As we continue now in the fourth day of this “Fortnight for Freedom” I trust that all of you have prayed daily in some way for the preservation of religious freedom in our country. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, if the freedom to practice one’s religion can be curtailed in the United States, where can it NOT be curtailed to the point of being relegated to a ghetto or to some merely nice sense on the level of feelings or nostalgia?
One of the issues that needs to be
confronted head-on is the idea that this is about the Catholic Church
desperately trying to hang on to some sort of sense of power or authority,
particularly over our organs of civil governance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Others would frame this as the Church trying
to force people to do what She would judge to be moral in our free
society. This would also be a false
reading of the situation (usually by those who want to force us into complicity
with their acts of sinfulness). There
are those who would say that the Church is unduly partisan and, having lost the
contraception fight with the President, are merely trying to muscle him out of
office. Finally, there are those who
howl about the separation of Church and State – another canard.
The truth of the matter is that the
bishops tried very hard to work with the President on putting together a
universal healthcare plan that would be truly workable for everybody. The truth is also that at as this issue was
developing, at the beginning of his term, President Obama assured the bishops,
in a personal meeting at the White House, that he had great admiration for the
work of the Church in our society and that he would do nothing that would make
us compromise the work that we were doing or our faith. Cardinal Dolan reminded him of that in a
later phone call and, sadly, he had nothing to say.
As Cardinal Dolan has said on a number of
occasions, we did not pick this fight, we did not pick the timing of this
fight, nor did we pick the battle ground over which this fight began. Secular newspaper editorials across the
spectrum have recognized that it was the administration that chose the fight,
the timing, and the ground over which it would be fought. The Church is merely refusing to back down,
which is what we were universally expected to do. Well, the time has come, the moment is here –
to fight for freedom lest we lose this first freedom and discover to our horror
that it is only the first of our cherished, constitutional freedoms to be lost.
This is why our prayers and acts of
abstinence and fasting are so very important!
It is always good to write letters to government officials and to talk
of these things with our friends and neighbors.
However, at the end of the day, our freedoms are protected not by a
president or congress or even the Supreme Court, but by our fidelity to almighty God who is the true author of these
freedoms which the president and the congress have been tasked with
defending in the political order by our Constitution. It is important that a free people be clear
about their freedoms and the responsibility that it lays on them in both living
and defending them. So…
Pray
Well!
