The Need for Redemption

George Weigel on religious freedom vs. exclusive humanism. To quote:

The Catholic Church asks—and, if circumstances require, the Church demands—two things of any political community and any society.

The Church asks for free space to be itself: to evangelize, to celebrate the sacraments, and to do the works of education, charity, mercy, and justice, without undue interference from government. The Church freely concedes that the state can tell the Church to do some things: to obey the local sanitary laws in church kitchens hosting pancake breakfasts, for example. But the Church refuses to concede to the state the authority to tell the Church what to think and preach, or how to order its ministerial life and serve the needy. Moreover, the Church asks, and if necessary demands, that the state respect the sanctuary of conscience, so that the Church’s people are not required by law to do things the Church teaches are immoral.

The Church also asks any society to consider the possibility of its need for redemption. The “world” sometimes doesn’t take kindly to this suggestion, as the history of the martyrs reminds us. But overt persecution isn’t the only way the “world” resists the Church’s proposal. Societies can affect a bland indifference to the truths taught by biblical religion. Cultures can mock the moral truths taught by God’s revelation to the people of Israel and God’s self-revelation in his Son, Jesus Christ. Educational systems can inculcate an ethos of nihilism and hedonism, teaching that the only moral absolute is that there are no moral absolutes.

On both of these fronts—the political-legal front, and the social-cultural front—the Catholic Church is under assault in the United States today. Over the past four years, the federal government has made unprecedented efforts to erode religious freedom. The gravest assault was the “contraceptive mandate” issued earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: an offense to conscientious Catholic employers who believe what the Church believes about the morality of human love and the ethics of the right to life, and a frontal attack on the institutional integrity of the Church. For with the HHS mandate, the federal government seeks nothing less than to turn the Catholic Church’s charitable and medical facilities into state agencies that facilitate practices the Catholic Church believes are gravely evil.

Rather than truckle to such coercion, Catholic bishops across the country have made clear that they will, if necessary, close the Catholic medical facilities for which they are responsible—a drastic action that would seriously imperil health services for the poor. But it doesn’t have to come to that. Aggressive, hegemonic humanism need not have the last word in the United States. (Read entire post.)

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