Quotes from Charles J. Chaput

And as John Adams told the Massachusetts militia in 1789, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." There

Marriage curbed the selfishness so natural to humans by binding a man and woman together, and even more by binding them to their children. Religious faith offered the purpose and reinforcement to sustain family structure. What

Without the restraints of some higher moral law, democracy instinctively works against natural marriage, traditional families, and any other institution that creates bonds and duties among citizens. It insists on the autonomous individual as its ideal. In

We're a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others. There

As Kraynak notes, "the Founders believed that freedom was based on moral order, not moral relativism." They drew their natural law principles from John Locke, Cicero, and others, as well as from the strong natural law tradition in Christian thought. Thus, for Kraynak, "Without natural law—meaning an objective moral law put into nature and human nature by the Creator—the ideal of republican liberty lacks an ultimate foundation."13 The

we're subtly pressed to believe what we're expected to believe as a good "conservative" or a good "liberal." Anything outside our narrow channel is hostile terrain. But exactly this kind of tribalism subordinates the common good (and often the truth) to party loyalties.

The good life, the life that brings real happiness, consists in conforming ourselves to our nature and realizing its inherent potential. It's not enough to get what we desire; we must learn to desire well. We do that by cultivating excellence in moral virtue and judgment, in our intellects, and in our unique skills.

The late distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet, following Tocqueville, argued that when the forces of personal liberation are dominant in a culture, the result is not maximal liberty, but the absorption of liberty by government.

We live in a culture eager to make truth a boutique experience as malleable as our personal tastes require.

If the goal is uprooting millennia of traditional sexual morality, a need exists for the means and the ruthlessness to enforce the uprooting. The process doesn't need to be vulgar or brutish. But it does need to be thorough—and in an advanced media culture, that can be achieved by reshaping public perceptions. And so what we face now is what the Wall Street Journal described as "the new intolerance.

The banking industry, corporate life, the mass media, religious ministries, athletics, law schools: Each has its scandals. In nearly every case the pattern is similar: Truth is adjusted or "interpreted," ignored or justified away, to get seemingly urgent results. And deceit then spreads and takes root like a weed.

Parents often complain that America's education establishment abuses the classroom and misuses their children by preaching new moral orthodoxies on a whole range of issues like gender identity. The courts and legal profession then enforce those new orthodoxies. But it's the social sciences that actually help create them.

On the one hand, idolatry is a means by which we try to control God, to make worshiping him less of a sacrifice. On the other hand, the false gods we make—either by crafting them directly with our hands, or by conjuring them more discreetly in the way we invest our time, desires, skills, and passions—always end up controlling us. By their nature, false gods are vampires. They prey on, and draw their life from, the human spirit.

Today's mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite… Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized 'simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.

The Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper summed it up when he said that "the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word.

St. Paul tells us that "God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control. Do not be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord

Benedict XVI noted that this was how monks created European culture: "First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum.

It's thus perfectly logical that the most acute threats to our religious freedom come not from some Orwellian gang of bullyboys in bad uniforms, but from gender theorists and sex-rights activists (and businesses happy to support them) who push "liberation" and who are very well suited to life in a brave new world. *

God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil

should be one of trust and abandonment.

The point of this work and the Christian life as a whole is not burden and drudgery, but joy. Jesus

Time has a purpose. The meaning of a sentence becomes clear when we put a period at the end of it. The same applies to life. When

When we hope, we trust in God. When we despair or presume, we choose to trust ourselves instead.

Today's social media have a massive and almost instantaneous ability to bring the pressure to conform on any selected target. If an end is seen as "good," justifying the means to achieve it is simply a matter of marketing. And this invites a subtle, chronic kind of lying—the editing and massaging of information—to get the results claimed to be needed. This