Archbishop Chaput on Catholic Engagement in Politics

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, Colorado recently gave an address to a gathering in Fargo North Dakota. The subject was "Render Unto Caesar revisited" (which references his most recent book, Render Unto Caesar, pertaining to Catholics' obligation to engage in the political process). The full text of his Fargo speech can be found here, but I would like to highlight a few points below...

The Archbishop urges all Catholics to embrace their individual calling as missionaries in society. This means bringing our faith into the public square personally and politically, pointing out sin where sin exists, and calling others to repentance and a new life in Christ. As Chaput puts it:

"The most urgent need for the Church in our day is a rebirth of faith and missionary spirit in her people.  But that will never happen, and it can’t ever happen, until each one of us rediscovers the apostolic mandate that came with our own baptism. We need to be the men and women Jesus calls us to be – his friends and disciples – and we need to call other Catholics, who are lukewarm in their faith, to the same kind of zeal. If we can begin that renewal together as a Church, through the grace of Jesus Christ, then God can achieve anything through us.

So if we are to truly transform the culture we must actively live an authentic faith and call others to do the same. Referencing Pope Benedict's visit to the U. S., Archbishop Chaput gives concrete examples of how to present this authentic Catholic witness:

"Benedict reminded American Catholics that we need to use our numbers and influence to enter into the public square in an active way.  He called us to bring Christian hope to the public debate, to be clear and united in our Catholic presence in society, and to be a leaven in our nation’s public life.

"So how do we do that?  We do it by informing our lives and our choices with a few simple facts.

"Here's the first fact.  George Orwell said the one of biggest dangers for modern democratic life is dishonest political language.  Dishonest language leads to dishonest politics – which then leads to bad public policy and bad laws.  We need to speak plainly and act in a spirit of truth.  We also need to demand the same behavior from candidates and elected officials.

"Here's the second fact.  “Catholic” is a word that has real meaning.  We don't control or invent that meaning as individuals.  We inherit it from the Gospel and the experience of the Church over the centuries.  Nobody forces us to be Catholic.  We can choose to be something else.  But if we choose to call ourselves Catholic, then that word has consequences for what we believe and how we act.  We can't truthfully claim to be Catholic and then act like we're not.

"Here's the third fact.  Being Catholic is a bit like being married.  We have a relationship with the Church and with Jesus Christ that's very similar to being a spouse.  This has consequences.  If a man says he loves his wife, his wife will want to see the evidence of that love in his actions – in other words, in his fidelity.  The same applies to our relationship with God.  If we say we're Catholic, we need to show it by our love for the Church, and by our fidelity to what she teaches.  Otherwise we're just fooling ourselves, because God certainly won't be fooled.

"Here's the fourth fact.  Each of us needs to follow his or her own conscience.  But conscience doesn't emerge from a vacuum.  It's not a matter of personal opinion or preference.   If our conscience has the habit of telling us what we want to hear about inconvenient issues, then we have a badly formed conscience.  Conscience is the voice of God's truth in our hearts, and it should usually make us uncomfortable, because none of us is yet a saint.  The way we get a healthy conscience is by submitting it to the will of God; and the way we find God's will is by opening our hearts to the guidance of the Church that Jesus left us for our salvation.  If we find ourselves disagreeing as Catholics with the teaching of our Church on a serious matter – well, we're wrong, and the Church is right.  It's that simple.

"Here's the fifth fact, and I’ll pose it as a question.  How do we make good political choices when so many different issues are so important?  The first principle of Christian social thought is this:  Don't intentionally kill the innocent, and don't collude in allowing anybody else to do it.  Again, as I said a few moments ago, the right to life undergirds every other human right.  The reason the abortion issue is so foundational to a healthy society is not because Catholics love little babies – although we certainly do – but because revoking the unborn child’s right to life makes every other human right politically contingent.

"Here's fact Number Six, and it's the central theme of everything I tried to say in my 2008 book Render Unto Caesar.  We're better citizens when we're more faithful Catholics.  The greatest gift we can give to our nation is the witness of our moral integrity.  We need to be willing to suffer for what we know, as Catholic Christians, to be true about the purpose of human society and the sanctity of the human person.  The more faithfully “Catholic” we are in our choices, actions and convictions, the more truly we will contribute to the moral and political life of our nation."

