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    • July 4, 2012

    Religious Liberty and Its Contemporary Enemies

    by George Weigel

    Independence Day concludes the Fortnight for Freedom mandated by the U.S. bishops, a two-week period of reflection and prayer on the defense of religious liberty that began on the vigil of the liturgical memorial of St. Thomas More. In July 2012, we may be grateful that none of us faces the headsman’s axe, as More did in Tudor England. But neither should we be indifferent to, or flippant about, the 21st-century threats to religious liberty that surround us. They have yet to bring anyone to today’s equivalent of the scaffold on Tower Hill, but they are already putting severe pressure on both believers and religious institutions.

    That pressure is more subtle than it was in More’s day, and it involves a kind of governmental pincer movement. The first arm of the pincer aims to reduce religious liberty to a privacy right: a permission slip from the government to engage in certain recreational activities considered matters of personal taste. The second arm of the pincer—embodied in the Obama administration’s contraceptive/abortifacient mandate (which many Catholic entities are challenging in court)—aims to conscript religious institutions so that they become virtual departments of the government.

    Between the two arms of the pincer, 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.

    What are the sources of this new assault on religious freedom in full?

    The pressure comes in part from a newly aggressive American secularism that is sadly similar to its counterparts in 21st-century Europe. There, secularism is not benign, tolerant and pluralistic, asking only that secular views have free play in the public square. Rather, 21st-century European secularism is intolerant, hegemonic and anti-pluralistic. It demands the entire public square for itself and tries to use the coercive power of the state to drive religious conviction to the far margins of society and public life. It is, in the pungent term deployed by the international legal scholar Joseph H. H. Weiler (himself an Orthodox Jew), “Christophobic.” That this new form of bigotry has at least something to do with ancient animosities over the Church-state alliances of Old Europe, no one should doubt.

    Yet that is why its translation across the Atlantic is somewhat odd: for there is no “established Church” in American constitutional history against which 21st-century radical secularists can wave the bloody shirt. Nonetheless, contemporary American secularists of the sort found in prestige law schools and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are quite like their European counterparts: they do not seek an open public square in which all points of view are welcome; they demand secularist hegemony in public life.  And they are quite prepared to throw some sharp elbows in getting what they want.

    How has this new cultural phenomenon gotten a beachhead in our public life? In part, by surfing waves created by over six decades of confused Supreme Court rulings in First Amendment cases—rulings that have unbalanced “free exercise” and “no establishment” in matters of religion and public life. The Framers of the Constitution did not intend that their proscription of a national church (“no establishment”) should create a radically secular American public square; they intended “no establishment” to serve the cause of “free exercise.” The United States would build a hospitable and civil public space where differences could be engaged intelligently and tolerantly, and where all points of view were welcome. “No establishment” was the means; “free exercise” was the end.

    Sixty-five years of Supreme Court rulings, however, have turned this inside out, such that “free exercise” has been reduced to a set of exceptions or exemptions within the overwhelmingly secular public space the federal judiciary has created since 1947. Wittingly or not, the Supreme Court has often aligned itself with the hegemonic secularists and the anti-pluralists, bringing its moral authority into play on their side of the debate.

    As we conclude the Fortnight for Freedom, some serious work is before us: serious cultural work, serious legal work and serious political work.

     

    Tagged as: HHS mandate

    The views expressed by the authors and editorial staff are not necessarily the views of
    Sophia Institute, Holy Spirit College, or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

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    George Weigel

    By George Weigel

    George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and the author, most recently, of The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II⎯The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy.

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    • TheZore5

      The ‘pincers’ analogy reminded me immediately of Our Lady of La Salette who came to France warning the people to make reparation and convert through prayer and penance. The La Salette cross has pincers on one side and a hammer on the other. The Blessed Mother said you could pray and make sacrifices to remove Christ’s thorns and His nails which are signs of our ongoing sins or you could continue down a path of luke-warm faith, little prayer and pount the nails deeper into Christ. Why does this seem significant?  John Paul II called us to a new millenium of deeper faith and lives of holiness. This is what we need as we go forward to face these secular enemies.

    • Ultramonta

      I think there is a simpler explanation for the desire of the US Government to block the Catholic Church from meaningful participation in the life of the country (beyond narrowly defined worship): the will to power that has animated controllers of government since before Christ founded the Church.  During the Christian Era, whether it was Julian the Apostate or the Byzantine Emperors who made cats’ paws of their Constantinopolitan patriarchs (who were succeeded by the Sultans who continued to keep the Phanar in captivity (the Turkokratia) or Phillip Le Bel who hijacked the Church to Avignon or Henry VIII and the Scandinavian kings and the North German Princes and the Hohenzollern who decided to laicize his abbacy over the Teutonic Knights, kings and potentates saw the Church as something to be taken over and used for the benfit of the state they controlled.  Even “Catholic” kings such as the French kings with Galllicanism and the Emperor Joseph in Austria with his “Enlightened” policies sought to control the Church.    Things got no better under “more democratic ” politicians.  The English parliamentarians who overthrew Charles I and  James II were totalitarian in their religious policies and were particularly vindictive against the one Church that couldn’t be cowed, the Catholic Church.  Likewise, the Church underwent severe attacks from democrats during the French Revolution and its successor regimes in France (such as the 1905 Laws unser the Third Republic) and during the Kulturkampf in Germany.  Mr. Weigel’s ”Church-State alliances of Old Europe” were generally ones where if the State couldn’t control the Church, it would go to war with the Church.

