Thursday is the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the founders of the church in Rome, who died rather than betray their conscience.
It also marks the end of Religious Liberty Week, when we honor our first and most cherished freedom — which is how the founders saw it and why they had it lead off the Bill of Rights.
Indeed, the framers were keenly aware of the potential danger of government butting into church issues.
Nearly 200 years ago, one of the most perceptive commentators on America, Alexis de Tocqueville, expressed his confidence (unlike other Frenchmen) that this daring experiment in democracy would not fail as long as religion and faith remained free and vibrant.
Joseph Califano, a close advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, told me LBJ was fond of a homespun analogy: “Religion is like a beehive: Let it alone and enjoy the honey; stick your hand inside and get terribly stung.”
These days, the hands of some elected officials and government bureaucrats are inside the beehive. You’ve heard reports:
* The FBI views some Catholic groups, like those ardent in the defense of the baby in the womb, or who happen to prefer Mass in Latin, as potential terrorists.
* The White House is calling for passage of the Equality Act, which explicitly eliminates rights secured under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a landmark piece of civil-rights legislation Congress passed nearly unanimously and President Bill Clinton signed into law.
* The Department of Health and Human Services will likely soon finalize regulations that could force health-care workers to perform gender-transition procedures and possibly even abortions.
* Nine different federal agencies have proposed to make religious charities working in partnership with the government give up their legally protected right to ensure their staffs are faithful representatives of the organizations’ beliefs.
* A government inspector in Oklahoma has threatened to cut off a Catholic hospital from federal funds unless it extinguishes an “open flame” — a candle in the small sanctuary lamp in the chapel next to the tabernacle with the Holy Eucharist.
* The Department of Education wants to push through rules that would roll back protections for religious students at public universities and put religious groups at risk.
* A new wave of bills in states across the country seeks to force priests to violate the seal of the confessional, giving them an impossible choice between jail and excommunication.
* A few lawmakers on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures are even pushing to halt aid to churches and agencies, like our own Catholic Charities, simply because we are assisting refugees and asylum seekers.
Thoughtful people can criticize our flawed border policies. I sure do.
But, we people of faith — Jews, Christians, Muslims — also realize that we have a moral duty to welcome, clothe, feed and respect the refugee and asylum seeker, no matter how they got here.
For a federal bureaucrat or elected official to punish us like that is nothing less than a violation of religious freedom.
All of these chilling illustrations of threats to our “first and most cherished liberty” — and there are more — stem from the belief that government has the right to total allegiance from its citizens, and that their behavior must bend the knee to the state, regardless of their faith.
Yet the boldness of our “one nation, under God” motto rests on an understanding that government has no claim on spiritual and religious bonds.
Other nations whose faithful suffer far more than we do here — Nicaragua, China, Cuba, Nigeria, just to name a few — have urged us to show fortitude in our defense of religious freedom, as they depend upon America’s example to stay strong in their plight.
The defense of religious freedom is too sacred and essential to the welfare of this great republic to become a blue vs. red, left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican issue.
It is an American issue.
Timothy Cardinal Dolan is archbishop of New York.
