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Dear Friends,
I just returned from this year's annual conference of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. The timely theme was: Religious Liberty. The theme mirrors the concerns of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops - who have called on Catholics to voice their opposition to the increasing governmental encroachments on religious freedom - and Benedict XVI - who expressed grave concern about "attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedom, the freedom of religion." The conference was organized by my old friend, William Saunders, the Vice President of the Fellowship and Vice President of Legal Affairs for the Americans United for Life. (Consider this a plug for both.)
Here is my report:
The conference began with Mass on the afternoon of September 28th.
Msgr. Stuart Swetland, the Archbishop Flynn Chair of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary's University, opened the conference with a detailed description of the barriers facing Catholics on secular university and college campuses, where the "diversity" enshrined in university proclamations comes abruptly to an end in the case of those whose sexual morality is consistent with that unanimously espoused by millennia by Christians and Jews and others. On many campuses, to espouse such views - regardless of how generously - is to be roundly condemned for "hate speech." We are familiar with this, but it was sobering to hear Msgr. Swetland spell it out.
On some campuses, Catholic organizations cannot require that those elected to leadership positions be Catholics, and the idea of requiring that they be in conformance with Catholic theological and moral teachings often invites howls of derision.
To show what unavoidably happens when nature and commonsense are subordinated to fashionable ideology, and how dizzily the academic world has capitulated to these anthropological absurdities, Msrg. Swetland cited the NCAA's conformity:
In 2011, the NCAA's office of inclusion promulgated regulations dealing with transgender athletes, going into great and solemn detail about the approved level of testosterone enhancement that transgender females could be expected to undergo, and the testosterone suppression drugs to be administered to transgendered males. Those failing to meet the specified dosage for the specified period of time would be assigned, not to men's sports or women's sports, but to a "mixed-gender" category.
The understanding (if you can even use that word) of the human person that such things presuppose is incompatible with Christian truth, the natural law and Catholic anthropology, not to mention commonsense.
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The next presenter was Patrick Reilly, Founder and President of the Cardinal Newman Society:
For Catholic colleges and universities, the threats to religious liberty are considerable and often unique to higher education. These include federal and state laws mandating contraceptive insurance coverage (for students as well as employees), the EEOC ruling that a Catholic college must include contraception in prescription drug plans, the National Labor Relations Board's decades-long discrimination toward Catholic colleges, Education Department policies, and same-sex marriage and homosexual nondiscrimination laws.
Federal agencies have been increasingly willing to appropriate to themselves the task of measuring the religiosity of a Catholic institution, substituting, as the HHS mandate does, freedom of worship for a much broader and constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion.
For Reilly, the elephant in the living room is the refusal or reluctance on the part of Catholic institutions - and many Catholics in them - to defend themselves against the erosion of religious freedoms.
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The next presenter was Kyle Duncan, General Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
Mr. Duncan addressed the administration healthcare law, noting that the language of the legislation itself spoke only of "preventive care and services," and that the interpretation of what this care and these services might be was left to the Secretary of the Health and Human Services and her bureaucrats, who would interpret the legislation only after it was passed into law. Predictably, HHS required all insurance plans to provide their employees - and in the case of teaching institutions, their students - free access to contraceptives, abortion inducing drugs, and sterilization procedures. The religious exception was so narrowly defined that it would only apply to worship service limited to co-religionists or to service activity directed exclusively to coreligionists. Duncan called this ridiculous constriction of religious freedom "The Bad Samaritan" principle. In other words, if you spread your religion - by word or charitable deed to the world - and not just to your coreligionists - you don't qualify as a religion in the eyes of the current administration. As Cardinal Dolan of New York put it: Our service agencies help people, not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.
Duncan quoted something HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius said to her supporters at a fund-raising event. Speaking of the Catholic Church, Sibelius said: "We are at war." Which seems less hyperbolic when you learn that the penalty for those institutions that fail to comply to the new mandate is $100 a day for each employee, and $2000 per year per employee for those organizations which opt out of the system. Later in the conference, Robbie George reminded the fellows that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, writing in his diocesan newspaper, had suggested that Chicago area Catholics take a look at the page after page of listings in the Catholic Yellow Pages of Catholic services agencies, adding that two Lents from now the pages would be blank.
