The Chaput Diagnosis

Rourke/AP: Chaput

In our western societies so sanitized of Christian faith, the public square has become a battleground, a killing field where massacres are becoming routine, to say nothing about the invisible atrocities committed behind closed doors. We have not come very far from slavery when we continue to down the definition of human being. Human life is suddenly inconvenient when that life requires us to own our responsibility to nurture that innocent, vulnerable life. Is it any wonder that people indiscriminately murder strangers when society has manufactured permission to do so by making human life disposable?

Speaking on the occasion of yet another series of horrific events, Archbishop Chaput identified the cause(s) of many a catastrophe in contemporary society.

Archbishop Chaput had this to say:

The people using the guns in these loathsome incidents are moral agents with twisted hearts. And the twisting is done by the culture of sexual anarchy, personal excess, political hatreds, intellectual dishonesty, and perverted freedoms that we’ve systemically created over the past half-century.

Archbishop Chaput, of course, is speaking about a malice identified by Pope Benedict XVI. That malice is relativism, "a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires." The consequences or effects of relativism are as Archbishop Chaput identifies:

• sexual anarchy
• personal excess
• political hatreds
• intellectual dishonesty
• perverted freedoms

One could add:

• a loss of personal identity and avoidance of social responsibility
• the usurpation of the authority of the legislative branch of government by the judiciary

Archbishop said:

(O)nly a fool can believe that “gun control” will solve the problem of mass violence.

Only "a fool can believe" that contemporary societies, having chosen relativism and barbarity, are any more evolved than those ancient societies that enabled parents to cast physically disabled children off cliffs, or societies that celebrated the sacrifice of men, women and children to false gods in an attempt to curry favour and secure some protection or power from capricious deities.

Dedication to the mission to spread the Gospel of Life is, now as much or more than ever, essential if we are to avoid a landslide into wholesale madness.