religious freedom

Catholic Politicians Who Attack Church Should Remember God’s Judgment

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With stern words Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Illinois warned Catholic politcians last Friday that any collaboration with “assaults against the faith” would one day face the judgment of God. Orthodox bishops should take notice.

The report states:

When asked specifically about recent actions of Democratic Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius Kathleen Sebelius and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Bishop Jenky replied “I am utterly scandalized.”

“The Lord once said ‘if you deny me at the end, I will deny you,’ this from our most merciful, good Savior. And so if it is a choice between Jesus Christ and political power or getting favorable editorials in leftist papers, well, that’s simply not a choice.”

Some leaders in the Catholic Church compromised with secular politicians for many decades, just as Orthodox leaders have done. The difference is that the Catholic Church remained clear about the moral precepts protecting innocent life while in some (fortunately rare) cases Orthodox leadership muddied the tradition to curry favor with the politicians. The cost has been incalculable. Today resistance is the only option says Bp. Jenky:

Determined secularists see the Catholic Church as the largest institutional block to a completely secularized society and not for the first, and probably not for the last time, we’re under assault,” he said drawing parallels with the anti-Catholic “Kulturkampf” in late 19th century Germany or the anti-clerical laws in France in the early 20th century.

He’s right. If the Catholic Church can be silenced, then the largest impediment to the secular advance is removed. Christians of other communions will also be silenced under the rubric of tolerance, open-mindedness, and more recently public health (Obamacare). When the voice is silenced, then the precepts the Christian moral tradition can be erased from the historical memory. Western Christendom will slip into unimaginable darkness, worse than the catastrophe from which East Christendom is emerging.

The Manhattan Declaration anticipated conflicts of the type we see today between the Obama Administration and the Catholic Church. It warned all Christians that a time was coming when the denial of God at the heart of secular ideologies would force the Christian into a choice: either abandon the Christian faith or resist the ideology.

That time has come. All Christians who know that Christ has indeed risen from the dead and that death has been overthrown, become brothers against the ideas that exalt death as a tool of social progress. The Catholic is my brother, as is the Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican, Pentecostal, Methodist, Jew, and anyone else who chooses life over barbarism.

Note too that some Orthodox bishops signed the Manhattan Declaration. They understand what the Christian religion gives the culture, and what a culture without Christianity would be like.

God bless and protect the Catholic Church. God bless and protect us.

Source CNA/EWTN News

Politicians who consider themselves Catholic but collaborate in “the assault against their faith” should remember they will one day have to give account for their acts before God, Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Illinois said Feb 10.

“There is a last judgment. There is a particular judgment. May they change their minds and may God have mercy on them,” he told CNA during his visit to Rome.

When asked specifically about recent actions of Democratic Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius Kathleen Sebelius and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Bishop Jenky replied “I am utterly scandalized.”

“The Lord once said ‘if you deny me at the end, I will deny you,’ this from our most merciful, good Savior. And so if it is a choice between Jesus Christ and political power or getting favorable editorials in leftist papers, well, that’s simply not a choice.”

Both Sebelius and Rep. Pelosi have been at the forefront of attempts to force Catholic institutions to cover contraception, sterilizations and abortifacients as part of their staff’s health insurance plans.

Bishop Jenky said there are too many Catholic politicians in the U.S. who “like to wear green sweaters on St. Patrick’s Day and march” or “have their pictures taken with the hierarchy” or “have conspicuous crosses on their forehead with ashes” but who then “not only do not live their faith they collaborate in the assault against their faith.”

The 64-year-old Chicago native is currently making his “ad limina” visit to Rome to discuss the state of his diocese with the Pope and the Vatican. He is part of a larger episcopal delegation from the states of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Bishop Jenky said the issue of religious freedom in the United States has featured in all their meetings so far, including their audience with Pope Benedict XVI Feb. 9.

“Determined secularists see the Catholic Church as the largest institutional block to a completely secularized society and not for the first, and probably not for the last time, we’re under assault,” he said drawing parallels with the anti-Catholic “Kulturkampf” in late 19th century Germany or the anti-clerical laws in France in the early 20th century.

“I am a Holy Cross religious and my own community had six colleges in France and they turned our mother house chapel into a stable,” he said. As for the United States in 2012, “it is always difficult to predict the future but the intensity of hatred against Catholic Christianity in elements of our culture is just astounding.”

