Chaput on "Things to Come: Faith, State, and Society in a New World"

This piece, by Archbishop Chaput, is timely, covers a lot of ground - the Florida school shooting, the 2016 election, immigration and change, capitalism and development, church-state relations, sexuality, mercy, moral anthropology, and a long quote from Charles Camosy -- and is well worth a read.  A bit:

. . . Polanyi showed how the industrial revolution disrupted and reorganized the entire fabric of English life.  It revolutionized the structure of the British economy.  That much was obvious.  But in doing so, it also reshaped every other aspect of the nation’s culture — from family relations, to politics and education, to the use of time, to patterns of thought and behavior.

The same thing is happening right here, in our own country, in our own time and space.  A consumer market economy tends to commodify everything and recast all relationships as transactional.  In practice, it depersonalizes a culture by commercializing many of our routine human interactions.  It also very easily breeds a practical atheism by revolving our lives around the desire and consumption of new things. . . .

More:

There are no new paradigms; no new hermeneutical principles; no revolutions in thought; and no possible concordats with the world and its alibis, that can the erase the radicalism and liberating beauty of Christian anthropology.

Key to that anthropology is the nature of our sexuality, expressed in the complementarity of male and female, and ordered to new life and mutual support.  Human sexuality and relationships have a God-given purpose.  That purpose is a source of true freedom and joy.  It can’t be changed, or reinterpreted, or medically reimagined away.

This is the truth about who we are as embodied creatures, no matter what our personal confusions or weaknesses might be.  We need to affirm that truth for our own sakes, and the sake of our whole society, because the meaning of our humanity depends on it. And while truth spoken without love and patience can be a weapon, not speaking it is a form a theft.  Mercy without truth is not mercy.