Fr. Robert Barron: “The secularist state wants Catholicism off the public stage…”

… and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism’s totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I’m dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually. A more tolerant liberalism allows, not only for freedom of worship, but also for real freedom of religion, which is to say, the expression of religious values in the public square and the free play of religious ideas in the public conversation. Most of our founding fathers advocated just this type of liberalism. But there is another modality of secularism — sadly on display in the current administration — that is actively aggressive toward religion, precisely because it sees religion as its primary rival in the public arena.

The reason that the Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to the Constitution — is so important is that it holds off the tendency, inherent in any government, toward totalitarianism, even if that means the totalitarianism of the majority. The very first amendment, of course, guarantees the free exercise of religion in our country. Our founders obviously feared that even a democratic system, predicated upon a repudiation of tyranny, could become so tyrannical itself that it would seek to intrude upon the sacred realm of the religious conscience. As Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lincoln, and many others have seen, our democracy is especially healthy when it disallows a concentration of power — political, economic, or cultural — in any one place. I would hope that American Catholics would argue against the Obama administration’s move, not only because they are Catholics, but also because they are Americans.

Read the entire piece, “The HHS Mandate: Anti-Catholic and Un-American”, on NRO’s “The Corner”.