He believes the present White House administration is also motivated by a “determined secularism,” while Communist dictator Joseph Stalin would “admire the uniformity of the American press, with some exceptions.”

In 2010 the Illinois legislature voted to legalize same-sex civil unions, a move which led to the closure of Catholic foster care services. This, said the bishop, took the Church “entirely out of the work that we started when the State of Illinois could not have cared less about beggar kids running up and down the streets.”

Bishop Jenky is very conscious of this patrimony of Catholic schools, hospitals and other social services “built by the sacrifice of Catholic believers” in previous generations of Illinois Catholics. “There weren’t a lot of multi-millionaires who built the churches, opened those orphanages or built those schools,” he said.

The bishop fears that socially liberal elites ultimately want to secularize such institutions by stealth. “I assume that is the underlying goal,” he suggested, “so that is robbing Christ but it is also robbing the heritage of generations of believers. So we would try to resist this in every way possible. It would be an incredible injustice.”

In conversation, he quoted the stark 2010 prediction of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, “I will die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” So is Bishop Jenky prepared for prison or worse?

“I hope I would always prefer Christ to anything so, if it came to it, yes but I would be one of the trembling martyrs.”

He recalled how in ancient Rome some Christians would run towards their martyrdom. He, on the other hand, would “probably be walking down the Forum with eyes downcast a little.”

“I think most of the bishops of our Church, though, would be faithful to Christ above anything, including our own personal freedom.”

Catholic Bishops to Obama: No Compromise, Rescind the Mandate

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Source: Vatican Radio

Full text of the US Catholic Bishops’ statement in response to President Obama’s proposed changes to the HHS mandate:

The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the “preventive services” regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers” that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.
It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer’s policy, not as a separate rider.
Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

Obama and the Dictatorship of Relativism

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When the Manhattan Declaration first came out, Orthodox signers came under considerable criticism. Too much culture wars was the usual response. I signed the document because I saw that efforts to institutionalize secular liberalism could only succeed if dissenting voices were silenced. The cost of that silence is high and will include the loss of liberty if it succeeds. Secular fundamentalism allows no prisoners.

Below Samuel Gregg examines the historical antecedents of the present conflict and writes, “(T)he Catholic Church’s fight — in fact, the fight of anyone, believer or non-believer, who recognizes secularist fundamentalism as a danger to freedom — against the despotism of “there-is-no-moral-truth…” is only just beginning.” He’s right.

Source: American Spectator | Samuel Gregg

There is no moral truth and Rawls is his prophet.

If there was ever any doubt about one of the Obama Administration’s key philosophical commitments, it was dispelled on Jan. 20 when the Department of Health and Human Services informed the Catholic Church that most of its agencies will be required to provide employees with insurance-coverage for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs: i.e., products, procedures, and chemicals used to facilitate acts which the Church and plenty of others consider intrinsically evil.

Alas, it’s not a question of the administration being tragically “tone deaf,” as one American Jesuit claimed, to specifically Catholic concerns. Nor is the bedrock of President Obama’s position, in the end, a commitment to “women’s health.” Outside the ghoulish world of Planned Parenthood, pregnancy does not qualify as a disease. A fertile womb is no threat to human life.

No, this is all about the absolutization of choice for the sake of choice. It’s also about creating a society in which any discussion of the actual ends we choose is considered unacceptable in public debates about law and morality.

Modern liberalism has a long history of trying to exclude consideration of the proper ends of human action from public discourse in the name of tolerance. But neither liberalism nor secularism are as neutral about such matters as they pretend.

Self-identified modern liberals (and secularists more generally) typically insist that justice and tolerance demand that governments shouldn’t privilege any conception of morality, religious or secular, in framing its laws. Unfortunately for liberals, this position — outlined in excruciating detail by the seer of modern secular liberalism, the late John Rawls — is self-refuting. Why? Because it, ahem, privileges a legal and political commitment to relativity about moral questions. It’s the same absurdity underlying the philosophical skeptic’s claim that there’s no truth — except for the truth that there is no truth.

These little internal inconsistencies, however, don’t stop the use of such conceptions of tolerance and justice as weapons for terminating any contribution to public debate that’s informed by the propositions that moral truth exists, that we can know it through revelation and/or reason, and that it is unjust to cordon off these truths from the public square.

