"Students of Faith" Video
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” -John Adams
A state Senator from Nebraska, first elected in 2016, has announced he will be switching his political affiliation because his right to maintain his pro-life views is not respected by his party.
When Mike McDonnell voted for a bill which would have banned most abortions in his state and another bill prohibiting transgender drugs and body altering surgeries for minors, his party withdrew support for him and blocked him from voting on his county’s party matters. Sen. McDonnell subsequently changed political parties.
His party issued a statement that it was not his Catholic, pro-life views they objected to, but that their actions were affirming their party’s position on these matters. The Senator believes his Catholic, pro-life views were the cause for the censures.
The treatment of Sen. McDonnell echoes a type of discrimination, a religious test for public office, shunned by our founders. The founders believed that America could preserve the extensive individual liberties of our Constitution only if the morality of each citizen could be brought into the public square of ideas, debate and policies. The morals and virtues accepted in America’s private and public spheres were to include all faiths with preference for none. To that end the founders specifically eliminated any “religious tests” from the requirements for holding public office.
“Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.” Thomas Jefferson
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LEARN & SHARE THIS WEEK'S LESSON
Click here to learn one example of why and how we protect religious freedom and the choice for life.
https://vimeo.com/901879901?share=copy
Whether Americans pray and act for life and religious liberty at the Washington March for Life, at the Pilgrimage to Montauk, NY for Life and Religious Liberty, at their state's capitol for their state's March for Life or in their own parishes, the prayers and attention cannot waiver. Let us keep the safekeeping of innocent life and the maintenance of religious freedom always in our prayers and action
STUDENTS MAY PRAY IN SCHOOL
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
ARE NOT “GOD-FREE ZONES”
America’s children need not leave their faith outside the school house door.
For students to be silenced or disciplined by a school authority for appropriate religious expression should never happen. Sadly, young students may well conclude…
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Educational resources for parish members who work to support Religious Freedoms.
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AT WORLD MEETING OF FAMILIES: DEFENDING FREEDOM OF RELIGION
Barbara Samuells, president of Catholics for Freedom of Religion and a parishioner at St. Matthew’s, Dix Hills, shares her experience at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM RALLY 2018
IN SERVICE TO THE CHURCH
Click here to watch Barbara on TeleCare TV.
Pope Francis has observed that “religion [cannot] be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life, without influence on societal and national life.” Evangelii Gaudium. . . , no. 183. In insisting that our liberties as Americans be respected, Pope Benedict XVI said that this work belongs to “an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture.” Therefore, catechesis on religious liberty is not the work of priests alone. If religious liberty is not properly understood, all people suffer and are deprived of the essential contribution to the common good, be it in education, health care, feeding the hungry, civil rights, and social services that individuals make every day, both here at home and overseas.
CATHOLICS FOR FREEDOM OF RELIGION
MISSION STATEMENT
America’s First Amendment guarantees its citizens five freedoms, the first of which is Freedom of Religion. Freedom of Religion includes the freedom to worship according to one’s beliefs as well as the freedom to practice that faith in everyday life according to one’s conscience.
So that this First Amendment freedom may be practiced and preserved for generations yet unborn it is essential that Americans understand this freedom and the circumstances from which it came. A fitting place for the development of this understanding and protection of Religious Freedom is inside all faith communities.
Catholics for Freedom of Religion offers resources to parish members who work to support Religious Freedom by initiating parish laity groups with these suggested goals:
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To educate and inspire for Freedom of Religion
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To remain non-partisan, advocating for no candidate or party
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To invite and include other faith communities
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To become a permanent group within each parish to educate every generation of Catholics about our Freedom of Religion…how rare it is, how dearly it was purchased for us and how certainly it is being lost.
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To recognize and oppose attacks on Freedom of Religion from any source
“We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” James Madison
“While Americans presume that the Constitution guarantees their rights, in practice our rights survive or disappear based on how firmly we defend them.” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
