Abp. Chaput Channels John Adams (and Juvenal)

The Archbishop of Philadelphia is right.

...The archbishop concluded that today's Americans are living in "a dysfunctional culture of frustrated and wounded people increasingly incapable of permanent commitments, self-sacrifice and sustained intimacy, and unwilling to face the reality of their own problems.” A self-governing nation cannot be sustained by that sort of people, he said; the nation's future "belongs to people who believe in something beyond themselves, and who live and sacrifice accordingly."...

That's not new, of course.  Here's John Adams:

...this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other....

It's no surprise that we have come to this in a Presidential race:

...One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse-control problem. And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities....

I will add that both are Statists who unabashedly promise what Juvenal decried:  bread and circuses.

...Roman politicians passed laws in 140 B.C. to keep the votes of poorer citizens, by introducing a grain dole: giving out cheap food and entertainment, "bread and circuses", became the most effective way to rise to power....

375 years later, Rome was vanquished.  Think it will take that long this time?