And here we come face-to-face with the essence of what a certain Joseph Ratzinger famously described in an April 2005 homily as “the dictatorship of relativism.” Most people think of tyrannies as involving the imposition of a defined set of ideas upon free citizens. Benedict XVI’s point was that the coercion at the heart of the dictatorship of relativism derives precisely from the fact that it “does not recognize anything as definitive.”

In this world, tolerance no longer creates the safety for us to express our views about the nature of good and evil and its implications for law and public morality. Instead, it serves to banish the truth as the reference point against which all of us must test our ideas and beliefs. The objective is to reduce everyone to modern Pontius Pilates who, whatever their private beliefs, wash their hands in the face of obvious injustices, such as what the Obama administration has just inflicted upon not only Catholics, but anyone whose convictions about the truth requires them to abstain from cooperating in acts they regard as evil per se.

Of course, modern liberals do have their preferred ends, which (despite all their endless chatter about reason) reflect their profoundly cramped vision of man’s intellect. Here they follow the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. He argued that “reason ought to be the slave of the passions.” Reason’s role, in other words, is not to identify what is rational for people to choose. Instead, reason is reduced to merely devising the means for realizing whatever goals that people, following the profound moral reasoning of a five year-old, “just feel like” choosing.

On this basis, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham concluded that life was really about nothing more than the experience of sensations. Hence, the goal was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But having repeatedly failed to construct a coherent hedonistic calculus of utility (even Rawls concluded it was a doomed endeavor), the “ultimate goal” of modern liberalism and secularism now “consists,” as Benedict noted in 2005, “solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

That in turn reduces life and my choices to ensuring that I am among those who are (1) powerful enough to get to indulge my ego and my desires, (2) sophistical enough to produce rationalizations (otherwise known as consequentialist ethics) for doing so, and (3) strong enough to trample over anyone whose existence or beliefs might limit my ability to do whatever I just happen to “feel like” doing.

Here modern liberalism’s essentially illiberal nature reveals its true face. Because if your theological or philosophical convictions get in the way of your employee’s desire to neuter his spouse at your expense in order to avoid the “disease” of pregnancy, then tough luck. Desire plus autonomy — the calling-cards of secularist fundamentalism — trump all (except, apparently, when it comes to the distribution of wealth, climate change, and smoking).

The Catholic Church — and its teachings about good and evil — goes back 2,000 years. Since that time, it’s weathered the savage persecutions of the Roman Empire, the terrorism of the French Revolution, the systematic harassment of National Socialism, and the all-out assault of Marxism-Leninism. And, perhaps most telling of all, it’s managed to survive the many, often terrible sins and faithlessness of its own members. The Church will be around long after the not-so-New Atheists have gone to their eternal reward.

The Church’s struggle with the dictatorship of relativism may, however, prove one of its most difficult challenges. That’s partly because it’s a subtle form of oppression that trades off words like “choice” that strongly resonate in Western societies — the same societies in which many secularists all-too-quickly equate any religion’s claim to teach the truth with murderers who fly planes into buildings.

In the span of human history, the Obama Administration is just a blip, however much it considers itself, like all progressivists, to be on history’s cutting edge. But be warned: the Catholic Church’s fight — in fact, the fight of anyone, believer or non-believer, who recognizes secularist fundamentalism as a danger to freedom — against the despotism of “there-is-no-moral-truth-and-Rawls-is-his-prophet” is only just beginning.

Orthodox Bishops Assembly Silent on Moral Issues

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By John Couretas

– At an October 1970 meeting of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the Americas (SCOBA), which was called to discuss the burning question of an independent American Church, the presiding conference chair Archbishop Iakovos got fed up and quit. Official letters raising the subject of independence had been sent to the “mother Churches” in Constantinople, Bucharest, Belgrade, Athens and other Orthodox “centers” pointing for the need to do something about the chaotic “situation of Orthodoxy in America.” Only three replies came back. To the Greek Orthodox Iakovos, this was proof that no one took SCOBA seriously and, for that matter, the American Orthodox.

The archbishop resigned from SCOBA in disgust, saying that he had no desire to be the head of a “dead body.” According to a contemporary account, the official minutes of the meeting were forged to cover up what would turn out to be a temporary resignation.

It would take another 40 years for SCOBA to be officially dismantled and replaced with the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America, also known as the Assembly of Bishops. Its founding articles constitute the body for “the promotion and accomplishment of Church unity in North and Central America.” It is also charged with providing a “common witness by the Church to all those outside her.” But given its sterling record of non-accomplishment on that “common witness” so far, is there good reason to expect that the Assembly won’t become the sort of “dead body” that Abp. Iakovos feared SCOBA had become?