This Catholic witness to the culture then must begin as a personal commitment but it extends into the realm of politics. While the Archbishop correctly states that the Catholic Church officially endorses no political party, he also insists that lay Catholics have a duty to work within the parties to affect political change. Bishops and priests are obliged to stay out of politics in any direct sense. Chaput even admits that his own political activism as a young priest in the 70's was "a mistake." However, lay Catholics, he urges, should be "politically engaged in a vigorous way." 

"I believe that Catholic leadership in the secular world belongs to laypeople, not to clergy or religious.  The visible role of the priest in public affairs – if by 'public' affairs we mean political affairs -- should normally be pretty small...

"...The problem is that the Church teaches moral truth, and truth has obligations for human behavior – including the social, economic and political kind.  The Church is never mainly a political organism.  But her witness for justice always and unavoidably has political consequences.  And here's an obvious example of what I mean:  Killing unborn children is a form of homicide.  It’s a profound attack on human dignity, because all other rights depend on the right to life.  It’s not the only important issue facing our country.  We have other vital issues, from immigration reform to the war in Afghanistan to the problems with our economy.  But abortion is the foundational issue at this moment in our nation’s history.  We can’t evade or ignore it.  Cooperating in abortion or quietly tolerating it is a grave evil.  We can incrementally seek to restrict and eliminate abortion, but we can never accept it as a so-called 'right.'  And if that truth inconveniences one or another political candidate -- well that’s their choice and their problem.  It’s not the fault of the Church.

"The job of Catholic laypeople is to change the thinking of their political parties and leaders with the tools of their Catholic faith.  Laypeople should be the leaven of Jesus Christ in the public square...."

So it is the primary responsibility of lay Catholics to bring the faith to bear on political issues. But Archbishop Chaput acknowledges that we do face many challenges. Among the many cultural forces out there that fight against the Truth of Catholic witness is the media, as Chaput clearly states:

"...[T]he news media, despite their claims of impartiality, and despite the good work they often do accomplish, are just as prone to prejudice, ignorance, bad craftsmanship and tribalism as any other profession.  But unlike other professions, the press has constitutional protections.  It also has real power in shaping how we think, what we think about and what we like, dislike and ignore.  America’s media, including its news media, are the greatest catechetical syndicate in history.  And if that kind of power doesn’t make us uneasy, it should at least make us alert.

We have a habit in this country of calling our news media 'the fourth estate.'  Very few of the people I ask seem to know why.  So it’s worth explaining.

"Over the past 200 years, the role of the press in democratic societies has grown sharply.  The power of the press led the 19th century poet Oscar Wilde to write that,

'In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody -- was it [Edmund] Burke? -- called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three . . . We are dominated by journalism.'

"Oscar Wilde was not exactly a model of Christian piety.  But he had the gift of very keen insight.  We should think about what he said.  When the press portrays itself as the 'tribune of the people,' ensuring the honesty of the other major institutions in our society through relentless critical scrutiny – then we need to ask the question, who scrutinizes the press?  Who keeps our news media honest?  Who holds them accountable for humiliating one political candidate while fawning over another?  Nobody elected Brian Williams as the NBC news anchor.  And readers can’t impeach the editor of The New York Times – though some people I know would find that a happy thought.

"What we can do is refuse to be stupid.  We can decline to be sandbagged by our news establishment into thinking that 'marriage' for homosexual partners is inevitable, or an obligation of social justice.  Or that Islam and Christianity lead to pretty much the same conclusions about freedom, society and the nature of the human person, when they clearly don't.  Or that the abortion issue is somehow 'settled' when thousands of unborn children continue to be legally killed every day."

The Press certainly has an anti-Christian/anti-Catholic bias. But I can't help noting that one of the two major political parties has a similar bias. When we think of issues like abortion, marriage, family, and traditional values, it seems clear that one party is more hostile than the other when it comes to authentic Catholic teaching in these areas. Archbishop Chaput admits that as a member of the clergy he is unable to endorse one party over the other. But he also says: "The first principle of Christian social thought is this:  Don't intentionally kill the innocent, and don't collude in allowing anybody else to do it...the right to life undergirds every other human right.  The reason the abortion issue is so foundational to a healthy society is not because Catholics love little babies – although we certainly do – but because revoking the unborn child’s right to life makes every other human right politically contingent."

