, they did go over the top on occasion) did get one crucial point right: the American founders “built better than they knew,” i.e., the founders designed a democratic republic for which they couldn’t provide a durable moral and philosophical defense. But the long-despised (and now despised-again) Catholics could: Catholics could (and can) give a robust, compelling account of American democracy and its commitments to ordered liberty.

Mid–twentieth-century Catholic scholars like historian Theodore Maynard and theologian John Courtney Murray picked up this theme and made it central to their reading of U.S. Catholic history. Murray presciently warned that, if Catholicism didn’t fill the cultural vacuum being created by a dying mainline Protestantism, the “noble, many-storied mansion of democracy [may] be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”

Related:
Religious freedom and the need to wake up by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput