Archbishop Chaput Explains the Obvious

In Kennedy Case. The Bishop Flunks the Professor , the Italian journalist Sandro Magister traces the debate between Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Denver, and an Italian sociologist and advisor to the Italian bishops, over the incoherence of President Kennedy’s famous and very damaging, and convenient and unprincipled (that’s me, not the archbishop), separation of faith and policy.

The professor worries about the wrong things. Chaput remarks, for example, that

the professor seems to worry that my remarks run the risk of encouraging “some of the ‘evangelical’ or neoconservative positions most widespread in the American Protestant world, but also in some fringes of the Catholic world.” Let me respond simply by noting that the pro-life and pro-family witness of American evangelicals is commendable. I only wish that it were emulated more fully by many of those American Catholics who describe themselves as “liberal” or “progressive.” Evangelicals and Catholics who (along with Eastern Orthodox Christians, Latter-day Saints, many observant Jews, and others) speak out in defense of the sanctity of life and the dignity of marriage, deserve praise, not derision. They labor in the tradition of activists for civil rights – a moral cause led by religious believers — who refused to “privatize” their faith. Their witness may be out of harmony with John Kennedy’s remarks in Houston; but they are fully in the spirit of Martin Luther King’s actions in Selma.

The site also includes a response to Prof. Diotallevi from the Catholic historian and cultural critic James Hitchcock.