“We serve Caesar best when we serve God first,” he asserted, explaining that serving God means deepening our Catholic faith and acting on it.
Failing to do so steals from the “moral discourse” that makes democracy work and is a form of cowardice.
Noting the vital distinction between “proper obedience to authority” and “obedience to proper authority,” he noted Christians’ “serious obligations” to obey secular authority because “all authority ultimately derives from God and is accountable to Him.”
“In the military that duty is especially urgent because if some people don’t obey, other people can die,” the archbishop added.
However, no secular authority can override Catholics’ conscience on the sanctity of innocent life, he insisted.
“Genocide is always gravely wrong. Deliberately targeting civilians in combat is always gravely wrong. Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia are always gravely wrong. There are no exceptions, because all of these evil actions intentionally attack the innocent. No authority can legitimately demand our cooperation in intrinsically evil acts -- and authority loses its legitimacy when it tries to do so.”
Proper obedience must be lived with humility and unselfishness but also “with brains and a conscience,” conscience being fully developed self-mastery and not “a feeling or an opinion or a personal preference.”
“It’s the voice of God in our hearts,” he said, revealed in Scripture, in prayer and in the teaching of the God-given Catholic faith.
“Obedience to the law is never an excuse for supporting or colluding in grave evil,” he said, saying that Catholics are not robots but moral agents whose decisions will be judged by God.
Noting that the cadets rank among the top ten percent of America’s young leaders, he said their talents have big implications for other Americans, because “we’re all going to suffer if you choose to be naïve, selfish or dumb.”
A free democracy depends on leaders and citizens who know how to think and have morally formed and critical minds, he added.
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“In practice, much of our popular culture now operates like a narcotic,” Archbishop Chaput remarked. “It dumbs down our news and politics, bleaches out our beliefs, and reshapes our opinions.
“This has unhappy consequences. Real democracy requires a vigorous, intelligent, shared public commitment to the common good. It dies in a culture addicted to the pursuit of individual appetites and insecurities. And I believe it’s reasonable to ask whether the latter is what we’re becoming.”
As an example of decline, he referred to the media’s arbitrary depictions of presidential popularity polls.
“If we lose the ability to reason clearly, based on accurate information, then we lose the ability to be free. As citizens, that means we need to subject the press in our country to the same hard scrutiny and high standards of accountability to which they hold everyone else,” he continued.
“People, not things matter,” the archbishop said, noting that the “true moral monster” Mao Zedong was nonetheless right when he wrote that “it is people, not things that are decisive.”
“Our political structures as a free people are the product of great moral and intellectual sophistication,” he explained to the cadets, saying that customary American pragmatism should not obscure this fact.