Bishops Call for 'Rosary Novena for Life and Liberty'

From National Catholic Register: 

Sunday, Oct. 14, begins the "Rosary Novena for Life and Liberty" proposed by the U.S. bishops. The novena ends on Monday, Oct. 22.

The Church celebrates October as the month of the holy Rosary, and it is an apt time for Rosary campaigns.

For months, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has urged a strong prayer effort for religious freedom. The USCCB has said October “seems an appropriate time to ask for Our Lady's intercession for these intentions.”

The novena is jointly offered by the USCCB's Committee on Pro-Life Activities and the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.

In the novena booklet’s introduction, the bishops write:

"This year, believers have faced an unprecedented new threat. In the two centuries since the Bill of Rights was ratified, Americans had the assurance that the U.S. Constitution secured their God-given rights to religious liberty and freedom of conscience. But in 2011, a federal agency mandated that virtually all employers would be required to include sterilization, abortifacient drugs and contraceptives among the benefits covered in the health-care plans they offer employees."

The bishops’ novena comes with a short reflection that ties each day’s saint into the novena with specific intentions for that day regarding respecting life and religious freedom.

The reflections-intentions take only two minutes to read before praying the Rosary. Notably, some old and new American saints are included.

It is most important that we continue to pray that religious liberty is protected in America, one of our most important Constitutional and God-given rights, and that we elect the right candidates that will do this. 

Fr. Frank Pavone's Letter to the Religious Freedom Rally

Update from Cardinal Dolan on Restoring and Defending Our Religious Liberty

Cardinal Dolan has posted an update to his fellow bishops on the USCCB's continued resolve in fighting to ensure every individual's right to live out the beliefs that they believe in their daily lives, to ensure religious freedom for all. Since blogger html is giving me a wee bit of trouble I will publish part of his update below with a link to the rest.


My brother bishops,
Twice in recent weeks, I have written you to express my gratitude for our unity in faith
and action as we move forward to protect our religious freedom from unprecedented intrusion
from a government bureau, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). I remain
deeply grateful to you for your determined resolve, to the Chairmen of our committees directly
engaged in these efforts - Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Bishop Stephen
Blaire and Bishop William Lori -who have again shown themselves to be such excellent leaders
during these past weeks, and to all our staff at the USCCB who work so diligently under the
direction of the Conference leadership.


How fortunate that we as a body have had opportunities during our past plenary
assemblies to manifest our strong unity in defense of religious freedom. We rely on that unity
now more than ever as HHS seeks to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be
exercised. We will once again dedicate ample time at our Administrative Committee meeting
next week, and at the June Plenary Assembly, to this critical subject. We will continue to listen, discuss, deliberate and act.


Thank you, brothers, for the opportunity to provide this update to you and the dioceses
you serve. Many of you have expressed your thanks for what we have achieved together in so
few weeks, especially the data provided and the leadership given by brother bishops, our
conference staff and Catholic faithful. And you now ask the obvious question, “What’s next?”
Please allow me to share with you now some thoughts about events and efforts to date and where
we might go next.


Since January 20, when the final, restrictive HHS Rule was first announced, we have
become certain of two things: religious freedom is under attack, and we will not cease our
struggle to protect it. We recall the words of our Holy Father Benedict XVI to our brother
bishops on their recent ad limina visit: “Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion.” Bishop Stephen Blaire and Bishop William Lori, with so many others, have admirably kept us focused on this one
priority of protecting religious freedom. We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the
government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans. We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it.


As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and
promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our
youth, and helping the poor. Yet, precisely because we are pastors and shepherds, we recognize
that each of the ministries entrusted to us by Jesus is now in jeopardy due to this bureaucratic
intrusion into the internal life of the church. You and I both know well that we were doing those extensive and noble works rather well without these radical new constrictive and forbidding mandates. Our Church has a long tradition of effective partnership with government and the 1wider community in the service of the sick, our children, our elders, and the poor at home and abroad, and we sure hope to continue it.


Of course, we maintained from the start that this is not a “Catholic” fight alone. I like to
quote as often as possible a nurse who emailed me, “I’m not so much mad about all this as a
Catholic, but as an American.” And as we recall, a Baptist minister, Governor Mike Huckabee,
observed, “In this matter, we’re all Catholics.” No doubt you have heard numerous statements
just like these. We are grateful to know so many of our fellow Americans, especially our friends in the ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, stand together in this important moment in our country. They know that this is not just about sterilization, abortifacients, and chemical contraception. It’s about religious freedom, the sacred right of any Church to define its own teaching and ministry. CONTINUED

Could The Obama Administration Be More Hostile to Religious Freedom than the ACLU?

The Obama administration has been more hostile towards religious freedom than any other administration in my lifetime.  The case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC focuses on the Ministerial Exception. Obama has targeted the Ministerial Exception which is applicable to religious organizations. 