So I would ask: which party is guilty of this great injustice?

Chaput also admits: "We have other vital issues, from immigration reform to the war in Afghanistan to the problems with our economy.  But abortion is the foundational issue at this moment in our nation’s history.  We can’t evade or ignore it.  Cooperating in abortion or quietly tolerating it is a grave evil.  We can incrementally seek to restrict and eliminate abortion, but we can never accept it as a so-called 'right.'"

Catholics may fairly disagree on these "other vital issues," but not on this "foundational issue." To do so would be a "grave evil," and one would need a proportionate reason to support a party or a candidate that denies this basic Truth. I can think of no proportionate reason.

Archbishop Chaput has rightly removed himself from passing any public judgment on political parties or candidates. It is not his role to do so. And so, as a Catholic layman who is "politically engaged in a vigorous way" I will say that the Democratic Party is no political home for a faithful Catholic. This is my own opinion (I do not pretend to speak for Archbishop Chaput or the catholic Church in general), but I believe that this is the most logical conclusion one can arrive at given the present political circumstances.

I will allow the Archbishop the final word:

"What makes the Christian faith convincing in any age is the zeal of everyday Christians. The health of the Church depends directly on the spirit of her people.  So we need to be more than simply honest or diligent or even faithful Christians.  We need to be carried away by our love for God, our love for the Church and our love for the Catholic faith."

A Further Defense of Marriage...

Once again, another excellent testimony to the correct understanding of marriage...

"The importance of male-female sexual union in marriage – both its unitive and procreative aspects – is largely ignored or denied by people today, even by Christians. And why is this fundamental component of marriage denied today?


"Contraception.


"The advent of modern contraceptive methods has completely redefined marriage in the hearts and minds of most people today. The procreative aspect of sexuality – being open to children – is seen as something superfluous to a good marriage. The unitive aspect of sexuality – a man and a woman becoming 'one flesh' – is also minimized, as sexual pleasure is exalted as the only good in the sexual act. But the Church has always taught that a marriage requires that a couple have this proper understanding, at least implicitly, of sexual intercourse for the union to be valid.


"By accepting the divorce between marriage and authentic human sexuality more than 50 years ago, we have laid the foundations for today’s gay 'marriage' push. For if procreation and male/female sexual union is irrelevant to marriage, why shouldn’t homosexuals be allowed to marry?"

Read the whole article here.

See also this previous post on this blog concerning the same subject .

God Lives Here

Jim Tonkowich, of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, has authored a piece I found at a website called Boundless (which styles itself as a “webzine” that is focused on the family). In his post Tonkowich tells of a man who moves with his family to a new town and decides to go “church shopping” by visiting different denominational services on different Sundays.

“…One week his family went to a contemporary church, and his 12-year-old son left breathless with excitement. The rock band, the audiovisuals, the theater-style seating, a coffee shop with jelly donuts — how could church be any better? ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘that’s the greatest church in the world. We have to go back!’

“The next Sunday, worship was the polar opposite. They visited a traditional Anglican church. When they arrived, the church was quietly filling up. Worshippers slipped into pews silently to kneel in prayer. If words needed to be exchanged, they were in hushed tones. Before the service had even begun, the boy tugged on his dad’s sleeve and whispered with wide-eyed wonder, ‘Dad, I think God lives here.’ There was a palpable sense of the sacred in a counter-cultural setting…

“…When we step into worship regardless of the architecture of our church, we enter the sanctuary. Sanctuary comes from the Latin word sanctus: holy. Holy means set apart, set apart for God. We enter sacred space. God lives here.

“Do we know that? Are we prepared for that? Do we ever treat any space as sacred space? And if not, why not? If all space is ‘sacred,’ then it turns out that no space is sacred since it’s all the same, all ordinary.”

Now I do not recommend “church shopping” as described above. I happen to believe that selecting one’s church should be undertaken in a more serious and thoughtful manner. (What about doctrine? What about creedal statements? What about correct teaching?) Simply dropping in one Sunday to see if the shoe fits is not the best way to judge the soundness of a church’s teaching. My advice to anyone who is “church shopping” has always been to ask questions, read, study and be informed about a denomination. Don’t just show up one Sunday and see if you like the atmosphere. There is more to faith than a good vibe and an emotional high.

