Chaput the Great hits it out of the park. Have we crossed the Rubicon? Do believing Catholics now find themselves in opposition to the American spirit? RTWT, but here's part:
Critics often accuse faithful Christians of pursuing a “culture war”
on issues such as abortion, sexuality, marriage and the family, and
religious liberty. And in a sense, they’re right. We are fighting for what we believe. But of course, so are advocates on the other side of all these issues—and
neither they nor we should feel uneasy about it. Democracy thrives on
the struggle of competing ideas. We steal from ourselves and from
everyone else if we try to avoid that struggle. In fact, two of the
worst qualities in any human being are cowardice and acedia—and by
acedia I mean the kind of moral sloth that masquerades as “tolerance”
and leaves a human soul so empty of courage and character that even the
devil Screwtape would spit it out.5
In real life, democracy is built on two practical pillars: cooperation and conflict. It requires both. Cooperation, because people have a natural hunger for solidarity that makes all community possible. And conflict,
because people have competing visions of what is right and true. The
more deeply they hold their convictions, the more naturally people seek
to have those convictions shape society.
What that means for Catholics is this: We have a duty to treat all
persons with charity and justice. We have a duty to seek common ground
where possible. But that’s never an excuse for compromising with grave
evil. It’s never an excuse for being naive. And it’s never an excuse for
standing idly by while our liberty to preach and serve God in the
public square is whittled away.
As an aside, here's his gentle version of Die, Boomers, Die:
In many ways I believe my own generation, the boomer generation, has
been one of the most problematic in our nation’s history because of our
spirit of entitlement and moral superiority; our appetite for material
comfort unmoored from humility; our refusal to acknowledge personal sin
and accept our obligations to the past.
Gentle because he prefers conversion to death:
But we can change that. Nothing about life is predetermined except the
victory of Jesus Christ. We create the future. We do it not just by our
actions, but by what we really believe—because what we believe shapes the kind of people we are. In a way, “growing
a culture of religious freedom” is the better title for these comments.
A culture is more than what we make or do or build. A culture grows organically out of the spirit of a people—how we live, what we cherish, what we’re willing to die for.