Nothing could reveal this more clearly than the Assembly’s non-reaction to the Jan. 20 mandate by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that orders most employers and insurers to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs (the “morning after pill”) free of charge. In sharp contrast to the somnolent Assembly, the response from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was swift and unequivocal.

“From a human point of view, we may be tempted to surrender, when our government places conception, pregnancy and birth under the ‘center for disease control,’ when chemically blocking conception or aborting the baby in the womb is considered a ‘right’ to be subsidized by others who abhor it,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of USCCB. “Not us!”

It wasn’t just a Catholic thing. Protestant and Orthodox Jewish leaders had written to the White House in late December about concerns that “the contraceptives mandate in the health insurance regulations, and about the ‘religious employer’ exemption that is so narrow that it does not protect most faith-based organizations.”

The Obama administration mandate came down just before Sanctity Sunday, on Jan. 22, and the March for Life the following day. As for these events, widely attended by Catholics, Protestants and those of other faith traditions, the “common witness” of the Assembly amounted only to silence.

That is not to say that individual hierarchs, clergy, seminarians and lay Orthodox did not turn out in numbers and show their support at the 2012 March for Life in Washington and other cities. Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America delivered an eloquent and Spirit-filled opening prayer in front of the U.S. Supreme Court – with Abp. Dolan at his side. On Sanctity Sunday, Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, offered a thoughtful talk on the Orthodox Tradition, abortion and the death penalty at a Pan-Orthodox Sanctity of Life Vespers held in Chicago.

The Assembly Nods

The Assembly is chaired by Archbishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOA). The Committee for Church and Society, which aims to “develop a process to determine both the propriety and the priority of advocacy by the Assembly of issues concerning Church, government and society,” is chaired by the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Savas of Pittsburgh. Both are hierarchs under Patriarch Bartholomew and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, based in Istanbul, Turkey.

Putting the left-leaning Met. Savas at the head of the Committee on Church and Society was a masterstroke of political cynicism. His idea of social critique is to post offensive videos on his Facebook page like, “Tea Party Jesus: Sermon on the Mall.” Whoever was responsible for nominating Met. Savas to the Church and Society position probably felt especially clever for the rest of the day, like the schoolboy prankster who puts fresh paint on doorknobs. But the intent of Met. Savas’ appointment has been so grossly obvious, it’s not even worthy of the Byzantine reputation for subterfuge and manipulation in high places.

Could it be that Met. Savas hasn’t roused the Church and Society committee to speak out on the Obama administration’s ruling on contraception, sterilization and abortifacients, or the March for Life, because he doesn’t want to be reminded of how he exulted at President Obama’s election, using the most florid biblical language? If he’d like some pointers on how to speak out on public square issues, he could do worse than follow the lead of his plain talking Roman Catholic counterpart in Pittsburgh, Bishop David A. Zubik. Or read the statements that, at last count, 126 Catholic bishops have issued on the HHS mandate, many of which were read at diocesan Masses or included in parish bulletins.

But what could the Assembly have done under its current framework and administration? Read the Church and Society’s to-do list, for some reason labeled “terms of reference,” and you find a perfect prescription for bureaucratic gridlock. It was designed for paralysis.

What’s more, the Assembly is already issuing appeals for funding. Does it not have the resources necessary to carry forward its ambitious – if wholly unfulfilled – mission? Why not? The Orthodox comprise one of the wealthiest faith communities in America, behind only Hindus and Jews. To be considered for this year’s National Herald ranking of the “50 Wealthiest Greeks in America,” for example, you’ll need a net worth of at least $60 million. (In 2011, the list published by this ethnic newspaper had a cutoff point of $72.5 million.)

Obviously, the American Orthodox world is awash in money. What’s more, there’s plenty of willingness to involve the Church in politics.

Obscure Balkan Controversies?

The Assembly managed to shake off its “common witness” torpor on Dec. 27 when it issued a press release expressing its “outrage” at the arrest of a Serbian bishop in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Under Assembly protocol, which bears a striking resemblance to GOA protocol, one must never refer to this country simply as Macedonia. That’s because the question of whether or not the Macedonians can call their country Macedonia is a pressing “national issue” at the GOA and with its leadership in Istanbul. As is well known, you can go into coffee hour at just about any Orthodox parish in America on any given Sunday and the faithful will be hotly debating this “national” issue. No, actually, they don’t even know what a FYROM is.

