Words MEAN Something, Says Abp. Chaput

The Archbishop of Denver remarked on the abuse of words in the current American lexicon. A few choice excerpts:

...However the word that Christians had to clearly understand was secularism, which the Archbishop called "actively destructive" undermining both human identity and community by rejecting "the sacred while posturing itself as neutral to the sacred."

"The American Experiment … is the product of religiously shaped concepts and tradition. It can't survive for long without respecting the source of that tradition. A fully secularized public life would mean policy by the powerful for the powerful because no permanent principles can exist in a morally neutral vacuum."

So much for the Anti-Christian-Lies-Union's principal operating philosophy.

Personally, I was happy to see this one:

The common good: "The common good does not mean the sum of what most people want right now. The common good is that which constitutes the best source of justice and happiness for a community and its members in the light of truth. The common good is never served by killing the weakest members of a community. It's also not served when the appetites and behaviors of individual members get a license to undermine the life of the wider community...

It's a forlorn hope that some of our political "leaders" might take that to heart, I suppose.

Pluralism: "These days pluralism usually serves as a codeword for getting Christians to shut up in the public square out of some misguided sense of courtesy. But pluralism is just a demographic fact. It's not an ideology. And it's never a valid excuse for being quiet about our key moral convictions."

So, Ibrahim Cooper of CAIR: jam your rhetoric right where the sun doesn't shine...

Tolerance and Consensus: "Words like 'tolerance' and 'consensus' are important democratic working principles. But they aren't Christian virtues, and they should never take priority over other words like charity, justice, faith and truth, either in our personal lives or in our public choices."

You get the idea.