Archbishop Chaput found this view “peculiar on at least two levels.”
“First, accepting public money to perform a government-desired service does not make a private agency part of the government. Nor does it transform the government into a catechism class. But insofar as any ‘debt’ exists in a government and religious agency relationship, it’s the government that owes the service provider, not the other way around. Obviously if the government wants to carry the social burden it currently asks religious-affiliated groups to carry, that’s the government’s business -- and so are the costs and problems that go along with it,” Chaput stated.
He continued, emphasizing that since “religious groups do help bear the burden, often at a financial loss to themselves, then they can reasonably insist on the right to protect their own mission.”
“The second and more dangerous problem with bills like HB 1080 is that they aggressively advance a secularist interpretation of the ‘separation of Church and state,’” the archbishop explained.
“Whether they do it consciously or not, groups like the Anti-Defamation League seem to argue from the presumption that any public money passing through religious agency hands is somehow rendered ‘baptized’ and therefore unable to serve the common good,” he said.
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Chaput wrote that he finds this to be “enormously offensive to religious believers” and also “alien to American history”.
“It's unreasonable -- in fact, it shows a peculiar hostility toward religion -- to claim that religious organizations will compromise the public good if they remain true to their religious identity while serving the poor with public funds. That's just a new form of prejudice using the ‘separation of Church and state’ as an alibi,” Denver’s archbishop insisted.
Archbishop Chaput closed his letter by reflecting on the introduction of similar legislation across the country and the security of the place of Catholicism in the American public square.