His remarks touched on the mandate, along with related areas of concern – including efforts to drive the Church out of adoption and foster care, and the government's attempt to control a religious school's self-governance in the Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court case.
Such threats, he warned, could push the U.S. in the direction of Canada and Britain, where the Church's freedom of speech and action is already compromised.
The U.S. Constitution would prove to be nothing more than “an elegant piece of paper,” if Catholics and other citizens were not willing to stand up for their rights, he said.
But the Church's most serious challenges, the Philadelphia archbishop observed, are internal and spiritual in nature. He urged the faithful to “look honestly at the arc of Catholic history” in the U.S., as a guide to the deeper problems facing the Church at present.
“American Catholics began as an unwelcome minority,” he recalled. “The Church built her credibility by defending and serving her people. She developed her influence with the resources her people entrusted to her. A vast amount of good was done in the process.”
“But two other things also happened. The Church in the United States became powerful and secure. And Catholics became less and less invested in the Church that their own parents and grandparents helped to build.”
Success and stability allowed many clergy to fall “out of touch with reality,” while some lay Catholics grew eager “to lose themselves in America’s culture of consumerism and success.”
“These problems kill a Christian love of poverty and zeal. They choke off a real life of faith. They create the shadows that hide institutional and personal sins. And they encourage a paralysis that can burrow itself into every heart and every layer of the Church,” the archbishop reflected.
It is partly due to these problems, he suggested, that his own Archdiocese of Philadelphia “is now really mission territory – again, for the second time.” And so, too, is “much of the Church in the rest of our country.”
The way forward, meanwhile, lies in the rediscovery of Jesus' true person and message – as the basis for a faith that can stand against assaults, both from outside, and from within.
“We live in a world of illusions when we lose sight of who Jesus Christ really is, and what he asks from each of us as disciples,” the archbishop said, pointing out that the “real Jesus” continues to call the faithful to a “life of honesty, heroism and sacrifice.”
Only by obeying this call, will Catholics “become people worthy of” the religious freedom they are called to defend.
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“We work best for religious freedom by first opening our hearts to God’s will instead of our own; and loving our country and our Church; and renewing the witness of the Church with the zeal and purity and obedience of our own lives,” Archbishop Chaput said.
“That freedom, that joy, no one can ever take from us.”
Archbishop Chaput's full text can be found at: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/06/launching-the-fortnight-for-freedom