Raise a stink on behalf of all American Orthodox bishops about obscure Balkan church-state politics that are completely incomprehensible – and meaningless — to 99.9 percent of the American laity? Sure. But evidently the GOA doesn’t want the Assembly to confront the Obama administration publicly and in a unified way. Especially not on one of the bedrock principles of this administration. In marking the anniversary of Roe V. Wade on Jan. 23, the president said in a statement that, “we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”

Then again, how could Patriarch Bartholomew, who says the Church has no business in parishioners’ bedrooms, object? We shouldn’t expect to see him delivering the opening prayer at the March for Life anytime soon

The reality is that the GOA and the Istanbul leadership have been neck-deep for decades in massive lobbying efforts in Washington on “national issues”: FYROM, Cyprus, the Turkish oppression of the patriarchate. All of this is done with the close cooperation of the Greek Foreign Ministry, whose representatives sit at places of honor at clergy-laity banquets and show up for constant photo-ops with GOA hierarchs at New York headquarters. In an interview with a Greek newspaper, Archbishop Demetrios admitted that the GOA was dedicated to the promotion of Greek national issues in Washington. “We exercise pressure constantly,” he said. Which explains why, when Patriarch Bartholomew was in the United States in 2009, his itinerary was packed with speeches and visits with Democratic leadership and center-left and progressive think tanks. These happen to be the folks in power right now in Washington.

This lobbying is less about “speaking truth to power” than it is about speech making rich with ecclesiastical tropes but with a meaning that is essentially innocuous to secular ears. If your strategy is to constantly lobby the powers-that-be to advance “national issues” – regardless of which party is in power – your moral witness is essentially neutered in the political sphere. Your Church has sold off its prophetic witness for a mess of pottage (Gen. 25:29–34).

And we can’t dismiss this problem by saying that the Orthodox, broadly speaking, don’t get institutionally involved in politics. Far from it. How else can you explain the churches’ long membership in the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, Protestant-dominated bodies that exist to put a patina of theological legitimacy on leftist economic and political ideologies?

Patriarch Bartholomew is all too ready to talk about how the Church invented hospitals more than 1,600 years ago, as he did in a 2009 speech sponsored by the Center for American Progress and Georgetown University in Washington. He even noted that these Byzantine hospitals were “public institutions, free of charge and created for the public good.” Although the patriarch stopped short of backing the Obama administration’s health care initiative before this liberal/progressive audience, he endorsed the notion that “every member of society, from the greatest to the least” deserves the best quality healthcare.

But Patriarch Bartholomew and his lobbyists are nowhere to be found when 21st Century American hospitals are feeling the heat from an administration trampling on conscience protections. We’re talking about hundreds of hospitals founded by Catholics, Jews and Protestants and serving people in real need — today and not in some idealized forever-gone past.

Ultimately, what is the Assembly of Orthodox bishops communicating to our Catholic and Protestant and Jewish brothers and sisters? That their hospitals, medical clinics, schools, universities, social agencies are good enough for the Orthodox when we need them, when we want to rush a child to an emergency room. But don’t look for us when you need back up.

The Assembly of Orthodox bishops, the bearer of “unity” and “common witness” for American Orthodox Christians, simply can’t be bothered on this issue.

Mattingly: Pope Benedict, President Obama and Religious Freedom

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Terry Mattingly

– Source: The Republic | Terry Mattingly

Pope Benedict XVI cut to the chase when meeting with the visiting bishops from Washington, D.C., Baltimore and the U.S. armed services.

The pope mentioned “religious freedom” in the third sentence of his Jan. 19 remarks at the Vatican and he never let up — returning to this hot topic again and again.

The bottom line, he said, is that America’s once-strong political consensus has “eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.”

It doesn’t matter if these attacks originate in “radical secularism,” “radical individualism,” a “merely scientific rationality” or suppressive forms of “majority rule,” said Benedict, during one in an ongoing series of meetings with American bishops. Catholic leaders must strive to defend church teachings in ways that reach all believers in their care — including Catholic politicians.

Within hours, these American bishops had good cause to reflect on one Benedict passage in particular.

[…]

Read the entire article on The Republic website.

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