Archbishop Chaput: On the Power of the Powerless

By Archbishop Charles Chaput, Substack, (Complicit Clergy) June 5, 2024

+Charles Chaput, a Capuchin Franciscan, is the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia. This essay is adapted from comments given to Tulsa’s Alcuin Institute in 2022.

Let’s start with a simple fact: Man’s oldest and most persistent sin is idolatry. And if the human story teaches us anything, it’s that idolatry has an infinite wardrobe of disguises—and an endless number of victims. In the modern era, the go-to idol is the state, usually in the liturgical vestments of science.

The Third Reich euthanized some 300,000 mentally and physically disabled persons. Then it killed another 6 million Jews, Gypsies, social outcasts, and political prisoners in the name of Aryan racial superiority. The political heirs of Karl Marx (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others) murdered 25 million people in the Soviet bloc; 40 million in China; 2 million in a nation of just 7 million in Cambodia; and millions more elsewhere—all to create a new world and restart history from “Year Zero,” cleansed of any memory of the past, and based on a model of man as his own master; humanity as the real and only god. …