On June 21, the night before the Catholic Church traditionally remembers the martyrdom of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More at the hands of King Henry VIII, American Catholics will begin a unique two-week vigil of prayer, sacrifice, and public witness for the cause of religious liberty.
The “Fortnight for Freedom” was called by my brothers in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and it will conclude with the ringing of bells in churches all across the country on July 4, the memorial of our country’s independence. The bishops aren’t comparing the conditions of the American church in the early 21st century with that of Catholics persecuted during the English Reformation. We’re blessed in our country with a religious liberty that, sadly, most people in the world today do not enjoy. According to the Pew Center, three out of four people worldwide live in a country where the government doesn’t protect their right to worship and serve the God they believe in.
This global context puts the Catholic Church’s current conflict with the U.S. government in some perspective. But just because believers today aren’t executed for their beliefs and are free to go to church on Sundays, that doesn’t mean freedom of religion isn’t in jeopardy in America.
For our country’s founders—and for every American generation until now—freedom of religion has meant much more than the freedom to worship. Freedom of religion has meant the freedom to establish institutions to help us live out our faith and carry out our religious duties. Freedom of religion has meant the freedom to express our faith and values in political debates—and the freedom to try to persuade others to share our convictions.
In recent years, many have observed that our American consensus on religious liberty, conscience protection, and religion’s public role has been eroding. There are many causes for this. The first is the reality of religious indifferentism or “practical atheism”—the fact that growing numbers of people in our society are living as if God doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to care about religious freedom if you don’t care about being religious.
But our freedoms are also being eroded as the result of constant agitation from de-Christianizing and secularizing elements in American society. In the public arena, we’ve seen relentless efforts to get Church agencies to go along with secular agendas that violate Catholic beliefs—from trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and sterilizations, to trying to coerce Catholic adoption agencies to place children with homosexual couples.
In our wider culture, Christian faith and values are increasingly portrayed—in the media, in the courts, even in comments from high government officials—as a form of bigotry. In our diverse, pluralistic society, it seems sometimes that Christianity is becoming the one lifestyle that can’t be tolerated to have a role in public life.
These same secularizing and de-Christianizing forces are at work in our current conflict with the federal government’s health insurance mandates. No one can credibly claim that this conflict with the government is about access to abortion and birth control, because unfortunately, both are widely available and affordable to anyone who wants them in this country, often subsidized by federal and state governments.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that our present conflict is part of a larger cultural struggle to redefine America as a purely secular society—a society in which religious institutions have no legitimate public role unless they are serving the government’s purposes.
This struggle to secularize America has been going on for a long time. What’s new is that our government, which is entrusted with the duty to protect religious liberty, has now taken sides against the liberty of the nation’s largest religious community. In this present conflict, our government is using the full weight of its powers to try to dictate the terms under which the Catholic Church and individual Catholics will be permitted to participate in our society. For perhaps the first time in our history, our government is acting as if our human rights don’t come from the hand of God, but are instead “benefits” that the government can bestow, define, and take away.
I’ve had well-meaning people ask me: Why has this conflict become so important to the Church? Why won’t we just “compromise” and provide birth-control insurance to our employees? They want me to know that this would be a small price to pay for the greater good of the Church being able to keep serving the poor in her hospitals, schools, and charities.
I agree that this has been a needless and unprovoked distraction for the Church. Catholic institutions have been forced at many levels to divert time, energy, and resources better spent serving the poor to defending ourselves against this unwarranted threat to our freedom from our own government.
But the Church doesn’t serve the poor to please the government. We serve the poor because we are compelled by the love of Christ. This same love for Christ compels us to bear witness that life, marriage, and family are sacred and that preventing children from being born is immoral. So the “compromise” we’re being offered is no compromise at all. It’s capitulation. It’s the temptation to serve the government instead of God.
So what do we do now? We do what the Church and individual Christians have always done: We love our enemies and resist their evil with good. We live our faith with the freedom of the children of God, in season and out of season, with a love that serves and heals and inspires. We redeem the time and tell the world the good news that God is alive and that he is calling us to a great destiny of love. We keep working with men and women of good will to create a society of mutual sharing, reconciliation, and love, rooted in the sanctity of the human person and the family.
In short, we continue to be followers of Jesus. And in this fortnight of prayer and action, we should reflect on the beautiful example of the many saints who defended the faith to the point of shedding their blood. By their dying, they show us what we should be living for.
José H. Gomez is the Archbishop of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese. He writes regularly at www.facebook.com/ArchbishopGomez
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Comments:
I read recently that Archbishop William Lori called religious liberty, “the pre-eminent social-justice issue of our time.” In my opinion, the pre-eminent social injustice of all time is abortion-on-demand, and for four long decades millions of our preborn American citizens have suffered the worst kind of social injustice, not just the loss of religious liberty, but the loss of life itself!