However, there is certainly one thing we can learn about a church community by witnessing their Sunday service – we can learn something about their attitude toward the sacred. And we can compare what we see to what we know of historic Christianity. The early Christians sought out the burial sites of the martyrs. They worshiped at the tombs of saints, gathering in the catacombs for the Eucharistic celebration. They marked these spaces with holy images. They set them apart for this special purpose. The ancient Church had respect for sacred space.

Compare this to many Evangelical/Protestant churches today, where you might find coffee and refreshments sold during the service. Or when the space is not used for worship, perhaps a jazzercise class can sweat it out next to the communion table. Or maybe you can have a pick-up game of basketball after we lower the goals out of the rafters and fold up the metal chairs.

Would an ancient Christian recognize this as sacred space? Would he see this as the same Church to which he belonged?

When we attend our church on Sunday morning, do we want our kids to say, “That music rocked, and the donuts were awesome!” Or would we rather they whisper to us quietly, “I think God lives here.”

This Week's Headlines

As another week comes to an end, this is your chance to top off your glass with a final helping of news, current events, and just plain interesting stuff that may not have made into the mainstream media. A chance to linger for a few more moments before we close the door on the week. Below are some links to articles, blogs, and miscellaneous happenings that caught my eye over the past few days. Sample what you like - I'll serve up more next Friday...

  
Message of His Holiness Benedict XVI for Lent 2011 - "As she awaits the definitive encounter with her Spouse in the eternal Easter, the Church community, assiduous in prayer and charitable works, intensifies her journey in purifying the spirit, so as to draw more abundantly from the Mystery of Redemption the new life in Christ the Lord"
  
Recovering a Catholic Subculture - "One of the worst mistakes American Catholicism ever made was the scrapping in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s of the subculture that had served it well up to that time. That was the era of the great flight from what Catholic intellectuals snobbishly called the 'Catholic ghetto.'"
 

Understanding the Stages of Spiritual Starvation in the West - "I’d like to take a look at some of the stages of physical starvation and speak of their spiritual equivalent...I will list the physical stage and them describe what I think is a spiritual component."

Exposing Relativism: Three Stories - "The three stories here effectively blow the whistle on relativism, exposing the self-deception and inconsistency which accompany that widely held position."


The Myth of Religious Tolerance - "The closer one examines tolerance and tries to apply it across the board, the more obvious it becomes that it's simply insufficient as a principle to govern society. Even if it were possible to achieve total tolerance, it would be exceedingly undesirable and counterproductive to do so."


Edith Stein: the Apostate Saint - "Why is it that when Edith endorsed atheism, she was still considered a member of the Jewish community?"


Private Totalitarianism, Writ Large - "It is curious how abortion has wound up devouring groups of people – blacks in the United States, females in the East – the very groups its advocates claim to champion. In that, it also eerily mimics the victimization patters of virulent forms of socialism."


The Demands of the Irresponsible - "Corruption is an inherent feature of collectivism.  There are no large, honest governments, and there never will be.  When political power becomes one of the most valuable commodities in an economy, it will be bought, sold, and traded."


Does God Love the Souls in Hell? - "Is it really a sign of hate or vengeance, rather than love, that God sustains the souls in Hell?"


The Lutherans Are Coming! - "Many Protestants in the original denominations, after 500 years of experimentation, and beginning to realize the futility of it all. It has been half a millennium of one epic failure after another, culminating in the virtual apostasy of modern denominations..." See also: 'Anglo-Lutheran Catholics' to Enter Catholic Church through Anglican Ordinariate


Scientism Is Not Science - "A truly Catholic perspective is to rejoice in science. Our tradition enshrines the understanding that creation is revelation and the more we can know of this creation, the more we can know of God, the more we can know of his Logos, Jesus Christ our Lord."

The Challenges and Graces of Conversion - "As a Protestant, you generally see the Church, particularly the Catholic Church as an 'institution.'  For many people, that term has become negatively associated with power, oppression, domination, and restrictions.  As a convert, you may discover that this was and is a false idea of the Church.  Instead you may find a growing understanding of what it means that the Church is the 'Bride of Christ.'"


Do Those Who Defend Marriage Understand it? - "While it is true that every state that has asked its citizens to decide who can marry has clung to the traditional arrangement, it is also true that few can explain the actual nature of marriage—nor can they adequately define its ends."


