Strangers in a Strange Land by Charles J Chaput, Henry Holt, £20
Archbishop Charles Chaput has been one of the bright stars of the American hierarchy, defending traditional Catholic teaching. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI named him Archbishop of Philadelphia – one of the nation’s oldest and largest Catholic sees. He has not yet received the cardinal’s red hat, traditional for the Archbishop of Philadelphia, in part, some think, because of his “conservative” stances. For example, Chaput caused controversy with his guidance for implementing Amoris Laetitia, which some accused of being “retrograde” in its rejection of a reading that would extend Communion, for example, to divorced and remarried couples.
Chaput, a Native American, is also an accomplished Catholic intellectual. His new book builds on two earlier works, Living the Catholic Faith and Render unto Caesar, to craft a specifically public role for Catholics in social and political life.
Chaput takes aim at “the premise that who we are, how we are made, and with whom we mate are purely matters of personal choice and social contract. Biology is raw material. Gender is fluid. Both are free of any larger truth that might limit our actions.” Quoting Benedict, Chaput places the family, and our understanding of it, at the centre of our social order.
Strangers in a Strange Land is a tour de force of Catholic, and larger Western, intellectual history. Chaput weaves Scripture in with philosophy, Church teaching and current events to present a clear picture of our predicament. The West has decoupled itself from its formative tradition of Western philosophy, which seeks the real, and from Christianity, which seeks God. Instead, we are seeing the end of the Enlightenment, where our dominant intellectual modes are either postmodern triumph of the will or a kind of scientific determinism that removes free will. The faith in progress that animated the last two centuries risks turning to despair.
Looking to Augustine, Chaput describes this despair as “really a subtle inversion of pride … the icy, embittered vanity that defies reality and truth”. In a series of chapters, Chaput explains how we arrived at this situation, and then considers signs of renewal, including, most importantly, Christian hope, an act of trust in God’s goodness.
This book should be understood in its specifically American context. In the United States, Catholics are doubly “strangers”. In a nation founded by Protestants, Catholics have long struggled not to be seen as aliens in their own land. And now, in a post-Protestant country, Catholics remain on the outside of a secular culture that rejects them. “The effect of being outsiders has always fuelled a Catholic passion to fit in … to excel by the standards of the people who disdain us. Over time, we Catholics have succeeded very well – evidently too well. And that very success has weakened any chance the Church had to seize a ‘Catholic moment’ when Catholics might fill the moral hole in our culture.”
Now, this is not the whole story – the sex abuse scandals in the eyes of many prevented the Church from filling any moral hole. But Chaput is taking a clear side in debates among American Catholics about whether the American experiment is compatible with Catholic principles. Some have argued that the Constitution is basically a Thomistic document, others that the nation’s heritage as a collection of dissenting Protestant sects could not result in anything other than a secular state ultimately actively hostile to religion, and especially the Church.
Chaput is closer to the latter view, but not quite. Using Alexis de Tocqueville, Chaput reminds us that religion is intended to be a brake on the state, and the French thinker credited the sincere and widespread religious belief of Americans as the strongest prop to free government. As Chaput explains, America once thought this idea commonplace. The Founders were largely religious men, and the nation was deeply Christian and remained so until within living memory. A combination of social, technological and cultural factors – not least the failure to pass on the faith to the next generation – have now muted the Christian message in the public sphere.
But this faith must be real. Chaput does not believe in a civil religion that has the form but not the substance of religious faith. Christians are called to faith first, then through that faith are called to leaven the societies in which they live. They should not expect success in those societies. Indeed, as lessons from ancient Rome to modern China and the Middle East attest, the Christian lot is more often persecution.
Chaput’s argument, of course, extends beyond America. Catholics are strangers everywhere in the City of Man, even though it is only through that city that we can reach our true home in the eternal city.
To do that Chaput, in this important book, calls on Catholics to recover that true joy of witness and to reject the bitterness of the hour. For Christians must be known by the love they have for one another if they wish to change the world.
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