Newsflash


Write Your Congress Person about this issue Read More about conscience protection at USCCB

In 1634, a mix of Catholic and Protestant settlers arrived in Southern Maryland from England aboard the Ark and the Dove.  They had come at the invitation of the Catholic Lord Baltimore,who had been granted the land by the Protestant King Charles I of England.  While Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in Europe, Lord Baltimore imagined Marylandas a society where people of different faiths could live together peacefully.  This vision was soon codified in Maryland’s 1649 Act Concerning Religion (also called the “Toleration Act”), which was the first law in our nation’s history to protect an individual’s right to freedom of conscience.

Maryland’s early history teaches us that, like any freedom, religious liberty requires constant vigilance and protection, or it will disappear.  Maryland’s experiment in religious toleration ended within a few decades.  The colony was placed under royal control and the Church of England became the established religion.  Discriminatory laws, including the loss of political rights, were enacted against those who refused to conform.  Catholic chapels were closed and Catholics were restricted to practicing their faith in their homes.  The Catholic community lived under this coercion until the American Revolution.

By the end of the 18th century our nation’s founders embraced freedom of religion as an essential condition of a free and democratic society.  So when the Bill of Rights was ratified, religious freedom had the distinction of being the First Amendment.  Religious liberty is indeed the first liberty.

This is our American heritage, our most cherished freedom. If we are not free in our conscience and our practice of religion, all other freedoms are fragile.  If our obligations and duties to God are impeded, or even worse, contradicted by the government, then we can no longer claim to be a land of the free. Is our most cherished freedom truly under threat?

Among many current challenges, consider the recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate requiring almost all private health plans to cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs.  For the first time in our history, the federal government will force religious institutions to facilitate drugs and procedures contrary to our moral teaching, and purport to define which religious institutions are “religious enough” to merit an exemption.  This is not a matter of whether contraception may be prohibited by the government. It is not even a matter of whether contraception may be supported by the government.  It is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide coverage for contraception and sterilization, even when it violates our religious beliefs.

Taken from the USCCB Conscience protection initiative- READ MORE.

What You Can Do!

1) PRAY - Follow the following links to guided prayer cards to our Lord with the intercession of our Blessed Mother and St. Thomas More.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas

Mary Immaculate, Patroness of Our Country

St. Thomas More, Patron of Religious Freedom

2) Write to Congress & HHS opposing the mandate and calling for conscience protections. !!!Deadline = June 19!!!

Click HERE to electronically write Congress (with an optional pre-written letter) voicing your conscience protection concerns.

3) Read more about the issue and decide what action is best for you.

USCCB CONSCIENCE PROTECTION WEBSITE

 

 

 
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Religious Liberty, What is at stake?

Dives et Misericordia, thirty years later

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Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) wrote his second encyclical about the mercy of Christ (30 November 1980).  When the Polish Pontiff wrote this letter there was plenty of injustice and unrest abounding: communism was reacting in Poland, the civil war in El Salvador shifted into more indiscriminate violence that cost thousands of lives, and Iran was awakening to Western domination (which it continues to shed even today).  Similar injustice and violence would persist in the decades to come (e.g., Bosnia, Serbia, Gulf War, terrorism on a rise).  Nevertheless, what a timely pastoral letter to the Flock of Christ about an aspect of Christian life that is desperately needed: mercy.

The heart of this encyclical is a prolonged reflection on the parable of the prodigal son.  He points out that the younger son’s squandering of his inheritance is a mini-reflection of each of our lives; we too have squandered the love that is given to us; we too have misappropriated gifts given to us for the glory of God.  But this is not the end of our lives, if and when we come to our senses about what is true and what is important.  Like that prodigal son, when we return to the house of our father to reconcile and to accept any access of grace, we will discover an overwhelming, healing love that will transform us.  This love, however, is not what we expect.  Shouldn’t God punish the disobedient child?  But that is the surprise of the parable, says John Paul; instead of deserved punishment, we are given membership in the household; the Lord dresses us with abundant love, with undeserved love.  And we are changed!

The encyclical exhorts its readers to come to our senses about what is important, true and good, to return to the Lord, and to humbly accept his love which moves us through justice, beyond justice, to mercy.  Not only is this our destiny, it is also our modus operandi, how we are to treat others.  Mercy is the hallmark of the Christian community.

On the Second Sunday of Easter in 1980 Pope John Paul II canonized Faustina, a Polish nun, who had visions, and he established this particular Sunday in the Sanctoral cycle as Divine Mercy Sunday.  Based on her writings, a portrait has been painted by Adolph Hyla of two rays pouring from the heart of Jesus.  The sense of her divine chaplet is the beseeching of mercy on a fallen world.  There is much to be said about the world’s ugly, sinful side.  It may not be everyone’s spirituality, but it is a spirituality that has found favor among many Catholics.  And surely, the need and hope for mercy is well founded. 

Mercy is an important Christian virtue.  Mercy is different from justice.  While recognizing the angst of injury and the rationale for the justification of punishment, mercy takes a different tact on redressing the injury.  Mercy strives to alter the condition and the soul of the perpetrator to resist doing evil, often by revealing love and one’s true beauty.  If any punishment is enforced, it must be for salvation, not retribution.  Oh, it is a messy business, this mercy.  But it is the right kind of mess…one that leads to salvation rather than being discarded as trash or abandoned as a spiritual leper.  No wonder, the mercy of the Lord Jesus is our hope.  It can be hope as long as I am resolved to change.  “Change our hearts this time…” (Rory Cooney, 1984).

 

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