At this point in the conference, warnings were being sounded by several members of the Fellowship that we could reasonably anticipate the need in the near future for what some were calling "Institutional Martyrdom."
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The next presenter was Bill Saunders, whom I introduced above. I will be brief here, even though Bill's talk was thick with important detail. He outlined the work he and his colleagues are doing at Americans United for Life, primarily drafting model legislation for states, which would put into place at the state level protections which at the federal level are being eroded.
Bill stressed what many of the presenters noted: that this attack on religious freedom and on long-established moral and legal principles has happened with breathtaking speed. (This, if I may add, is what is documented in the book "No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom," which I recommended on our Facebook Page last week.)
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Following morning Mass at St. Patrick's Church, the first plenary presentation of the day was given by Thomas Farr, Visiting Professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at Georgetown's Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where he directs the Religious Freedom Project.
Dr. Farr began by saying that religious freedom is in global crisis. Outside the West, the problem is manifest in severe restrictions on religious ideas and actors. Studies show that in some 66 countries, in which about 70 percent of the world's population lives, restrictions on religion are either high or very high. Millions of people are subject to violent religious persecution, such as torture, rape, unjust imprisonment, or unjust execution. Most are religious minorities, and Christian minorities head the list. (150,000 Christians are murdered each year for their faith, and countless thousands of others are persecuted and oppressed.) Muslim minorities come in a close second, even though many of them are persecuted either by military dictatorships or theocratic governments in Muslim-majority countries themselves, where anti-blasphemy, defamation and apostasy laws have the effect of silencing the voices of reform.
Europe is rapidly turning into one of the worst offenders, however. In the United Kingdom courts recently determined that the traditional understanding of marriage as that between one man and one woman was not an inherent or intrinsic part of Christian teaching, and that therefore it was a point of view not protected under religious liberty provisions of the law. So those who proclaim what Christianity has always said about this matter for two millennia may now be vulnerable to prosecution under "hate speech" provisions.
Even in the United States, he insisted, where religious freedom was once considered "the first freedom" of the republic, the warrant for this fundamental right is under attack, especially by, but not exclusively by, the Obama administration.
With other speakers, Dr. Farr opined that when we abandon nature and commonsense, we prepare the ground for anthropological nonsense of the most culturally devastating kind and, potentially for what some call "democratic totalitarianism."
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The next presenter was Rocco Mimmo, Founder and Chairman for the Ambrose Centre for Religious Liberty in Sydney, Australia.
Drawing on his expertise in international affairs and international law, Mr. Mimmo reported on the Australian struggle for the preservation of religious liberty. There is no constitutional protection for religious liberty in Australia despite a provision which is similar in tone to the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. The biggest threat to religious liberty comes from subtle changes to discrimination and equal opportunity laws. These laws are anchored in State jurisdiction rather than in Federal legislative frame work. Faith based welfare organizations and religiously operated schools are particularly vulnerable to these laws. Rocco reported on recent successes, however, and professed a guarded hope that more might follow.
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The next presenter was Gerry Bradley, Professor of Law at Notre Dame University, speaking on "The Future of Catholic Institutional Ministries in the USA"
He spoke of the dramatic changes in the "contingent historical circumstances," in the context of which religious - and specifically Catholic - institutions will be trying to carry out their mission in the face of an increasingly inhospitable legal climate. The HHS mandate is just one example among several which indicate that the way of Catholic Charities in Boston, Rockford, and Washington, D.C. - all of which abandoned the delivery of services rather than bear false witness to the truth about marriage - may be the way of the future.
