Archbishop Chaput on "Religion and the Common Good"

The First Things blog On the Square reproduces the text of a talk delivered by Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput at the John Cardinal Krol Conference in Philadelphia on April 21, 2007:

...That revolution, the same revolution that “occurred 2,000 years ago,” is already underway in every believer who confesses passionately and unapologetically—in his private life and in her public witness—that Jesus Christ is Lord, the Son of God, the messiah of Israel, and the only savior of the world. Every other lens we use for understanding the human story, whether we choose economics or gender or Darwin or race or something else, will ultimately lie to us about who we are. And, of course, we also lie to ourselves.

In her short story “Greenleaf,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote about a widow called Mrs. May who owned a large dairy farm and who thought faith should be a very private matter. O’Connor described her this way: “Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”

If Mrs. May sounds familiar from daily life, she should. The deepest tragedy of our age is how many of our own people who claim to believe in Jesus Christ, really don’t prove it in the way they live their lives—and don’t like the inconvenience of being asked to prove it.

The “common good” is more than a political slogan. It’s more than what most people think they want right now. It’s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It can’t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a healthy society.

The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. That’s the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity...

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(emphasis added)