      Protestant and Orthodox churches have generally been easier for the state to control than the Catholic Church for at least three reasons: 1) the Catholic Church was a universal church which could not be totally controlled the way a local or countrywide-only church could be;  2) those “meddlesome priests” that governments sought to control were more or less celibate and therefore might or might not be susceptible to blandishments that appealed to people looking to provide for their families; and 3) the other Christian churches were willing to acknowledge the paramount role of the local king over the Church, as in the Orthodox acknowedgment of the Emperor as Isopostolos, Luther’s ceding of control over the Church to the local lords “on an emergency basis” and the surrender of the Church of England under Henry that was rescinded under Mary I but then grabbed by Elizabeth through the simple expedient of throwing most of the Marian Hierarchy into prison and replacing them with lackeys.

    • Dave

      We should all dedicate ourselves unstintingly to the Year of Faith about to begin this October 11.

    • Caeifert

      With the recent win for ObamaCare in the high court came the continuation of the HHS mandates inimical to religious freedom. The hoped for death blow was not struck by the court. Now, we Catholics — and other religious people protected by the First Amendment — must await favorable outcomes from lower courts. But regardless of those decisions, the Supremes eventually will rule. If memory serves, a majority of the Big Nine are Catholic (including Roberts?), so will the secular press campaign for their recusal? As Mr. Weigel points out, the high court has whittled our First Amendment rights over the last generation, so we will need prayer. Logic seems not to suffice.

      • Tout

        That is why I pray at least once a month at a Mary-statue downtown. And started a yearly procession(alone 6 times), finally people joined me. In May 2002, very weak, but grew to over 50 people. Catholics, don’t hide. Evangelize.

      • Michael Paterson-Seymour

        Of the 9 Supreme Court Justices, Roberts CJ and Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito and Sottomayor JJ are all Catholics.  Ginsburg, Brayer and Kagan JJ are all Jewish.

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    • Tout

      We can theorize; I sometimes act. I was in Turnhout(Belgium)in 2004.On the big central market was a Sacred Heart statue; I prayed there a rosary. No one dared to stay with me. The statue was in terrible shape, held together with 5 metal bands. Back in Canada, I wrote to 100 + people and the Mayor in Turnhout that the statue had to be repaired. It was replaced, a totally new statue, begin 2006. I went back, prayed the rosary there, again alone. I wonder if anyone ever dared to pray at that new statue. Here in Canada, I prayed monthly at Mary-statue downtown. Some pedestrians come, touch the statue. Four different persons came, prayed, left. Let parishes have a Cross or statue outside, for every  Catholic to pray at least once a year at that statue. Are you too scared to evangelize ? Jesus was scared too at his ultimate offer, but made the offer. How much courage have you ?

    • Michael Paterson-Seymour

      European conservatives always maintained that a constitutionally anchored religious unity was necessary to secure respect for the civil authority, to promote social order, and to enable the Church to carry out most effectively her supernatural mission.  A confessional State relied on the Church for the religious instruction of the youth, for the promotion of family life by protecting the sacramentality and indissolubility of marriage, and for the corroboration of the civil order in countless ways through a legal concordat between Church and State.  

      This led to the identification of the Church with the Ancien Régime, both by Catholics and Republicans.  Because of the dominant position of the Catholic Church, many of the most vocal supporters of laïcité, especially between 1870 and 1940 were Protestants and Jews.  This goes some way to explaining Lefebvre’s opposition to Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom.

      The spiritual mission of the Church was gravely hampered, during that 70 year, by the open hostility of most Catholics to the Republic, which neatly matched the anti-clericalism of the bouffeurs de curé.  Leo XIII had exhorted Catholic to “rally to the Republic,” explaining that a distinction must be drawn between the form of government, which ought to be accepted, and its laws which ought to be improved,  only to be accused by the Catholic press of “kissing the feet of their executioners.”  In 1940, alas, too many Catholics rallied, not to the Republic, but to Vichy.  After the Liberation most of the leaders of the Catholic parties were in jail, a few were shot and the rest fled abroad.  It was De Gaulle and the Fifth Republic that began to heal the divisions.

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    • Dave Reckoning

      Vatican II sought to bring a radical new era to the Church by attempting to reconcile its teachings with the ideas of “modern man”, as they existed in the 1960′s.  That such a reconciliation was and is impossible is being demonstrated in today’s headlines.  The hierarchy, in the name of “aggiornamiento” (updating), suppressed the eternal social teachings of the Church in favor of the ephemeral fads of the 1960′s.  Now, fifty years later, lo and behold, “modern man”, deprived of the ageless wisdom of the Church, has adopted ever newer and more savage fads.  Meanwhile, our Catholic hierarchy is in the ludicrous position of trying to impose the fads of the ’60′s on today’s heretics, who no longer believe in, for instance, religious liberty.

      Our hierarchy needs to awaken to the fact that the Church’s previous condemnation of “religious liberty” was based on eternal truth, not on passing fad.  Only Divinely-revealed Truth has the ultimate authority to command the assent of all mankind, and bring about world peace.  Error has no rights.  It can (and sometimes should)  be tolerated to prevent a greater evil, but to accord error equal rights with Truth is the crime of Pilate, who placed Truth incarnate on the same level as error incarnate and bade “the People” to choose.

      Our Lord died on the Cross to save mankind from sin and error, not for the sake of dialog, religious liberty, and ecumenism.  He told His Apostles to PREACH the GOSPEL to every soul and to baptize ALL NATIONS.  How, then can their successors be content with their “all are saved- none need convert” attitude that has darkened the post-V2 era of the Church?

      An enemy hath done this.