In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News:
Archbishop Charles Chaput called House Bill 1080 an “attack on religious identity” in his weekly column appearing in last week’s Denver Catholic Register. He subsequently answered questions about the bill in an e-mail exchange with the Rocky Mountain News:Q: The most straightforward interpretation of your column suggests that you will shut down Catholic Charities if this bill – or any bill – passes which restricts your ability to hire or fire based on Catholic religious standards. Is that a correct reading of what you will do?
Chaput: No. Catholic Charities will continue its core mission to the poor with or without public funds. If the government wants to carry the burden it currently asks religious-affiliated groups to carry, that’s the government’s business, and so are the costs and problems that go along with it.
What I actually said is that Catholic Charities “is an arm of Catholic social ministry. When it can no longer have the freedom it needs to be ‘Catholic,’ it will end its services.” At this point, HB 1080 is only a bill; a bad bill — but not yet the law. If HB 1080 were to become law, that would be the time for us to make service decisions based on the content of the law. But if you’re asking me whether I meant what I said about closing services rather than compromise our religious identity, I most certainly did.
Q: What current standards do you and the Catholic archdiocese demand of your employees when it comes to sexual orientation and religion?
Chaput: We expect our employees to respect Catholic teaching and support it in their professional lives. That’s logical and just because the Catholic community has a religious mission. Obviously, we respect the personal lives of our employees. We have no interest, nor does any other sensible employer, in intruding on their privacy or family autonomy outside their service to the Church. But it’s self-defeating to imagine a Catholic-affiliated ministry where the key guiding people can’t be required to be Catholic.
Q: You note that Catholic Charities already employs many non-Catholics. Obviously, you aren’t discriminating against them in your hiring practices even today. So what’s the danger of this law — its worst-case effect? Please give some specific examples of how it could impact an agency like Catholic Charities.
Chaput: I think I’ve said what I need to say pretty clearly in my Jan. 23 column, and Chris Rose amplified on that well in his Jan. 30 letter to the Denver Catholic Register.
Q: How do you respond to those who say, “Oh, the archbishop is just playing politics by threatening to shut down Catholic Charities. Would he really deny services to the poor and disadvantaged — take milk from babies’ mouths — just to keep from complying with established discrimination laws?”
Chaput: Christians were delivering services to the poor long before government got into the business and will continue to do so long after any of us are around to argue. The Church didn’t start the HB 1080 debate. We had it pushed on us. HB 1080 has bad implications for all religious service organizations, not just Catholic ones. This unfortunate bill and its fallout are entirely the work of others. But anyone who thinks the Catholic community is ‘playing politics’ on this matter is seriously mistaken. We’re eager to cooperate with anyone of good will. Catholic Charities has a long track record that proves it. But we won’t be used by the government to provide services, often at a financial loss to ourselves, and then be told we can’t hire key people according to our religious identity because it allegedly compromises the public good. That’s unjust, bad for the poor, alien to American history, and offensive to religious believers.
Q: Your opposition to this bill will also have some people wondering, “But isn’t any kind of discrimination against groups of people just plain wrong? Shouldn’t religious groups that believe in helping people want to outlaw every kind of discrimination, no matter what kind it is?” What do you say to them?
Chaput: I’d ask them to use their common sense. It’s reasonable for a religious organization to ensure and protect its religious identity. It’s also reasonable to expect religious organizations to refrain from proselytizing when using public funds.
But it’s unreasonable — in fact, it shows a peculiar hostility toward religion — to claim that religious organizations will compromise the public good if they remain true to their religious identity while serving the poor with public funds. That’s just a new form of prejudice using the ’separation of Church and state’ as an alibi.
Boy, is this guy articulate. And I know you had a long blog post about some of your concerns with his words, but for me, I was glad to see a bishop with a spine. As I see the encroaching laicizing secularlism driven by a government in this country that ever grows in size and has its fingers in everything, I really fear for the libertas ecclesiae. I don’t see it discussed a lot, not nearly as much as other things. But I think it is an urgent issue. The pro-’choice’, pro-contraception and pro-homosexual movements in this country aren’t going away, and they don’t believe in ‘live and let live’ after they have achieved the upper hand in cultural debates.