Number of Baptized Catholics Grows by 15 Million - "...the number of bishops and priests grew in direct proportion to the number of Catholics worldwide. For the 1.3 percent more Catholics in the world, there were 1.3 percent more of both bishops and priests in the period from 2008 - 2009."


Primacy in Love - "[T]he Church can remain one only from communion with the crucified Christ... Only the eucharistic faith, only the assembly around the present Lord can she keep for the long term. And from here she receives her order. The Church is not ruled by majority decisions but rather through the faith that matures in the encounter with Christ ...in the liturgy."
 
Would George Washington Recognize God-deprived America? - "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports....reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National Morality can prevail in Exclusion of Religious Principle." [George Washington's Farewell Address]


 What's So Great About Democracy?  - "Democracy in the hands of the Klingons probably still portends bad news for Starfleet, not to mention your average Klingon." See also: Is Democracy Better? - "Catholics should not believe in the strict separation of Church and State...Instead we believe that the teachings of Christ must consciously influence the governments of the state for the good of the people."


We need constantly to rediscover why the Church is against abortion - "Catholics believe – more fundamentally than in anything else – in God’s Creation of this world and in the fact that, in Chesterton’s words, life in it 'is an experience of a unique and miraculous character, the idea of missing which would be intolerable if it were for one moment conceivable.'"


What You See is Only Part of What You Get – A Meditation On the Magnificence of Mystery - "In the worldly notion of mystery it is something to approach with  perseverance and the smarts to conquer. But the mysteries of faith are something to be considered with humility and reverence realizing we can never exhaust their meaning or capture and conquer their full essence."


Communion on the Hand or on the Tongue? - "I guess that my question is a polarising one: on the one side are almost all the faithful who attend the Novus Ordo Mass; and on the other is the eloquent, passionate and often learned minority who attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form."

House Overwhelmingly Votes to Scrap Planned Parenthood Funding - "Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana was the main sponsor of the amendment, which prevents federal funding of Planned Parenthood’s national organization and 102 named affiliates."

 

The debate continues over the truth about lying... - "Do the activities of Live Action constitute lying?"

Obama decision on marriage law raises questions of religious liberty, future of marriage - "It raises the concern that the Justice Department will treat believing Christians, Jews, Muslims and others as though they are the equivalent of racists."

 

Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2, on "who is Jesus Christ"

What's So Great About Democrcay? (Part 2)

Continuing with the same theme as my post from yesterday, I stumbled across a piece by Fr. Dwight Longenecker at his blog, Standing on my Head. Again the emphasis is on sound moral virtue as the foundation of a just society. A democracy is only as "good" as the people who live in it...

...[A]ny form of government that is dominated by ruthless, self seeking, ambitious and power hungry people will be corrupt and will eventually end in tyranny and revolution. This is why personal virtue is vital for any political system to bring about a truly good and free society. The ruler must himself be virtuous, but so must the whole society, for a corrupt society will despise a good and noble ruler just as a corrupt ruler will despise a good and noble populace.

This is where the Catholic worldview becomes so important. Catholics should not believe in the strict separation of Church and State. That is not to say we support a 'State church' or that explicit religion must be integrated into every aspect of national life. Instead we believe that the teachings of Christ must consciously influence the governments of the state for the good of the people. We are to be salt in the dish and yeast in the dough. Through Catholic education and the Catholic religion we should be reminding our leaders and teaching future leaders the principles of servant leadership. We should be grooming rulers who are virtuous  at the same time that we teach the people to follow those same principles of virtue and self sacrifice.

People may hold these principles without holding to the Christian religion, but without the Christian religion they will not hold them for long because there is no ultimate motivation to do so. What human being, given great power and wealth, will have the nobility of spirit and self sacrificial ideals to truly serve the people and lay down his life for them every day? Apart from the grace of God, no one, and if there were a person like that he or she would probably not be seeking power in the first place.

This is why, in the end, political solutions to the world's problems are not the ultimate answer. G.K.Chesterton said, "Every argument is a theological argument." Same here. Every form of government will be eventually become corrupt unless it is founded on a supernatural faith which calls all men to lay down their lives in service of others--just as the Master did

 Read the whole article here.

What's So Great About Democracy?

Excellent post at the National Catholic Register website by Pat Archibald:

With dictator after dictator facing early retirement over the last month, we have heard a lot of talk about democracy.

