If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.
There, didn’t that feel better? Now we can get on with the fight.
"... religious liberty is being subjected to a slow but steady wasting disease. Recognizing that disease is essential; so is an accurate diagnosis of its causes." Read George Weigel here.
What do we mean by religious liberty?
What did our early American leaders say about religious freedom?Who have been heroes of religious liberty in the church?
"…If we duct tape the role of religions and the churches (in society) that’s going to lead to a huge deficit, a huge void. They want to fill it up with a new religion called secularism which would be as doctrinaire and as infallible as they believe the church is. “
All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. -Abraham Lincoln
A frog in a pan of lukewarm water will not notice the heat being increased slowly before it is boiled to death. The heat from increasing government regulations is beginning to boil our religious freedom away.
My hope is that every Catholic will be able to articulate their faith in convincing and intelligent ways, and show by their living example the compelling truth of the Gospel and church teaching.