From The National Catholic Register Patrick Archbold points out that the "Ministerial Exception allows for religious organizations 'to decide for themselves, free from state interference, matters of church government as well as those of faith and doctrine.' "

Based on this right, twelve federal circuits have recognized the “ministerial exception.” (The Federal Circuit has no jurisdiction over cases that could present the issue.) The ministerial exception bars lawsuits that interfere in the relationship between a religious organization and employees who perform religious functions — most obviously, lawsuits seeking to compel a religious organization to reinstate such an employee or seeking to impose monetary liability for the selection of such employees. As the first court adopting the ministerial exception explained: “The relationship between an organized church and its ministers is its lifeblood”; allowing the state to interfere in that relationship — effectively allowing judges and juries to pick ministers — would produce “the very opposite of that separation of church and State contemplated by the First Amendment.” McClure v. Salvation Army, 460 F.2d 553, 558, 560 (5th Cir. 1972).

The question which was raised in the Hosanna case was whether protections from discrimination lawsuits would extend to employees and whether or not they could be fired for religious reasons under the exception or not.  Apparently the Obama administration's DOJ has raised the stakes. The DOJ goes so far to say that there should not be a Ministerial Objection, at all.

The Obama administration is so far off the rails that even the militant secularists at Americans United For Separation of Church and State and the ACLU didn't agree the DOJ's argument. Ed Whelan writes:

DOJ’s position — which is even more hostile to the ministerial exemption than the amicus brief filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU — thus threatens to expose churches and other religious institutions to a broad array of employment-discrimination claims that the ministerial-exception has long shielded them from. 

Obama certainly is "fundamentally transforming" America into something like Communist China. We need to stop Obama and his minions from harming America any more than they already have. He needs to be booted out of office in 2012. I think the Obama administration is more of a threat to our religious freedom than any other entity in America. 

Brother of Assassinated Pakistani Minister Continues Brother's Legacy of Religious Freedom

The Christian Roots of The American Experience

I posted this same article on my political blog and since Archbishop Chaput hits this article out of the park I thought I would repost it here.

I don't usually post entire articles but this article by Archbishop Chaput is brilliantly written.   The article is called Subject to the governor of the universe: The American experience and global religious liberty.  Archbishop Chaput pulled the first part of the title - "Subject to the governor of the universe" - of his post from one of our Founding Fathers.

“Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society he must be considered as a subject to the governor of the universe.”
  — James Madison

Subject to the governor of the Universe: The American experience and global religious liberty: 

A friend once said – I think shrewdly -- that if people want to understand the United States, they need to read two documents.  Neither one is the Declaration of Independence.  Neither one is the Constitution.  In fact, neither one has anything obviously to do with politics.  The first document is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.  The second is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad. 

Bunyan’s book is one of history’s great religious allegories.  It’s also deeply Christian.  It embodies the Puritan, Protestant hunger for God that drove America’s first colonists and shaped the roots of our country. 

Hawthorne’s short story, of course, is a very different piece.  It’s one of the great satires of American literature.  A descendant of Puritans himself, Hawthorne takes Bunyan’s allegory – man’s difficult journey toward heaven – and retells it through the lens of American hypocrisy: our appetite for comfort, easy answers, quick fixes, material success and phony religious piety.

Bunyan and Hawthorne lived on different continents 200 years apart.  But the two men did share one thing.  Both men – the believer and the skeptic -- lived in a world profoundly shaped by Christian thought, faith and language; the same moral space that incubated the United States.  And that has implications for our discussion today.

In his World Day of Peace message earlier this year, Pope Benedict XVI voiced his concern over the worldwide prevalence of “persecution, discrimination, terrible acts of violence and religious intolerance.”ⁱ   In reality, we now face a global crisis in religious liberty. As a Catholic bishop, I have a natural concern that Christian minorities in Africa and Asia bear the brunt of today’s religious discrimination and violence.  Benedict noted this same fact in his own remarks.

But Christians are not the only victims. Data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life are sobering.   Nearly 70 percent of the world’s people now live in nations — regrettably, many of them Muslim-majority countries, as well as China and North Korea — where religious freedom is gravely restricted.ⁱⁱ

Principles that Americans find self-evident — the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of conscience, the separation of political and sacred authority, the distinction between secular and religious law, the idea of a civil society pre-existing and distinct from the state  — are not widely shared elsewhere. In fact, as Leszek Kolakowski once said, what seemed self-evident to the American Founders “would appear either patently false or meaningless and superstitious to most of the great men that keep shaping our political imagination.”ⁱⁱⁱ   We need to ask ourselves why this is the case. CONTINUED

 

Benedict XVI: Religious Freedom is a Right of Everyone