Look, I don’t mean for this to be alarmist, or sound as harsh as it may come across. But the fact is that most people in this country — even many good, faithful churchgoers — have it in their heads that (as Kant would put it) religion must operate within the limits of ‘reason’ alone, that our values and mores must submit to the culture’s. It’s because most of us have drunk deeply the anti-Christian arsenic of Americanist ideology.
So good for Chaput. He’s a man I’d follow into hell with a squirt gun.
There is NOBODY who articulates Catholic teaching in the public square like Chaput.
More like him, please.
But isn’t any kind of discrimination against groups of people just plain wrong? Shouldn’t religious groups that believe in helping people want to outlaw every kind of discrimination, no matter what kind it is?
This is just bizzarre. It just shows they are talking without thinking. Is requiring someone to be 16 before they can drive discrimination? Of course it is. You are denying children the right to drive based only on age. Is requiring teachers to hold a college degree before they can teach discrimination? Yes. If the basis for dicrimination is realted to the thing they are excluded from then it is not “plain wrong”. Even if it ends up excluding some good teachers and good drivers. It is only when the grounds for discrimination are not relevant to what they are being excluded from that it becomes plain wrong.
So what is really being asserted is that a persons religion has no effect on how they serve the poor. I know many believe that but should they be surprised that the Catholic church does not believe it? That they think you relationship with God effects all areas of life?
I wonder if these organizations have prayers and faith formation events as part of work. Maybe if they said an Our Father together once in a while people would get the connection better. Maybe they already do. I just wonder if this is the fruit of Catholic Charities being run in a totally secular manner. I know that is the case in Catholic schools where I live. Parents forget the school is Catholic and I don’t blame them. There is so little in the way the school is run to remind you of that.
I am very fortunate to be in the Denver Archdiocese with Archbishop Chaput as my shepherd. I will miss him if he is made a cardinal and goes to Rome or elsewhere.
One thing confuses me though. Doesn’t the preaching of the gospel and serving the sick and poor go hand-in-hand? Don’t the sick and poor have a right to hear the gospel? Sure, they have a right to reject it as well, but that implies that they first hear it.
Government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. A good chunk of those people are Catholic. If the public good is served when Catholic Charities, on behalf of Catholics, serves not only Catholics but non-Catholics as well, then that’s all the government should concern itself with — that the public good is being served. Whether this Catholic organization chooses to hire only Catholics for certain positions should not be the concern of the government if the public good is being served. Same thing if the organization has religious pictures or brochures for the taking or even prays and preaches the gospel in the course of performing its services.
I think it’s similar to vouchers or other funding for private education. As long as the public good of educating all of the population is being served, and a particular organization assists with that objective by serving a portion of that population, government should not concern itself with the religious identity of that organization. It should fund it in proportion to the number of people being served.
Requiring organizations to essentially lose their religious identity in order to serve the public is just one more attempt to drive religion from the public square.
Let’s not be fooled. this is about requiring Catholic Charities, and by extension the Church to hire non-repentant public sinners and placing them in positions of authority or at least public relations. So from this we get headlines such as “Coach at Catholic University supports abortion” or “Catholic Hospital board espouses woman’s rights in reproductive heath (a euphemism for contraception and abortion.”
Make no mistake this is about secularizing Catholic institutions.
The problem with the separation of church and state is that about the only place the state has not laid claim to (yet) is the space between our ears. We are devolving into a right to practice religion providing that it is never made manifest.
The minute a private organization takes one dollar of state money or state tax exemptions, pandora’s box is opened and the state has all the power it needs to control your actions. Beginning to look like the best plan for any kind of real autonomy is to just give to Caesar exactly what Caesar is owed and take nothing in return
We don’t need a pro-our faith government to be believers. Paul and Peter didn’t
So many people talk as if all discriminating is somehow wrong. There is “discrimination” and then there is “Discrimination”. In life, we all “discriminate” all the time in various ways for various reasons. The question we have to ask when we say “yes” to this one, and “no” to that one is this: “Is this a reasonable and just discrimination based on correct principles?”
Here’s why I get really concerned for the libertas ecclesiae: Spitzer’s Abortion ‘Wrongs’.