Catholics in public life

A few months ago a breakfast was held in Washington DC attended by many prominent people and the keynote address was delivered by the Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, a Capuchin. During the first 200 years of U.S. history (he said) American Catholics were trying merely to be accepted. Now that they have achieved that goal, a problem has arisen. Many Catholics in public life are afraid to act according to their Catholic convictions. As he put it, "Since the 1960s many American Catholics have been acting like we’re lucky just to be tolerated in the public square. In other words, we’d better not be too Catholic or somebody will be offended. That’s a mistake."

Equivalently, these dissembling American Catholics are saying, "In private life I am a Catholic, but I don’t allow my Catholic Faith to influence my public acts and decisions."

Such people (says the Archbishop) are either confused or are evasive. (He refrains from using the word "cowardly".)

Why shouldn’t their Catholic beliefs influence their public decisions? As the Archbishop puts it, "the most precious thing anyone can bring to any political conversation is an honest witness to what he or she really believes."

To do otherwise is to live a lie.

The Archbishop does not go into details, but perhaps we can think of some obvious examples. If a person believes that our very lives depend on God, how can he vote in favor of a law forbidding any form of prayer in public schools? If a person believes that human life is precious and that it is a sin to kill an innocent human being, how can he vote in favor of promoting the killing of babies in the womb – or worse, at birth?

If as Catholics we believe that marriage is a sacrament, a sacred union of man and woman, blessed by God, for the procreation and education of children, how can we vote in favor of same-sex "marriage"?

To say "I am privately a Catholic but I don’t allow the tenets of the Church to influence my public life" is to admit that one is living a lie.

"What we really believe, we conform our lives to. And if we don’t conform our lives to what we claim to believe, then we are living a lie," says the Archbishop.

What we believe about God, says the Archbishop, shapes what we believe about men and women, and it shapes what we do to promote human dignity.

Our religious convictions are not private. They are what defines us. They therefore must influence even our public actions and decisions. Admittedly, this may be difficult for Americans. American Catholics are a minority in a predominantly secular and even anti-Christian culture. Our politicians in the Philippines do not have that problem. And yet even they are sometimes tempted to dissemble. They like to be called "broadminded".

There is also a problem peculiar to the Philippines: many of our Catholics are Catholics only in name. Their Christianity is superficial. At heart they are really pagans, perhaps even atheists.

How else can we explain that we – the only Christian nation in the East – are also among the most corrupt? How explain the enormous amount of murders, of bank robberies, of kidnappings for ransom? How explain the enormous waste of taxpayers’ money, used, not for the good of the people, but to satisfy private greed?