Culture changes could cause a Reformation 2.0

Archbishop Chaput's talk links the decline of belief, technology, and the collapse of the family to the utilitarian ideas of today replacing faith and logic. But this is the part about the "scandal".

Briefly put, that project is this. Permanent truths about good and evil, man and his behavior and meaning, do exist. Faith and reason are the means to find and know those truths. Each needs the other in its search....

I said a moment ago that I’ve always found talk of schisms in the Church or a “new Reformation” to be alarmist. I still do. The world is too different from half a millennium ago for easy parallels to apply. But I do think we’ve reached a tipping point or pivotal moment in the modern West, where even at the popular level, Christianity can be shed like dead skin...

The issues of how we organize society, how we build a healthy culture, and how we understand the meaning and dignity of the human person, are all very much in play today.

 Our country and the world need a pure voice speaking the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a response. And this is what makes the current sex abuse crisis in the Church so damaging and dangerous, like a lit match in a roomful of kindling.

The leaders tasked with witnessing Christian truth to the world as bishops and religious superiors are exactly the men who have too often failed their people, failed in their ministry, and even actively betrayed their vocation. We bishops and the Vatican itself are now seen as the problem. We need to face that fact honestly, and work to change it by our actions.

A long and subtle essay: and that is one reason that Chaput isn't a Cardinal, even though he is in charge of Philadelphia, whose archbishop traditionally is a Cardinal (he was sent there to clean up the scandal caused by cheerful "Uncle Tony", who by the way also served in Pittsburgh before he was sent east).

Sigh.

Remember there are many good priests and even good bishops out there who need your prayers.
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related items: Get ReligionBlog has discussions of MSM articles HERE and HERE.

update: I am not up on the upandcoming synod by bishops on "yutes", except that a few bishops who got into the headlines lately said they aren't going now. But here is the agenda and here is a subtle point by point essay showing the problem with the agenda (which of course has already been decided before the meeting)...

lots of it is over my head, but this part about religion as a warm fuzzy upsets me:

• The theological consequence of this is that the IL lacks any theology of the Cross. Christian joy is not antithetical to suffering, which is a necessary component of a cruciform life. The document gives the impression that the true Christian will be “happy” at all times, in the colloquial sense. It further implies the error that the spiritual life itself will always result in felt (affective) joy. The pastoral problem that results from this comes to the fore most clearly in §137: Is it the role of the Church to make youth “feel loved by him [God]” or to aid them in knowing they are loved regardless of how they might feel? 

religion as a warm fuzzy or vague "spirituality" is nonsense. One of my medical school teachers pointed out that we docs rarely are big church goers, but most of us believe there is an ultimate reason for the suffering we see, because if we didn't cling to that hope, we couldn't work.

We docs see so many innocent suffer, we see people who should live end up dying, but of course, we also see cases where every scientific fact suggests they should have died but they lived.

from Chaput's essay I quoted above:

 Not one of my friends who has a child with disabilities is “rational.”  All of them are unreasonable; all of them are irrational – unless, like Augustine, we believe in order to understand.
The genius of Fides et Ratio, the beauty and the glory of the text, is its defense of the capacity of human reason to know the truth; a truth rooted in the deep harmony of creation.  The world has a logic and meaning breathed into it by its Author, who is Love himself.  And reason lit by faith can see that, and find the path to him.
There’s a plaque on the wall of my educator friend’s kitchen, and it overlooks every meal the family shares.  Most of the time, nobody notices.  Life is a busy and complex enterprise.  But when they do notice, it reads, “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”  It’s the final line in the greatest of all poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy:

 . . . my wings were not meant for such a flight —Except that then my mind was struck by lightningThrough which my longing was at last fulfilled.Here powers failed my high imagination:But by now my desire and will were turned,Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

that's Dante of course. A good Catholic who put two political popes in his Inferno for their betrayal of the church.
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And VDHanson has an article worrying if a new American civil war is approaching. One of many articles about this worry, which has morphed from late night talk radio to a main stream intellectual worry.

this predated Trumpieboy (look up the definition of "Bork").