Restore ‘luster’ to religious freedom, cardinal says

Cardinal Dolan

WASHINGTON (CNS) — To the enthusiastic reception of an audience of John Carroll Society members on Sept. 10, New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan traced the historic origins of U.S. religious freedom in light of a current battle with the government over those rights.
Saying that he wanted to “restore the luster” on “this first and most cherished freedom,” Cardinal Dolan, who also is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was afraid “that the promotion and protection of religious liberty is becoming caricatured as some narrow, hyper-defensive, far-right, self-serving cause.”
Rather, he said, “freedom of religion has been the driving force of almost every enlightened, unshackling, noble cause in American history.”
This year, the U.S. bishops have waged a campaign to draw attention to what they describe as “religious liberty under attack” through a variety of governmental policies and societal trends.
Chief among the issues they have cited is a mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services that employers provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, including some that can induce an abortion, and sterilization. The USCCB and other religious organizations say an exemption to the mandate for religious employers that consider such services morally objectionable is too narrow.
Cardinal Dolan, who holds a doctorate in American church history, said a historical perspective can help explain that the defense of religious freedom “is not some evangelical Christian polemic, or wily strategy of discredited Catholic bishops, but the quintessential American cause, the first line in the defense of and protection of human rights.”
Speaking in the Newseum, Cardinal Dolan noted that religious freedom has always been understood in the United States as one of the fundamental freedoms, “spheres of free thought and action essential to individual liberty and a civil society.”