Thursday, June 21, 2012

Fortnight for Freedom


The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have declared a Fortnight for Freedom, starting today -- the vigil of Thomas More and John Fisher -- and ending on the Fourth of July.  We Catholics in the United States should join our prayers with those of our shepherds, and offer our daily Offices and Rosaries -- you are praying the Rosary daily, aren't you? -- for the intention of preserving religious liberty and the rights of the Church in this country, and for the utter, crushing, and humiliating defeat of the Church's enemies.

Reciting the bishops' Prayer for the Protection of Religious Liberty might not be a bad start.

O God our Creator, through the power and working of your Holy Spirit, you call us to live out our faith in the midst of the world, bringing the light and the saving truth of the Gospel to every corner of society.
We ask you to bless us in our vigilance for the gift of religious liberty.  Give us the strength of mind and heart to readily defend our freedoms when they are threatened; give us courage in making our voices heard on behalf of the rights of your Church and the freedom of conscience of all people of faith.
Grant, we pray, O heavenly Father, a clear and united voice to all your sons and daughters gathered in your Church in this decisive hour in the history of our nation, so that, with every trial withstood and every danger overcome — for the sake of our children, our grandchildren, and all who come after us — this great land will always be "one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

And since St. Thomas More died to vindicate the rights of the Catholic Church in his own country, it might not hurt to invoke him as well:
Dear Scholar and Martyr, it was not the King of England but you who were the true Defender of the Faith. Like Christ unjustly condemned, neither promises nor threats could make you accept a civil ruler as head of the Christian Church. Perfect in your honesty and love of truth, grant that lawyers and judges may imitate you and achieve true justice for all people. Amen.

6 comments:

  1. The prayer to St Thomas More makes me feel a little uneasy. As Henry VIII's Chancellor, More was responsible for the imprisonment, interrogation and burning at the stake of six Lutherans. In other words, he acted on behalf of the civil ruler to execute people simply on the grounds of their religious beliefs. The Council of Trent subsequently taught that it is legitimate for a Catholic state to use coercion against "baptised infidels" (i.e. apostates, Protestants, etc). Vatican 2, of course, revised this teaching (presumably influenced by the memory of the horrific way in which such coercion had been used by Catholics against Orthodox Christians in Croatia in the 1940s, to take an obvious and particularly shocking example), and redefined it in terms of religious freedom, but groups such as the SSPX seem to regard belief in a return to the earlier Tridentine doctrine (according to which Catholics can coerce non-Catholics) as a touchstone of Catholic orthodoxy. It is, needless to say, a very complicated and sensitive subject, and in many ways a very distressing one (granted how much blood has been shed over the years by Catholics in the name of the traditional doctrine). Given his involvement in state-sponsored judicial execution of heretics, I wonder whether it is maybe unfortunate that More is being widely presented as a patron saint of those victimised by the civil power in violation of their religious freedom.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The prayer to St Thomas More makes me feel a little uneasy. As Henry VIII's Chancellor, More was responsible for the imprisonment, interrogation and burning at the stake of six Lutherans. In other words, he acted on behalf of the civil ruler to execute people simply on the grounds of their religious beliefs.

    I would hope you'd be a lot more uneasy about the fact that, solely on the basis of people's religious beliefs, and in direct violation of the guarantees of Magna Carta, Henry VIII strong-armed priests and bishops; imprisoned and executed persons who would not accept his purported primacy over the Church in England (including More himself); dissolved the monasteries and distributed the loot to his political cronies (thereby, incidentally, liquidating the Church's system of caring for the poor); wiped out an entire religious order (the Gilbertines, England's only home-grown order); and laid the groundwork for centuries of persecution, during which priests risked their lives merely by being present in the country, and ordinary Catholics risked theirs merely by attending Mass. So much for the freedom of religion for which Protestantism allegedly stands.

    The Council of Trent subsequently taught that it is legitimate for a Catholic state to use coercion against "baptised infidels" (i.e. apostates, Protestants, etc).

    Perhaps you could direct me to the article in the Catechism of Trent that enshrines this teaching.

    It is, needless to say, a very complicated and sensitive subject, and in many ways a very distressing one (granted how much blood has been shed over the years by Catholics in the name of the traditional doctrine).

    Yes, Catholics have shed a lot of blood over the years in the name of traditional doctrine: their own. In the forefront of this Throng of Martyrs stands St. Thomas More, who lost his head because he clung to the Faith that Henry VIII abandoned for the sake of his own convenience.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Regarding your first point, you are, of course, right to say that the crimes committed against Catholics by Protestants in England and Wales (and elsewhere) during the 16th and 17th centuries were horrific. But that doesn't alter the fact that St Thomas More's actions with regard to the burning of heretics raise a number of questions.

      Regarding your second point, the Council of Trent, session 7, canon 14 teaches that baptised infidels can be compelled by spiritual and temporal penalties to return to the faith and to the Church, on the grounds that by baptism they were made subject to the Church.

      Regarding your third point, yes, Catholics have shed a lot of their own blood, but they have also shed a lot of non-Catholic blood. The number of victims of the forced conversion program in Croatia was around 200,000. More often than not Catholics have been victims of persecution (the aftermath of the French Revolution being one of the most horrifying examples). But we do need to acknowledges the times when we have ourselves been guilty of persecuting others.

      Delete
    2. Regarding your first point, you are, of course, right to say that the crimes committed against Catholics by Protestants in England and Wales (and elsewhere) during the 16th and 17th centuries were horrific. But that doesn't alter the fact that St Thomas More's actions with regard to the burning of heretics raise a number of questions.

      We could raise similar questions about Aquinas, who, like More, defended the use of the state's police powers against heretics. But since both he and More are canonized saints, the Church obviously considers such questions sufficiently answered. The fact is that heresy was a crime under the civil law as well as Church law: the dissemination of false doctrines was viewed as a threat to the secular order. In view of the almost total collapse of the civil, social and moral order in Europe (and now in America) since the time of Henry VIII, it is hard to argue plausibly that this view was wrong.

      I am not equipped to respond to the Croatian allegation. It would be interesting to read an account of it from an objective source, instead of one spiced up with anti-Catholic sensationalism. All I can say is that no sins committed by individual Catholics will find any sanction in either Scripture or Tradition.

      Delete
  3. Well, all, heretics were burned in order for them to save their souls from hell. I think the problem is that we no longer believe in hell or eternity.

    If one really believes that one or two people will turn hundreds against Christ and His Church, then one has to think about coercion. Now, I think years in prison would have been a better idea to give people time to think, but we are more civilized and less spiritual now.

    Anyway, I a playing devil's advocate here. Thomas More is a canonized saint and we are not likely to be....

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think the problem is that we no longer believe in hell or eternity.

    Absolutely true. This is why we do not see the danger of disseminating falsehoods, though our ancestors, whom we judge to have been backward, did. We may argue about how they handled these things, but the whole course of world history since Henry VIII tends to indicate that they may have had a point after all.

    ReplyDelete