Quotes from Charles J. Chaput

Creation is more than an accident of dead matter. It's a romance. It has purpose. It sings of the Living God. It bears his signature.

Tolerance is not a Christian value. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty--these are Christian values.

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

In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the wizard Saruman turns from wisdom to rapacity in his taste for power. He rips out the ancient trees and flattens the land to make room for the industries of war. The lesson is simple: All technology, along with its blessings, also carries a temptation—an appetite for control, a willingness to flatten the world (if needed) to make space for the human will. And

if new orthodoxies of unbelief attack inherited faith, if scientism and a cult of technology lower our eyes to the gadgets in our hands, the effect ripples across a culture's soul.

The White House elected to power in November 2008 campaigned on compelling promises of hope, change, and bringing the nation together. The reality it delivered for eight years was rather different: a brand of leadership that was narcissistic, aggressively secular, ideologically divisive, resistant to compromise, unwilling to accept responsibility for its failures, and generous in spreading blame. As

People who hold a classic understanding of sexuality, marriage, and family have gone in just twenty years from pillars of mainstream conviction to the media equivalent of racists and bigots. So what do we do now? Patriotism,

The Founders believed that liberty depended on persons with the maturity to avoid both radical self-assertion and a timid reliance on the state.

we're often worse than pagans. True pagans had a reverence for nature and the gods. Today we worship ourselves and our tools. That sin defaces the world.

What's at stake in current sex and gender-identity struggles is not just the ability of Catholic ministries and schools to serve unhampered in the public square. The freedom of Catholic families to raise their children according to Christian beliefs is also, in everyday practice, becoming more difficult.

In decoupling gender from biology and denying any given or "natural" meaning to male and female sexuality, gender ideology directly repudiates reality. People don't need to be "religious" to notice that men and women are different. The evidence is obvious. And the only way to ignore it is through a kind of intellectual self-hypnosis.

Aelred writes that true Christian friendship begins with two people who are drawn to some quality of holiness or virtue they see in each other. Since both persons love Jesus Christ and want to build their friendship on their love of Christ, Jesus is, in a real sense, the third person in their friendship.

In American life, democracy and capitalism, despite their advantages, tend to erode the place of traditional authorities (families, religious faith, and other institutions), while putting new authorities (public opinion and market forces) in their stead. And that has consequences.

One of the ways in which a good Christian marriage mirrors the divine is that, just as God's love overflowed into creation, so the love of man and woman should overflow into new life. The family is the "domestic Church" where parents preach the word of God to their children by example and instruction.30 It's a school of deeper and more fruitful humanity.31

The point of course is to be a great saint, to love greatly, rightly, and with passion, until we burn ourselves up in service to God and to others. Our wholeness, our integrity, depends on the health of our friendship with God. It was he who fashioned us from the dust. It was he who breathed his life into our bodies. So when we ignore God's Word, we violate our own identity.

IT'S RATHER ODD THAT in the wake of the bloodiest century in history—a twentieth century in which scores of millions of human beings were shot, starved, gassed, blown apart, and incinerated with superhuman ingenuity—even many religious leaders are embarrassed to talk about the devil (Pope Francis is a notable exception). In fact, it's more than odd. It's revealing.

If we don't believe in the devil, sooner or later we won't believe in God. Try as we might, and as awkward as it might be for our own peace of mind, we can't cut Lucifer out of the ecology of salvation. The supernatural is real, and his existence is near the heart of this world's confusion, fears, sufferings, and spiritual struggles.

As with democratic politics, the market is a mass of individuals making discrete choices within a framework shaped by larger forces, over which they have limited control.

As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—" strangers in a strange land," in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2: 22). But the deeper problem in America isn't that we believers are "foreigners." It's that our children and grandchildren aren't.

Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.5 But

We need to engage him with our whole lives. That means cleaning out the garbage of noise and distraction from our homes. It means building real Christian friendships. It means cultivating oases of silence, worship, and prayer in our lives. It means having more children and raising them in the love of the Lord. It means fighting death and fear with joy and life, one family at a time, with families sustaining one another against the temptations of weariness and resentment.

It's easier to accept lies by invoking a misguided alibi of tolerance and mutual respect than to live outside the cone of public approval. This is clear in every recent national debate over abortion, marriage, family, sexuality, and rights in general. Many of us are happy to live with half-truths and ambiguity rather than risk being cut out of the herd. The culture of lies thrives on our own complicity, lack of courage, and self-deception. The

Pornography hurts more than the user. It alienates spouses. It destroys real intimacy. It reduces people to objects. And those are just the immediate human costs. The social impact is much wider and more damaging. It's a major factor in divorce, infidelity, and broken families. And even more brutally, the porn industry also fuels and feeds on the exploitation of women and minors forced into "sex work." Today

the biggest failure of so many people of my (baby boomer) generation, including parents, teachers, and leaders in the Church, has been our failure to pass along our faith in a compelling way to the generation now taking our place. The