Regrettably, our nation’s religious leaders, and respected moralists, did not recognize the magnitude and severity of this greatest of evils. If they had, the majority of Catholics would not have voted for a radically pro-abortion president.
Abortion on demand is a premeditated act that destroys the life of a preborn American citizen; the inevitable consequence is that we are a nation of barbarians.
Prayers for our preborn American citizens,
Charles N. Marrelli
Writers for Life
Irvine, CA 92620
prolifedigest.com
I would amend this to, it's easy to overlook the reasons to care about religious freedom if you don't care about being religious.
In a country without a state religion, the erosion of religious freedom is an erosion of freedom generally.
This call to arms on the part of the U.S. Bishops is way overdue, but it IS happening now, and we the people had damn well better get on board or we could well see the total erosion of Constitutional rights. We have had the state sponsored buthering of over 55 million souls at the hands of abortion advocates, we have had a complete watering down of the Christian faith, now Jesus more resembles a perpetual victim than he does the savior of all mankind.
All of us need to understand that there are rules we have to obey, it is in the rules of Christ that we can live in liberty, for his yoke is light indeed. The yoke that the U.S. government is attempting to place on us is extremely dangerous and we need to stop it now, we dare not wait another year, our destinies are now in our hands. The incredibly intrusive manner of the government, people can't smoke in their own homes, everywhere I go I see the signs of totalitarianism, "click it or ticket", "obey the sign, or pay the fine", "drive sober or get pulled over", and my very favorite "see something, say something", if you who are reading this now cannot see this for what it really is, TOTAL control of how we live, eat, drink, worship, and even think, then just turn this off and go back to watching whatever garbage that is spewing from the tv!!
To the U.S. Bishops, it is now time to get tough, no more whiny Jesus, no more wishy-washy feel good insipid all-inclusive BS, it is now time to worship Jesus Christ as he deserves, remember, he came as a lamb, he will come again as a lion!!!
I had been watching in EWTN the Masses.
I hope that we sent a blast e -mail to all Parishes inviting all to participate
on the 24th and to ask all parish offices to inform all parishioners to be part of this until July 4th. Thank you.
In order to avoid the horrible religious wars of England, the drafters of the US Constitution provided a system in which the Government stays out of the issues of religion and religious teachings, and holds all people to the same law as much as is possible. Demanding special treatment for businesses held by religious organizations opens a floodgate that would allow the Church of Scientology to buy corporations and exempt those corporations from all labor laws under "religious freedom." I advise the Bishops in this case to be careful what you push for, as the push back could cost you your current exemption from ANY laws, and that could include tax law.
Most workers employed by Catholic institutions do not share the Catholic belief about birth control (in fact most Catholics don't.) Is there any reason they should be compelled to pay for Catholic beliefs?
And where does it stop? What about a Muslim employer who believes in dhimmitude? It's ironic that Christians in Kansas have tried to prevent non-existent Shari'a from being imposed in that state, while the Bishops are creating exactly the same legal environment for the imposition of Christian law on workers.
As to being prolife, as a volunteer EMT, and former hospice volunteer, I can say quite plainly, there is no 'prolife' movement in the US. There's certainly an anti-sex movement, but no prolife movement. Consider the cherry picking of prolifers. Cigarettes...a multibillion dollar industry, torture to death 500,000 people a year. They start by poisoning children. John Boehner, who gets high marks from prolifers, took $350,000 from this assisted suicide industry. Yet the response of prolifers? Silence. Complete and abject silence.
A recent study found that 26,000 people die each year from lack of access to health insurance. Prolifers are also silent about that, except when they protest at extending care to the poor and unemployed.
Guns kill 11,000 people a year in the US, which has one of the highest murder rates in the western world. Prolifers, resolutely conservative, refuse to address THAT issue.
So there is no attack on religious freedom. This is, in reality, an attack on workers' rights, and an attempt to impose a Christian brand of Shari'a.
Despicable.
He raises such an OBVIOUS point. Yet, I never hear any bishop or priest or spokesman for the bishops address. When something like this just makes no sense, and no explanations are being offered, I think people are justified in being suspicious about what is really going on.
But corporations are not people. Secular corporations that are affiliated with the Catholic Church are not Catholic, as the corporation is not a person and cannot take Communion, etc. If this were about personal religious liberty, the whole tone of this campaign would be very different. Instead, this is a top-down crusade for the advancement of corporate rights to the detriment of individual rights.
Remember Matthew 20:21!
Mr. Gomez it also helps that we ALL step out and step up to the plate.
"Abortion Proponents Admit Defeat at Rio Conference"
By Timothy Herrmann
RIO DE JANERIO --- June 20, 2012 (C-FAM) "In an astounding show of solidarity, a diverse group of countries rallied together with the Holy See to successfully remove any mention of reproductive rights or population control from the final outcome document produced during the last round of UN negotiations at the Rio +20 conference this week."