American Catholics must resist unjust laws “as a duty of citizenship and an obligation of faith,” the U.S. bishops Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, wrote in a statement released on April 12. The document, titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” calls for “a fortnight for freedom” from June 21, the vigil of the feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, to July 4, Independence Day, as a “special period of prayer, study, catechesis and public action.” The statement cited a number of clashes over religious liberty currently confronting the church—most notably the continuing dispute with the Department of Health and Human Services over a new mandate on contraception. Among other examples of “religious liberty under attack,” the bishops named immigration laws in Alabama and other states that “forbid...what the church deems Christian charity and pastoral care to those immigrants” and new government regulations across the country that have “driven local Catholic Charities out of the business of providing adoption or foster care services” because the agencies would not place children with same-sex or unmarried heterosexual couples.
Demand Liberty
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Pope Leo said that if the teen “had come all the way to Rome, then (the pope) could come all the way to the hospital to see him.”
A Reflection for Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, by Molly Cahill
As emergency workers searched for survivors and tried to recuperate the bodies of the dead, Pope Leo XIV offered his prayers for people impacted by the latest shipwreck of a migrant boat off the coast of Yemen.
The Archdiocese of Miami celebrated the first Mass for detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Trump administration’s controversial immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades.