I knew that the Catholic church was having recruitment problems, but not like this. Charles Chaput, the ultraconservative archbishop of Philadelphia, gave a speech in which he encouraged liberal and moderate Catholics to leave the church:
“[W]e should never be afraid of a smaller, lighter church if her members are also more faithful, more zealous, more missionary and more committed to holiness.
“Losing people who are members of the church in name only is an imaginary loss,” he continued. “It may in fact be more honest for those who leave and healthier for those who stay. We should be focused on commitment, not numbers or institutional throw-weight.”
In a sense, I agree with this. It’s not honest to call yourself a member of a church that you have no meaningful connection to. If you’ve stopped attending services, if you don’t agree with the doctrines being taught from the pulpit, if the church’s teachings are irrelevant to your day-to-day life, you should formally disassociate yourself. Don’t be afraid to stand up and be counted as a nonbeliever, if that’s what you really are.
However, Chaput didn’t seem to be directing his ire solely at Christmas-and-Easter Christians. Rather, his real targets are Catholics who don’t fall in line with the church’s political positions, no matter how faithful they may be:
Chaput’s main focus, however, was on the wider threat posed by what he said was a secularizing culture and a progressive political agenda that “bleaches out strong religious convictions in the name of liberal tolerance.”
Too many Catholics are guilty of cooperating with that process, he said, transferring “our real loyalties and convictions from the old church of our baptism to the new ‘church’ of our ambitions and appetites.”
He named Biden, Kaine and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as prime examples of this phenomenon, as well as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic and Republican appointee whose deciding vote in the landmark 2015 gay marriage case made him anathema to many social conservatives.
The obvious problem is that the politicians Chaput was railing against are all Catholic themselves (Tim Kaine was an actual missionary). Whatever I may think of their beliefs, I don’t think they lack “strong religious convictions”.
Chaput implies that disagreeing with him, rejecting the specific set of cruel and archaic rules he advocates, is equivalent to having no faith at all. I appreciate the compliment, but I have to decline it. It’d be nice to think that every enlightened and moral person was an atheist, but the reality is that religious people differ across the board of every political issue there is.
He isn’t wrong that liberal Catholics are rejecting the decrees of the church, but this doesn’t mean they lack convictions of their own. It’s arrogant and insulting to insinuate that the only reason to support reproductive choice or same-sex marriage is “ambition and appetite”, as opposed to genuinely believing that those are human rights which should be respected. If anything, our moral views, which come from lived experience and rational debate, are better than his dogmas, which are rooted in the dead recitation of ancient books and are unresponsive to moral progress.
I’m not surprised to see a church leader taking this tack. Conservatives, no less than liberals, have struggled with the evidence of religion’s fading. They’ve tried everything they could think of to stem the decline, without success. It was inevitable that, at some point, cognitive dissonance would kick in and they would rationalize it as a good thing.
In Chaput’s view, Catholics should be glad that the less orthodox are falling away, leaving behind a smaller and purer church, less reconciled to modernity. There’s even a jaw-dropping line where he praises Muslim women who wear the hijab:
He said that despite his “long list of concerns with the content of Islam” he admired Muslim women who proudly wear the hijab and said Catholics could learn from that as they seek to “recover their own sense of distinction from the surrounding secular meltdown.”
It’s not clear whether Chaput is envious of conservative Muslims because they’re willing to be visibly distinct from the cultures around them, or because he admires their emphasis on female modesty and subordination. (Or both.)
Either way, it’s attitudes like this that are accelerating the decline. If liberal and moderate Catholics wonder whether they’re welcome in the church, well, see for yourself. If you support same-sex marriage or contraception or divorce, or if you just have a tendency to doubt or question, the church’s highest officials say there’s no place for you and want to nudge you out the door. I encourage everyone to take that advice!
Along the same lines, I applaud Chaput for his unwillingness to bend his principles and hope he’ll continue to speak out. Say it loud and clear – let everyone know that this is what the church stands for!
If conservatives like him want to persuade themselves that everything is going fine as they’re driving away younger generations en masse, more power to them. They may imagine that a smaller church will be more politically effective, but they’ll soon find that they’re on a greased slide into total irrelevance.