New York City, N.Y., Sep 18, 2010 / 06:04 am
In upcoming years Catholics will likely find it harder to influence the course of American culture or to live their faith “authentically,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput has written. A social consensus which once supported Christian assumptions in the U.S. is “much weakened” to the point that there is “no more revolutionary act” than to live Christian faith with integrity, he said.
Writing in an essay titled “Catholics and the Next America” at the First Things website, the Archbishop of Denver noted a central “myth” of American Catholicism: the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president helped U.S. Catholics break through into the mainstream.
This is not entirely unfounded, he explained, because baptized Catholics make up the largest religious community in the U.S., serve in Congress and on the Supreme Court, while also having leading roles in the business world.
However, the direction of the country is less reassuring than these apparent signs of progress.
“Catholic statistics once seemed impressive. They filled many of us with tribal pride. But they didn’t stop a new and quite alien national landscape, a ‘next America,’ from emerging right under our noses,” the archbishop commented.