Leap of Faith
Defending Religious Freedom
Government and Religion are to live side by side in peace and with the understanding that human beings need both,
but above it all God, who is the one who gave power to the ones in government to govern.
By Marta Alves
Today, June 21, 2012, on the eve of the commemoration of Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More, we gather to begin a 14 day period of prayer for the Freedom of Religion to be protected in the United States of America.
We remember 2 Chronicles 7:14:
“If my people, upon whom my name has been pronounced, humble themselves and pray, and seek my presence and turn from their evil ways, I will hear them from heaven and pardon their sins and revive their land.”
Why Fortnight (14 days) for Freedom? To pray to become aware of how we are to defend our religious freedom and our religious rights. We begin our prayers today on the eve of the day that in 1535 Saint John Fisher (Bishop of the Catholic Church in England) and Saint Thomas More (Chancellor under Henry VIII) were beheaded by King Henry VIII, because he demanded their pledge of allegiance to him and to the new Church he had founded after breaking from the Roman Catholic Church. The last words of Saint Thomas More were: "The King's good servant, but God's first."
The Fortnight for Freedom is to call us to prayer and fasting, to beg the Lord for His protection and for His strength as we united to defend religious liberty in our country.
Saint Thomas More is an example of faithfulness to the truth and obedience to the law, which he understood to be just as long as it was under the umbrella of God’s divine law::
For Joseph Clayton, one of (Saint Thomas More’s) his many biographers, “All human laws had but one end, the fulfillment among men of the laws of the Most High. All legal argument must be directed to one end: to establish the truth.”
In 1935, 400 years after losing their heads on Tower Hill, Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher were canonized saints by the Roman Catholic Church, which commends More as patron saint of lawyers and politicians. He remains a hero to non-Catholics as well and to all who see in his life and death the courage of a man who refused to put worldly honor and gain ahead of faithfulness to the God of his eternal salvation. At the end of a life centered on God and absorbed in prayer, More resisted with quiet fortitude the claims of an overbearing monarch upon a spiritual kingdom that did not belong to him. He was, he said before putting his head on the chopping block, "the King's good servant, but God's first."
(From God's Servant First: Sir Thomas More Was Beheaded for Treason, Which He Was Not Guilty of. He Remains a Prototype of One Who Lost His Life Rather Than Overrule His Conscience and Risk His Soul. Contributors: Jack Kenny - author. Magazine Title: The New American. Volume: 26. Issue: 16. Publication Date: August 16, 2010. Page Number: 37+. COPYRIGHT 2010 American Opinion Publishing, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning)
In America, today, we need to defend our freedom. We need to speak the truth and defend our right before we lose them all.
As the Catholic Catechism says in paragraph 1731:
Human Freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness, it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude”
I have lived under a communist dictatorship and I know what it is like to lose religious freedom. It is hard for me to remember my past in Cuba, but the Cuban people under Castro lost their freedom and among that the freedom of religion, and it can happen to us in America.
In Cuba, at the age of 10, the Catholic Church was closed by the government in my town. We were with no Church. Communist broke into the Catholic Church and were known to get drunk on the wine that was meant to be for the sacrament of the Eucharist. For example, I remember sadly a day in 1963, in my small town, there were several young men sitting in an outdoor ice cream parlor, when one of Castro’s soldiers approached them and began shooting at them, running after them and continuing shooting – He killed five boys between the ages of 14 and 16. The Cuban government did not punish the soldier and that same soldier was seen in the town a few years later with an extra stripe on his forearm. The funeral of the boys was not announced publicly and the time of their burial was at different hours as commanded by the government. Free expression of religion was dead in my town under Castro’s communist dictatorship. That is complete lack of freedom of religion. If you said anything against the government or protested in any way, you were send to jail – no need of reason or cause.
Today in America, the government is trying to intimidate us into submission. Slowly, different things are happening that show the lack of respect for people of faith. The state is trying to tell us, in our religion, what to do. We are to stand for religious liberty. If we give away our freedoms, it will take years to get it back if at all, and then… what would be of our children and grand-children in this land.
Government and Religion are ideally meant to live side by side in peace and with the understanding that human beings need both, but above it all God, who is the One who gave power to the ones in government to govern. We are to foster and defend the common good with the help of God almighty.
Please, go to the US Catholic Bishop Conference site and see what you can do:
www. usccb.org/issues-and-action/religious-liberty
Written by Marta Alves – LEAP OF FAITH – www.faithleap.org
Quote for the Day – June 21, 2012 – from www.usccb.org
"The challenge facing you, dear friends, is to increase people's awareness of the importance for society of religious freedom; to defend that freedom against those who would take religion out of the public domain and establish secularism as America's official faith. And it is vitally necessary for the very survival of the American experience, to transmit to the next generation the precious legacy of religious freedom and the convictions which sustain it."— Blessed John Paul II, 1995 Baltimore, Basilica of the Assumption