We are told that protesters are seeking democracy.  We should support democracy.  The people deserve democracy.  I say, so what?

What’s so great about democracy?

I think people sometimes mistake the means for the ends.  Democracy can be a means toward a larger goal, the securing of individual liberty.  But it is no guarantee of the same.  Without a culture supporting it, democracy can be just as bad as whatever it replaces.

Democracy in the hands of the Klingons probably still portends bad news for Starfleet, not to mention your average Klingon.

People often misunderstand the greatness of the American experiment.  The greatness came not from “one man, one vote.”  The greatness of the experiment lay in the concept that democracy is to be used to secure unalienable God-given rights. What good is democracy in a culture in which those concepts are alien?

Democracy is a tool, nothing more.  I conceive of it as a loaded gun, used for good or ill.  A loaded gun can put food on the table and protect your life and liberty.  A loaded gun can also oppress, coerce, and kill.  Democracy, like a loaded gun, is a tool that inherits the morality of those who wield it.

 Read the whole article here.

Our Republic stands or falls on our ability as a nation to uphold sound moral values. The "dictatorship of relativism," as Pope Benedict phrased it, attempts to dismantle moral Truth and eats away at the very foundation of our country. As Catholics (as Christians) we have an obligation to defend objective moral Truth in the public square. Democracy will only be as good or as just as those who participate in its function.

Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter

Today, February 22, is the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter. For Catholics this day commemorates Jesus’ handing of the “keys” to Peter as Vicar of Christ and head of the Church on earth. In other words, we celebrate the establishment of the papacy. For obvious reasons Protestants do not share this Feast Day as part of their liturgical calendar. The Reformation rejected the primacy of the Church of Rome and the authority of the pope.

I am currently reading a book (as a part of the book review program for the Catholic Company) which points out an interesting fact regarding the historical argument in favor of Roman primacy. The book Clement and the Early Church of Rome (which I will review fully at a later date) concerns itself with the precise dating of a certain letter from Clement, a bishop of Rome, to the Church in Corinth in the First Century. The letter of Clement was intended to settle a dispute over some ousted presbyters in Corinth. Clement and the Church of Rome instructed the Corinthian Church to re-instate the presbyters, and the letter implies that Rome had the authority to make such a request and expected its wishes to be fulfilled. Of course this argues in favor of Roman primacy at a very early date, and if the thesis of the book is correct, the dating of Clement’s letter may indeed be even earlier than previously believed by scholars.

The letter itself by no means seals the deal on Roman primacy or the papacy. But it certainly drives home the point quite nicely, and is often used by Catholic apologists as one reason to favor the Catholic view. So how did the Reformers such as Luther and Calvin argue against the Letter of Clement? The answer is they didn’t have to. The letter was not known to theologians of that time and so it was never presented as a counter to Protestant charges. Father Thomas Heron, author of Clement and the Early Church of Rome, explains that the letter of Clement was discovered in relatively recent times:

“The actual text, after being lost in the Middle Ages, was rediscovered with the Codex of Alexandrinus, sent as a New Year’s present by the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucar, to the English King, Charles I, in 1627. The Royal Librarian, Patrick Young, edited and published the two Clemintine epistles contained in the codex, with modern chapter notation, in 1633…

“The Alexandrinus, however, lacks several folios and 1 Clement is missing about one tenth of its sixty-five chapters, a lacuna which extends from 57:6 to 64:1. It was not until 1875 that the remainder of the epistle was found and published. This was the accomplishment of Bryennios who found the Codex of Constantinopolitanus in the library of the Patriarch of Jerusalem… The authenticity of this manuscript was in turn substantiated by the discovery of a Syriac version only a few months later in Paris in 1876…”

Thus it was not until the Nineteenth Century that Catholics could use 1 Clement as an historic proof text for Roman primacy. Good news for Catholics today, but what about the Church during the Reformation, as Herron points out:

“As fortunate as their rediscovery was in the nineteenth century, the practical disappearance of manuscripts of 1 Clement from circulation after the eleventh century accounts for its lack of use among theologians in the Middle Ages and in the all-important Reformation period.”

So the appearance of 1 Clement was too little too late to stop the errors of Protestantism, but we can certainly celebrated its existence today of all days, and hopefully raise the awareness of our separated brethren to its importance in understanding the ancient Church.