Archbishop Charles Chaput: America’s Least Conservative Bishop

National Catholic Register, 24 January 2020

For more than 30 years, Archbishop Chaput has been a model of creativity and collaboration in preaching and preserving the Gospel.

The news was reported this week as one voice. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, a “conservative” — sometimes styled a “prominent conservative” or “archconservative” — was retiring after having reached the age of 75.

This paper has already profiled the remarkable three decades that Archbishop Chaput ministered in Rapid City, Denver and Philadelphia. Yet the term “conservative” bears examination. Does it apply to Chaput?

The New York Times characterized Chaput as a “theological and political conservative.”

The first may well apply, as it is commonly used. For example, Chaput would interpret Amoris Laetitia in continuity with St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the moral life, Veritatis Splendor. Pope Francis wrote Amoris Laetitia as if Veritatis Splendor was never written; there is no mention of it whatsoever, despite the nearly 400 footnotes. Does that mean that Chaput is conservative and the Holy Father is liberal?

But Veritatis Splendor was itself an innovative encyclical. It left behind the casuistry that marked the moral theology of the preconciliar period in favor of a biblical view rooted in the capacity of man, redeemed in Christ, to know and live in the truth. In ignoring that view does Amoris Laetitia return to an older, narrower view of the moral life, in which the key task is to apply the rules in a more or less creative way to arrive at this or that conclusion? So perhaps Chaput is the more up-to-date and liberal, while Francis is the conservative, preferring a pre-Vatican II approach to moral theology?

The categories are easily confused, and so are not apt for describing theological positions.

“If we don’t care for the poor, we will go to hell.”

Does that sound like a liberal Pope Francis? It does, but I don’t think he has ever said exactly that. But Archbishop Chaput has said it often.

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