Archbishop Chaput Writes E-book About Faith & Liberty

from the National Catholic Register, EWTN News

A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America is an extended essay that will serve as foreword to new addition of his 2008 book Render Unto Caesar.

A new e-book by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia examines the role of religious faith in American public life and contemporary pressures on religious liberty.

“Our national leadership in 2012 seems deaf to matters of religious freedom abroad and unreceptive, or frankly hostile, to religious engagement in public affairs here at home,” Archbishop Chaput writes in A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America.

The book was released March 27 through the Random House publishing division Doubleday, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia reported.

The book is an extended essay that contends that a new and authentically Catholic activism is urgent “as the mistakes and ambiguities of the past half century of American Catholic experience come to harvest.”

Some of these mistakes came because American Catholics “really wanted to fit in and wanted to kind of minimize the teachings of the Church that might be in conflict with the broader culture,” Archbishop Chaput said on the March 23 broadcast of The Dom Giordano Program on CBS Radio Philadelphia.

“I think that effort to fit in kept us quiet, and it fully undermined even Catholics’ belief and knowledge. It also compromised our ability to speak clearly about the truth.”

The new book is “very small” and will serve as a new forward to his 2008 book Render Unto Caesar, a new edition of which will be released this summer.

The book was drafted in the fall of 2011. The Philadelphia Archdiocese said the book is “even timelier now” in light of the controversy over the Health and Human Services mandate requiring almost all private health-care plans to cover sterilization and contraception, including abortion-causing drugs.

Archbishop Chaput has criticized the mandate as “coercive and deeply troubling for the rights of conscience.”

The archbishop served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2003 to 2007. Besides Render Unto Caesar, he is also the author of Living the Catholic Faith: Rediscovering the Basics.