CHICAGO, NOV. 13, 2003 (Zenit.org).- The freedom of the Church in the United States is more at risk now than it was just a few years ago, says Cardinal Francis George.
In the past year the attorney general of Massachusetts suggested that his office should pass judgment on which seminarians should be ordained priests, and dioceses in Arizona and New Hampshire signed agreements giving civil officials unprecedented control of some areas of Church life, the archbishop of Chicago observed.
In the Nov. 9 issue of the archdiocesan paper Catholic New World, the cardinal reflected on the «long and complicated history of believers taking their place publicly in societies often fearful of our faith.»
On the states’ recent attempts to become involved in Church matters, Cardinal George noted: «These developments are, in part, the result of bishops’ failure to supervise priests who had abused minors sexually. They are part of an understandable reaction to a failure of Church government.»
«But if they are also part of a permanent institutionalized interference of the State in the freedom of the Church to govern herself, then we are in a new pattern of Church-State ‘separation,'» he wrote.
The First Amendment laid the groundwork for the Church’s freedom and secured religious liberty for Americans.
«The Constitution, however, does not separate faith from life,» the cardinal wrote. «This would be oppressive for believers. It presupposes that religious institutions will be free, even of state interference, to pursue their own mission, cooperating with the state and, where necessary, criticizing it.»
Cardinal George outlined what he sees as the optimal role of the Church in the state.
«The Church’s greatest gift to the cities of this world is always to give society a glimpse, however fleeting, of another city,» he wrote. «That glimpse of eternal life, however, brings certain judgments to bear on life here, even political life.»
«The Church serves society, cooperating with the state and other public institutions, by being unapologetically herself, a witness to God’s ways among his human creatures,» the cardinal added. «Even the state and civil authority are subject to the criteria of good and evil, and it is the Church’s mission to make those criteria clear and express them publicly.»
Writing that Christians can fulfill their religious obligations in almost any sort of political arrangement, Cardinal George quoted from No. 76 of the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes: «The political community and the Church are autonomous and independent of each other in their own fields. Nevertheless both are devoted to the personal vocation of man, though under different titles.
«The Church should have the true freedom to each the faith, to proclaim its teaching about society, to carry out its task among people without hindrance and to pass moral judgment even in matter relating to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it.»
