QUOTATION: Unbelief

If we don’t believe in the devil, sooner or later we won’t believe in God.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Mush Doesn't Feed Heroes

If men and women are really made for heroism and glory, made to stand in the presence of the living God, they can never be satisfied with bourgeois, mediocre, feel-good religion. They’ll never be fed by ugly worship and shallow moralizing. But that’s what we too often give them.

 --Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Enemies of Religious Freedom

The worst enemies of religious freedom aren’t 'out there' among the critics who hate Christ or the Gospel or the Church, or all three. The worst enemies are in here, with us — all of us, clergy, religious and lay — when we live our faith with tepidness, cheap compromises, fear, routine, and hypocrisy.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Rights

What God endows, no human being – no judge, no court, no legislator and no executive – can take away. And when governments assume the power to define rights, repression always follows.

--Archbishop Charles Chaput, “The First Freedom - Religious Liberty as the Foundation of Human Liberty”

QUOTATION: Truth and Love

Truth without love is bitter and can drive the wounded away; and “love” without truth isn’t love at all, but a comfortable form of lying.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput.

QUOTATION: Politics

Politics is never the main content of Christian faith. It can never provide perfect solutions. But no Christian can avoid the duty to work for more justice and charity in our life as a nation, a task that inescapably involves politics.

--Archbishop Charles Chaput, “There is no equivalence”, CatholicPhilly.com, August 10, 2015

QUOTATION: Christians

If Christians were powerless, the world would not feel the need to turn them into martyrs.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Foreword, How Not to Share Your Faith, by Mark Brumley.

QUOTATION: The Future is Here

Threats against religious freedom in our country are not imaginary or overstated. They’re happening right now. They’re immediate, serious, and real.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: It's Not All Up to the Bishops

If laypeople don’t love their Catholic faith enough to struggle for it in the public square, nothing the bishops do will finally matter.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: When Evil Preaches Tolerance

Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Catholic Social Ministry

Everything in Catholic social ministry begins and ends with Jesus Christ. If it doesn’t, it isn’t Catholic. And if our social work isn’t deeply, confidently and explicitly Catholic in its identity, then we should stop using the word ‘Catholic.’ It’s that simple.

Faith in Jesus Christ — not as the world likes to imagine him, but the true Son of God as the Catholic Church knows and preaches him — is the only enduring basis for human hope. Real hope has nothing to do with empty political slogans. It has nothing to do with our American addictions to progress or optimism or positive thinking

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: America

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in – not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now – is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Helping the Poor

Jesus tells us very clearly that if we don’t help the poor, we’re going to go to hell. Period. There’s just no doubt about it. That has to be a foundational concern of Catholics and of all Christians. But Jesus didn’t say the government has to take care of them, or that we have to pay taxes to take care of them. Those are prudential judgments.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Religion in the Public Square

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Asking a Christian to keep his religion out of the public square is like asking a married man to act single in public.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Going with the Flow

Believers today are relentlessly tempted to accept a halfway Christianity, to lead a "double life" — to be one person when we're in church or at prayer and somebody different when we're with our friends or family, or at work, or when we talk about politics.

Part of this temptation comes from normal social pressure. We don't want to stand out. We don't want to seem different, so we keep our religious beliefs to ourselves. It's as if we've internalized the old adage: "Never talk about religion or politics in polite company." I've never accepted that kind of thinking, myself. Religion, politics, social justice — these are precisely the things we should be talking about. Nothing else really matters. Few things could be more important than religious faith, which deals with the ultimate meaning of life, and politics, which deals with how we should organize our lives together for justice and the common good.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Dissent

As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long — but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

--Archbishop Charles Chaput

QUOTATION: Evil and Tolerance

Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Abortion and Social Justice

Working against abortion doesn’t license us to ignore the needs of the homeless or the poor, the elderly or the immigrant. It doesn’t absolve us from supporting women who find themselves pregnant or abandoned. In Catholic belief, all human life, no matter how wounded, flawed, young or old, is sacred because it comes from God. The dignity of a human life and its right to exist are guaranteed by God. Catholic teaching on abortion and sexuality is part of the same integral vision of the human person that fuels Catholic teaching on economic justice, racism, war and peace.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: The Vulnerable

Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs — in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned, or homeless — is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of his love. How we treat these persons — whether we revere them and welcome them or throw them away in distaste — shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.

-- Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Bench Warmers

We're at a time for the Church in our country when some Catholics — too many — are discovering that they've gradually become non-Catholics who happen to go to Mass. That's sad and difficult, and a judgment on a generation of Catholic leadership. But it may be exactly the moment of truth the Church needs.

-- Archbishop Charles J. Chaput