Chaput, 66, is praised by the right as a strict doctrinaire and pilloried by the left as a "culture warrior."
While other bishops bite their tongues as the church bleeds money from self-made wounds, Chaput scolds politicians, passes judgment on more open-minded clerics, and chastises that uniquely American species, Cafeteria Catholics, for daring to put their lives before faith.
Oh, and he once kept two little girls from attending parochial school, because their mothers are lesbians. How's that for compassionate conservatism?
Whose moral compass?
Boston may have given birth to the clergy sex-abuse scandal, but Philadelphia is where a monsignor will, for the first time, soon stand trial on charges that he failed to halt the ravages against children.
Chaput has won praise for acting swiftly when accusations arise, but scorn for launching a media war against the effort to give Colorado victims their day in court.
After enduring three cardinals accused of covering up crimes over decades, reform-minded Catholics like Charles McMahon had high hopes for Rigali's replacement.
"To send us a guy like Chaput," gripes the professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, is "insulting."
Area Catholics had been bracing for this day of reckoning. Susan Matthews, a Huntingdon Valley mom and QVC presenter, even started a website, Catholics4Change.com, to give other loyal but livid parishioners a place to vent and dream.
In February, after the latest grand jury report laid bare a continued pattern of criminal audacity by men of the cloth, my in-box and voice mail overflowed with cries from people sickened by the scandal and their helplessness to fix - or flee - the only church they know.
