{"id":5140,"date":"2020-07-18T08:39:18","date_gmt":"2020-07-18T13:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/doxaweb.blog\/?p=5140"},"modified":"2021-03-28T04:52:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-28T09:52:00","slug":"catholics-in-political-life-and-the-virtue-of-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/doxaweb.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/18\/catholics-in-political-life-and-the-virtue-of-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Catholics in political life, and the virtue of hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-4471\" src=\"https:\/\/doxaweb.files.wordpress.com\/2019\/11\/rns-charles-chaput-012717.jpg?resize=334%2C208\" alt=\"RNS-CHARLES-CHAPUT-012717\" width=\"334\" height=\"208\" \/>Here are a few bracing excerpts from a talk Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered in Toronto back in 2009. The <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.catholicnewsagency.com\/document.php?n=790\">whole presentation<\/a><\/strong> is worth a read.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The \u201cseparation of Church and state\u201d does not mean \u2013 and it can never mean \u2013 separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be \u201cleaven in the world\u201d and to \u201cmake disciples of all nations.\u201d That kind of radical separation steals the moral content of a society. It\u2019s the equivalent of telling a married man that he can\u2019t act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won\u2019t stay married for long.<br \/>\nPartly because I\u2019m a bishop and partly because I\u2019m older and a little bit wiser, I don\u2019t belong to any political party. As a young priest I worked on Bobby Kennedy\u2019s campaign. Later I volunteered with the 1976 and 1980 campaigns for Jimmy Carter. So if I have any partisan roots, they\u2019re in the Democratic Party. But as I say in the book, one of the lessons we need to learn from the last 50 years is that a \u201cpreferred\u201d Catholic political party usually doesn\u2019t exist. The sooner Catholics feel at home in any political party, the sooner that party takes them for granted and then ignores their concerns. Party loyalty for the sake of habit, or family tradition, or ethnic or class interest is a form of tribalism. It\u2019s a lethal kind of moral laziness. Issues matter. Character matters. Acting on principle matters. But party loyalty for the sake of party loyalty is a dead end&#8230;.<br \/>\nOne of the words we heard endlessly in the last U.S. election was \u201chope.\u201d I think \u201chope\u201d is the only word in the English language more badly misused than \u201clove.\u201d It\u2019s our go-to anxiety word &#8212; as in, \u201cI sure hope I don\u2019t say anything stupid tonight.\u201d But for Christians, hope is a virtue, not an emotional crutch or a political slogan. Virtus, the Latin root of virtue, means strength or courage. Real hope is unsentimental. It has nothing to do with the cheesy optimism of election campaigns. Hope assumes and demands a spine in believers. And that\u2019s why \u2013 at least for a Christian &#8212; hope sustains us when the real answer to the problems or hard choices in life is \u201cno, we can\u2019t,\u201d instead of \u201cyes, we can&#8221;&#8230;.<br \/>\n[Georges] Bernanos once wrote that the optimism of the modern world, including its \u201cpolitics of hope,\u201d is like whistling past a graveyard. It\u2019s a cheap substitute for real hope and \u201ca sly form of selfishness, a method of isolating [ourselves] from the unhappiness of others\u201d by thinking progressive thoughts. Real hope \u201cmust be won. [We] can only attain hope through truth, at the cost of great effort and long patience . . . Hope is a virtue, virtus, strength; an heroic determination of the soul. [And] the highest form of hope is despair overcome.\u201d<br \/>\nAnyone who hasn\u2019t noticed the despair in the world should probably go back to sleep. The word \u201chope\u201d on a campaign poster may give us a little thrill of righteousness, but the world will still be a wreck when the drug wears off. We can only attain hope through truth. And what that means is this: From the moment Jesus said, \u201cI am the way, the truth and the life,\u201d the most important political statement anyone can make is \u201cJesus Christ is Lord.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are a few bracing excerpts from a talk Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered in Toronto back in 2009. The whole presentation is worth a read. The \u201cseparation of Church and state\u201d does not mean \u2013 and it can never mean \u2013 separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,83,33,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelization","category-hope","category-moral-life","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Catholics in political life, and the virtue of hope &#8211; doxaweb<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/doxaweb.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/18\/catholics-in-political-life-and-the-virtue-of-hope\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholics in political life, and the virtue of hope &#8211; doxaweb\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here are a few bracing excerpts from a talk Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered in Toronto back in 2009. 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