The 19 page essay entitled A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America, released just last week in e-book format only, begins by exploring the role played by the modern media in advancing what Archbishop Chaput calls an Orwellian "new orthodoxy." This new worldview makes dangerous assumptions about the purpose of government, the meaning of marriage, the role of family and sexuality - all of which sharply diverge from past American habits of thought.
"Nowhere is this new orthodoxy more obvious than in our news media's treatment of religion," Chaput writes. "Historically, religious faith has played a large and positive role in shaping American public life. But today's news coverage of religion is often marked by poor reporting skills, ignorance of the subject matter, and an undercurrent of distaste for religious believers and their convictions."
Journalism is a "knowledge profession" and American democracy depends upon informed, intelligent citizens, he reminds. Unfortunately, today's journalism, from The New York Times to the smallest local newspapers, "has its own unstated orthodoxies, its own vanities, prejudices, and targets of disdain."
When these go unchecked and uncorrected, "they undermine our public life because they cripple the honest presentation of facts."
Chaput advises, "In seeking truth as citizens, we need to hold our news media to the same skeptical, demanding standards they apply to everyone else. We forget that at our peril - especially in an election year."
Speaking truth to power, Chaput continues: "Our national leadership in 2012 seems deaf to matters of religious freedom abroad and unreceptive - or frankly hostile - to religious engagement in public affairs here at home."
Among governments, the media, academia, and the wider culture, many leaders no longer regard religious faith as a healthy force. Chaput sees both an encroaching secularism and vigilant atheism as combining to squeeze religion out of the public forum.
"The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past. And that poses a challenge for all of us as Catholics. It’s not a question of when or if it might happen. It’s happening today."
He goes on to issue the sobering warning that there are no guarantees that America's experiment with religious freedom, as enshrined in our Constitution, will survive in the United States.
"The Constitution is a great achievement in ordered liberty. But it's just another elegant scrap of paper unless people keep it alive with their convictions and lived witness," he writes.
He offers a twofold solution to these problems: a stronger devotion to the Gospel and a recovery of Catholic identity.
"Too many people who claim to be Christian simply don’t know Jesus Christ. They don’t really believe in the Gospel. They feel embarrassed by their religion and vaguely out of step with the times. They may keep their religion for comfort value. Or they may adjust it to it their doubts. But it doesn’t reshape their lives because it isn’t real."
This is especially true among youth for whom "the Christian image [has] shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people."
Second, Catholics “need the kind of leadership and the kind of education that radiates confidence in the Word of God, fidelity to the Catholic faith, and a missionary zeal to make all things new in Jesus Christ.” In other words, they need a strong Catholic identity.
But that's not what they're getting at many Catholic institutions of higher education these days. Universities that have drifted away from their Catholic roots and disregard both dogma and faith "steal a treasury of wisdom, imagination, and hope from emerging Catholic leaders,” the Archbishop says.
By purging religious values from Catholic universities, young people come to believe that religion has no place in serious intellectual life, an attitude that opens the door for religious intolerance.
Archbishop Chaput's essay could not have been more timely and comes just as the contentious HHS mandate has brought the topic of religious freedom to the forefront of the collective American mind.
"[A genuinely Catholic life] is the kind of witness that sets fire to the human heart. It starts the only kind of revolution that really changes anything: a revolution of love. Jesus said, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled. Our task is to start that blaze and then help it grow."
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