ARLINGTON, Va. — Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wis., implored Catholics to speak up for religious freedom and for truth after explaining the link between the two at a lecture in Arlington, Va., on Aug. 23.
“Freedom of religion is the most basic of all the human rights, because the other human rights are limited to matters of time,” he said in a talk at the Institute of Catholic Culture. “Freedom of religion relates to my eternal salvation: whether I’m free to achieve that, by God’s grace, or not. There’s nothing more important than that.”
Bishop Morlino spoke on Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II declaration outlining the Church’s relationships to states and the proper understanding of religious freedom. Explaining the historical development of religious freedom as a concept, he said that the last three ecumenical councils — Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II — are “the Church’s responses to modernity.”
He described how, prior to modernist philosophy, both the Church and society recognized that “to know the truth meant that there was a correspondence between the mind and the reality out there.” This correspondence enabled man to know the natural law — the participation of human reason in Divine law.
“There was a conformity of the mind to what was real, independent of the mind,” the bishop explained. The philosophical movement of modernity, he added, was a “major turn in the way human beings thought about knowing.” It shifted thinking towards a more subjective view of reality, in which the individual’s perception determines what he or she thinks to be real.
Have I mentioned before I love Bp. Morlino?
Some traddies don't like this kind of talk - basically that Catholics should take control of all governments and all heresy should be legally punishable. I disagree, the Austro-Hungarian empire before it's demise at the hands of the Americans is a model for religious tolerance where Catholicism continued to flourish.
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I might be wrong here, but it does seem that the whole rejection of a Catholic confessional state that tolerates rather than provides "freedom" (which is not defined, so presumably an American version) for non Catholics is often bashed by those putting themselves out as orthodox stalwarts. Im thinking here of George Weigle and Michael Novak, commonly represented as Neo-Conservatives (I dont know about the Neo Catholic thing, it might be a bridge too far). I just dont get the fear that Churchmen have in proclaiming Christ as King and his Holy Church as Bride...color me confused
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