Catholic institutional ministries in the future will be smaller than the one we have now. They will more often bear witness to the faith, rather than simply replicate the work that governmental and non-religious agencies do. They will be concentrated in strategic areas where the need for the Catholics' distinctive work is most pressing and where the level of legal harassment allows them to operate with integrity. These areas of opportunity will likely include ministries to immigrants (legal and illegal - but without conspiring to undermine legitimate laws), hospice care, family counseling, and expanded "Newman Centers (that is, educational and residential adjuncts to colleges and universities).
One big take-away in Gerry's talk was this: The medical profession is submitting to an ideological takeover. (As, I might add, are many of the social sciences, the American Psychological Association, for example.)
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The next presenter was Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Professor of Politics at Princeton University and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The right to religious freedom, he argued, flows from religion understood as an aspect of integral human fulfillment, a topic he addressed in terms of the key documents of the Second Vatican Council.
The take-home remarks from Robbie George's talk were these:
Religion is a human good, and the truer the religion the greater does it foster the flourishing of the human person.
He concluded by quoting something relevant to the current attack on religious freedom which the late Richard John Neuhaus, no stranger to the Fellowship, had repeated many times about the Roe v. Wade abortion regime: "We're going to turn this thing around."
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The final presenter was Cardinal Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura at the Vatican.
Cardinal Burke addressed the important difference between canon law and shari'a law.
Canon Law, he said, respects the autonomy of civil law and considers it a product of right reason and the natural moral law. Shariʻa, on the contrary, is ultimately to be the only law and has no reference to natural moral law. In Islam, he said, even the most religious act is juridical in nature; it is a duty inscribed in the prescriptions of Qur'anic law or in the other texts regarded as sacred, the Hadith and the Sunna.
Catholicism understands civil law as a mirror - imperfect to be sure - but a mirror nonetheless of the natural moral law written on the human heart. Catholic teaching, therefore, relies on appeals to natural law and to arguments grounded in nature and reason as the proper way to arrive at a just civil law. Key to the operation of laws - civil or ecclesial - is the formation and development of conscience in individuals, as an indispensable feature of a healthy human person.
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At the concluding banquet, awards were given to Cardinal Burke as well as to Seamus Hasson, the founder of Becket Fund. Seamus' acceptance remarks, and the concluding remarks by Jerry Bradley, were as uproariously funny as they were sobering and deeply faithful. The conference as a whole was marked by just this combination of faith, great good cheer, and steely determination to grow ever more faithful in the struggles that surely lie ahead.
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Following Sunday morning Mass and a CFS business meeting, Fr. James V. Schall, SJ addressed the conference. A Georgetown University Professor of Government, Fr. Schall is one of the most widely acclaimed and prolific Catholic philosophers alive today. He has written a book and several articles on the lecture Benedict XVI delivered at the University of Regensburg in 2006. The lecture, as you will recall, sparked the kind of Islamic rage with which we are becoming all too familiar, and at the time the Pope was roundly criticized for speaking so candidly. Fr. Schall said then, and repeated at the conference, that Benedict's Regensburg lecture was the finest academic lecture ever given. This, by the way, is high praise indeed coming from someone with Fr. Schall's breadth of learning. Fr. Schall said that the 2006 lecture belonged with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard address, in which the latter challenged the West for its weak and inept defense of its highest principles.
Fr. Schall said that Islam and secular relativism have more in common with each other than either has in common with Christianity and the traditional principles of Western civilization. He left the conferees with a ambiguous assessment: "Catholicism has never been stronger intellectually nor weaker culturally."
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I am composing this on the flight back to California. Just before boarding my flight in Washington, I read something from the Liberty Institute's "Survey of Religious Hostility in America" which struck me as a worthy appendix to my synopsis of the conference.
"Our first freedom is facing a relentless onslaught from well-funded and aggressive groups and individuals who are using the courts, Congress, and the vast federal bureaucracy to suppress and limit religious freedom. This radicalized minority is driven by an anti-religious ideology that is turning the First Amendment upside down."
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With that I end my little report, with gratitude to all the friends, old and new, that I saw at the Fellowship gathering, and with equal appreciation for all our Cornerstone Forum friends who sustain us with prayers, encouragement and support.
With gratitude and affection,
Gil Bailie
 
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