Archbishop Chaput noted the "huge spike" during his priesthood of hearing penitents confess sins of promiscuity, infidelity, sexual violence, sexual confusion, and pornography use.
"Listening to people's sexual sins in the Sacrament of Penance is hardly new news. But the scope, the novelty, the violence and the compulsiveness of the sins are," he said.
"The truth about our sexuality is that infidelity, promiscuity, sexual confusion and mass pornography create human wreckage," he continued. This wreckage has been compounded by tens of millions of people over five decades, and "media nonsense" about the effects of sexual immorality and divorce.
"What you get is what we have now: a dysfunctional culture of frustrated and wounded people increasingly incapable of permanent commitments, self-sacrifice and sustained intimacy, and unwilling to face the reality of their own problems," the archbishop lamented.
"This has political consequences. People unwilling to rule their appetites will inevitably be ruled by them – and eventually, they'll be ruled by someone else," he said. "People too weak to sustain faithful relationships are also too weak to be free. Sooner or later they surrender themselves to a state that compensates for their narcissism and immaturity with its own forms of social control."
People who are unwilling to have children and raise them with love, virtue, and moral character are "writing themselves out of the human story," he added.
Government has a role to play in easing problems like unemployment, low pay, crime, poor housing, chronic illness and bad schools, but not if government works "from a crippled idea of who man is, what marriage is, and what a family is."
He warned against a government that "deliberately shapes its policies to interfere with and control the mediating institutions in civil society that already serve the public well."
According to the archbishop, the decline of marriage, family, and traditional religion also have consequences for the country. Fewer than 30 percent of U.S. millennials think that it's vital to live in a democracy, while undemocratic feelings have especially risen among the wealthy.
This didn't happen by accident.
"We behaved ourselves into this mess by living a collection of lies," Archbishop Chaput charged.
(Story continues below)
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Given that the truth makes us free, "no issue has made us more dishonest and less free as believers and as a nation than abortion."
"Abortion poisons everything. There can never be anything 'progressive' in killing an unborn child, or standing aside tolerantly while others do it."
"In every abortion, an innocent life always dies," the archbishop said. Trying to imply other important issues have the same moral weight is "a debasement of Christian thought."
Archbishop Chaput also criticized Notre Dame's granting of its Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden.
"For the nation's leading Catholic university to honor a Catholic public official who supports abortion rights and then goes on to conduct a same-sex civil marriage ceremony just weeks later, is – to put it kindly – a contradiction of Notre Dame's identity," he said.
"It's a baffling error of judgment. What matters isn't the vice president's personal decency or the university's admirable intentions. The problem, and it's a serious problem, is one of public witness and the damage it causes both to the faithful and to the uninformed."