"Bigoted legislators," Chaput said in reference to Sen. McDonald and Rep. Lawlor, "including some who claim to be nominally or formerly ‘Catholic,’ are thankfully uncommon. Most lawmakers, whatever their convictions, sincerely seek to serve the common good.
"But prejudice against the Catholic Church has a long pedigree in the United States. And rarely has belligerence toward the Church been so perfectly and nakedly captured as in Connecticut’s pending Senate Bill 1098, which, in the words of Hartford’s Archbishop Henry Mansell, ‘directly attacks the Roman Catholic Church and our Faith.’"
"In effect, SB 1098 would give the state of Connecticut the power to forcibly reorganize the internal civil life of the Catholic community. This is bad public policy in every sense: imprudent; unjust; dismissive of First Amendment concerns, and contemptuous of the right of the Catholic Church to be who she is as a public entity," the archbishop criticized.
She issues her own link-filled jeremiad:
I think it’s time to face the fact that the notions of “tolerance” and “liberty” in America are about to be wildly re-interpreted, and not in some nebulous distance - not ten years or five years from now - but this very day - or, tomorrow, as it turns out. Just as we are watching the president - who thinks the US constitution is “fundamentally flawed” - make noises that “reproductive freedom” has primacy over “religious freedom” (the latter is explicitly mentioned in the constitution and the former is not), we’re going see the state try to penetrate the day-to-day management of the churches. What they cannot subvert through legislation, they will see destroyed, eventually, by lawsuits and punitive damages on a wide range of issues (gay marriage, re-opened statutes of limitations (for Catholics only, not for public school cases) on abuse scandals, “green” population initiatives) that will bankrupt the church and leave her (materially) against the ropes.
With which, alas, I concur. As I wrote back in October about our bishops' brave and eloquent defense of life during this election cycle:
Of course, you realize, this means war? What's coming for the Catholic church under the Pelosi-Reid-Obama regime is going to be ugly. Brace yourselves.
