Bridgeport, Conn., Nov 18, 2010 / 03:59 am
Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut has warned the faithful of his diocese that their fight for religious freedom has just begun, despite the defeat of a law that would have stripped authority from Catholic clergy.
In a pastoral letter released in October, entitled “Let Freedom Ring,” Bishop Lori said that authentic religious freedom was coming under fire from legislators, judges and other officials. He warned of a “growing tendency in our state to view religious liberty as a grant to citizens by civil authorities,” rather than a God-given right that the state should acknowledge and protect.
Alongside this misconception, he said, there is a tendency to view religion as an exclusively private matter that must be prevented from influencing society. Some advocates of this view reinterpret the First Amendment as guaranteeing “freedom from religion,” effectively banishing faith from public life.
In his letter, Bishop Lori alluded to some government officials' attempts to obscure authentic religious freedom, by speaking only of believers' relatively narrow “freedom of worship” rather than the “free exercise of religion” that the U.S. Constitution guarantees.