In a review of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput laments our current political alternatives:
Elections are tough times for serious Catholics. If we believe in the encyclical tradition—from Rerum Novarum to Evangelium Vitae; from Humanae Vitae to Caritas In Veritate—then we can’t settle comfortably in either political party. Catholics give priority to the right to life and the integrity of the family as foundation stones of society. But we also have much to say about the economy and immigration, runaway debt, unemployment, war and peace. It’s why the US bishops recently observed that “in today’s environment, Catholics may feel politically disenfranchised, sensing that no party and few candidates fully share our comprehensive commitment to human life and dignity.”
The evils of November 6 were sown on October 31, Chaput suggests:
No wonder Catholics find elections these days so grim. To be a Catholic in 2012, in the modern West at least, is to live at the end of a long history. Brad Gregory eloquently shows us some of what that means. Our moral failures and our intellectual choices have had consequences over the centuries. And now our culture is fractured.
More here. It should be noted that Ephraim Radner had a much more critical review of Gregory’s book in our pages that highlighted and celebrated the way modernity embodies and advances the ideal of Christian love.
November 6th, 2012 | 2:05 pm
I do have a copy of The Unintended Reformation that I hope to get to soon, although I am reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation first. It does seem to me from reading Archbishop Chaput’s review that his reading of Gregory (and things in general) is that the Protestant Revolt (as we called it when we studied it in Catholic school in the 1950s) wasn’t just the unfortunate breaking away of a large number of groups from the One True Faith. It was a catastrophe that ruined everything.
It seems to me that blaming the Reformation for the poor choices Catholics allegedly have in American elections is rather strange, since I don’t think the United States would even exist for Catholics to vote in if there had been no Reformation. I am by no means an expert on the topic, but it seems to me the political philosophers who influenced the Founding Fathers were not only not Catholic, but had at least some of their works on the Index of Forbidden Books. (Of course few great thinkers didn’t have at least one forbidden book.)
November 6th, 2012 | 6:28 pm
Yes, the review of Brad Gregory’s book that First Things published was a shockingly inadequate appraisal of the best apologia for FT’s general position (at its best) that has so far been written. It would be good to fill most of some future issue with a panel discussion of the work.
November 6th, 2012 | 6:48 pm
Read the book, David. You may find flaws in it or disagree with it entirely, but Gregory’s account of postmodern society certainly rings true to me, and he makes a plausible case that much of it can be traced back to the Reformation.
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