Archbishop Chaput on separation of church and state

Archbishop Chaput had a strong column in First Things yesterday, saying that recent legislation proposed in Colorado that is supposed to be aimed at having the church play by state rules if it accepts church money is really a far more hostile attack on the church in general.

This is something that I've noticed too over the last three years in witnessing some of the hearings on legislation that affects the church. It seems that the aim is not just to separate church and state, but to bury churches. At the heart of this, I'm starting to believe more and more, is a desire among some in power for an atheistic society. Archbishop Chaput goes so far as to say that, even though statistics say there are more Catholics in the world than any other faith, that the Catholic view is rapidly losing weight in the public arena.

The lesson here for American Catholics is this: For more than forty years, we’ve worked to integrate, accommodate, and assimilate to American society in the belief that a truly diverse public square would have room for authentically Catholic life and faith. We need to revisit that assumption. It turns out that nobody gets anything for free. If we want to influence, or even have room to breathe in the American environment of coming generations, we’ll need to work for it and fight for it—always in a spirit of justice and charity, but also vigorously and without apology. Anyone who still has an easy confidence about the Catholic “place” in American life had better wake up.

We need to fight, indeed, and that means knowing our faith so we can defend it.