Thoughts on a New Knighthood
Archbishop Charles Chaput
October 25, 2010
Archbishop Chaput delivered the following remarks to Catholic cadets at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on Monday, Oct. 25, 2010.
None of you wants to sit through
another classroom lecture. So my comments will be
brief. Then we can get to some questions and answers. I'm
also going to skip telling you how talented you are. You
already know that. You wouldn't be here if you weren't. What
you'll discover as you get older is that the world has
plenty of very talented failures – people who either
didn't live up to their abilities; or who did,
but did it in a way that diminished their humanity and their
character.
God made you to be better than
that. And your nation and your Church need you to be
better than that. Scripture tells us that the fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps 111:10). Wisdom – not
merely the knowledge of facts or a mastery of skills, but
wisdom about ourselves, other people and the terrain of
human life – this is the mark of a whole person. We
already have too many clever leaders. We need wise
leaders. And the wisest leaders ground themselves in
humility before God and the demands of God’s justice.
I want to offer you just four quick
points tonight. Here's the first. Military service is a
vocation, not simply a profession.
The word “vocation” comes from the
Latin word vocare, which means to call. In Christian
belief, God created each of us for a purpose. He calls each
of us by name to some form of service. No higher purpose
exists than protecting other people, especially the weak and
defenseless. This is why the Church, despite her historic
resistance to war and armed violence, has held for many
centuries that military service is not just “acceptable.” It
can also be much more than that. When lived with a spirit of
integrity, restraint and justice, military service is
virtuous. It's ennobling because – at its best –
military service expresses the greatest of all virtues:
charity; a sacrificial love for people and things outside
and more important than oneself. It flows from something
unique in the human heart: a willingness to place one's own
life in harm's way for the sake of others.
The great Russian Christian writer
Vladimir Solovyov once said that to defend peaceful men,
“the guardian angels of humanity mixed the clay [of the
earth] with copper and iron and created the soldier.” And
until the spirit of malice brought into the world by Cain
disappears from human hearts, the soldier “will be a good
and not an evil.” (i) He expressed in a poetic way what the
Church teaches and believes. And you should strive to embody
this vision in your own service.
Here's my second point. Protect the
moral character you build here, and remember the leadership
you learn here. You’ll need both when the day comes to
return to civilian life.
I think it's unwise for people my age
to judge the world too critically. The reason is pretty
simple. The older we get, the more clearly we see – or think
we see -- what's wrong with the world. It also gets harder
to admit our own role in making it that way. Over my
lifetime I've had the privilege of working with many good
religious men and women, and many good lay Christian
friends. Many of them have been heroic in their generosity,
faith and service. Many have helped to make our country a
better place.
And yet I think it's true – I know
it's true – that my generation has, in some ways, been among
the most foolish in American history. We’ve been absorbed in
our appetites, naïve about the consequences of our actions,
overconfident in our power, and unwilling to submit
ourselves to the obligations that come with the greatest
ideals of our own heritage.
Most generations of Americans have
inherited a nation different in degree from the
generations that preceded them. You will inherit an America
that is different in kind – a nation different from
anything in our past in its attitudes toward sexuality,
family, religion, law and the nature of the human person; in
other words, different and more troubling in the basic
things that define a society. My generation created this new
kind of America. Soon we will leave the consequences to
you.
And this brings us back to my second
point: Where the leadership and moral character of my
generation failed, you need to succeed. The task of
Christian moral leadership that will occupy much of
your lives in the future will not be easy. It will place
heavy demands on people like you who learned discipline and
integrity in places like this.
Here's my third point. Guarantees
of religious freedom are only as strong as the social
consensus that supports them.
Americans have always taken their
religious freedom for granted. Religious faith has always
played a major role in our public life, including debate
about public policy and law. The First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution explicitly guarantees this freedom. But that
guarantee and its application are subject to lawmakers and
the interpretation of courts. And lawmakers and courts
increasingly attack religious liberty, undermine rights of
conscience, and force references to God out of our public
square. This shift in our culture is made worse by mass
media that, in general, have little understanding of
religious faith and are often openly hostile. As religious
practice softens in the United States over the next few
decades, the consensus for religious freedom may easily
decline. And that has very big implications for the life of
faithful Catholics in this country.
Here's my fourth and final point. Given
everything I've just said, how do we live faithfully as
Catholics going forward in a culture that’s skeptical, and
even hostile, toward what we believe?
Knighthood is an institution with very
deep roots in the memory of the Church. Nearly 900 years
ago, one of the great monastic reformers of the Church, St.
Bernard of Clairvaux, described the ideal Christian knights
as Godly men who “shun every excess in clothing and
food. They live as brothers in joyful and sober company
(with) one heart and one soul. … There is no distinction of
persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather
than to noble blood. They rival one another in mutual
consideration, and they carry one another’s burdens, thus
fulfilling the law of Christ.” (ii)
Bernard had few illusions about human
nature. And he was anything but naïve. Writing at the dawn
of the crusading era, in the early 12th century, he was well
aware of the greed, vanity, ambition and violence that too
often motivated Europe’s warrior class, even in the name of
religious faith.
Most of the men who took up the cause
of aiding eastern Christians and liberating the Holy Land in
the early decades of crusading did so out of genuine zeal
for the Cross. But Bernard also knew that many others had
mixed or even corrupt and evil motives. In his great essay
“In Praise of the New Knighthood” (c. 1136), he outlined the
virtues that should shape the vocation of every truly
“Christian” knight: humility, austerity, justice, obedience,
unselfishness and a single-minded zeal for Jesus Christ in
defending the poor, the weak, the Church and persecuted
Christians. (iii)
Our life today may seem very different
from life in the 12th century. The Church today asks us to
seek mutual respect with people of other religious
traditions, and to build common ground for cooperation
wherever possible.
But human nature -- our basic hopes,
dreams, anxieties and sufferings -- hasn’t really changed.
The basic Christian vocation remains the same: to follow
Jesus Christ faithfully, and in following Jesus, to defend
Christ’s Church and to serve her people zealously,
unselfishly and with all our skill. As St. Ignatius Loyola
wrote in his “Spiritual Exercises” -- and remember that
Ignatius himself was a former soldier -- each of us must
choose between two battle standards: the standard of Jesus
Christ, humanity’s true King, or the standard of his
impostor, the Prince of This World.
There is no neutral ground. C.S. Lewis
once said that Christianity is a “fighting religion.” He
meant that Christian discipleship has always been -- and
remains -- a struggle against the evil within and outside
ourselves. This is why the early Church Fathers described
Christian life as “spiritual combat.” It’s why they called
faithful Christians the “Church Militant” and “soldiers of
Christ” in the Sacrament of Confirmation.
The Church needs men and women of
courage and Godliness today more than at any time in her
history. So does this extraordinary country we call home in
this world; a nation that still has an immense reservoir of
virtue, decency and people of good will. This is why the
Catholic ideal of knighthood, with its demands of radical
discipleship, is still alive and still needed. The essence
of Christian knighthood remains the same: sacrificial
service rooted in a living Catholic faith.
A new “spirit of knighthood” is what
we need now -- unselfish, tireless, devoted disciples
willing to face derision and persecution for Jesus
Christ. We serve our nation best by serving God first, and
by proving our faith with the example of our lives.
(i)
Vladimir Solovyov, The Justification of the Good: An
Essay on Moral Philosophy; translated by Nathalie
Duddington; edited and annotated by Boris Jakim (Wm. B.
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 2005) 349; original Russian
text published in 1897
(ii)
Bernard of Clairvaux, “In Praise of the New Knighthood,”
The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, V. 7 (Cistercian
Publications, Kalamazoo, MI, 1977) 127-167
(iii) Note that Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade, wrote his essay specifically as an apologia for the founding of the first military-religious order, the “knights of the Temple” or the Knights Templar. The Templars took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, lived in common and dedicated themselves to the defense of Christians in the Holy Land. But as R.J. Zwi Werblowsky writes in his introduction to Bernard’s essay in The Works noted above, Bernard was also concerned with “the theology of a reformed and sanctified knighthood” in contrast to the frivolity and vanity of worldly chivalry.
(iii) Note that Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade, wrote his essay specifically as an apologia for the founding of the first military-religious order, the “knights of the Temple” or the Knights Templar. The Templars took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, lived in common and dedicated themselves to the defense of Christians in the Holy Land. But as R.J. Zwi Werblowsky writes in his introduction to Bernard’s essay in The Works noted above, Bernard was also concerned with “the theology of a reformed and sanctified knighthood” in contrast to the frivolity and vanity of worldly chivalry.