America’s 1st Freedom: Religious Liberty

America’s religious freedom was assured to all generations by the careful crafting of the 1st amendment of the Bill of Rights. The robust freedom of religion envisioned by the founders has allowed our country to flourish without the religious strife seen elsewhere in the world. Americans were to be forever free to follow their conscience in the service of their God and maintain a morality that would sustain our constitutional freedoms. One of our Founding Fathers, John Adams, said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

As stated by the USCCB: “That is our American heritage, our most cherished freedom. It is the first freedom because if we are not free in our conscience and our practice of religion, all other freedoms are fragile. If citizens are not free in their own consciences, how can they be free in relation to others, or to the state? If our obligations and duties to God are impeded, or even worse, contradicted by the government, then we can no longer claim to be a land of the free, and a beacon of hope for the world.”

You are invited to come together in prayer with fellow Long Island Catholics who understand the peril of this time. The coming months will see the vise that is the HHS mandate tightening around our Catholic institutions…a vise that, left unchecked, will crush the life and liberty out of Catholic practices and institutions in a way unimagined by us all.

We must pray together that we might stand together in strength and courage with our faith in God and our love of America’s freedoms guiding the actions we must take. Thomas Jefferson said, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty”. These rights of life and liberty are not ours to lose. They were gifted to us by God and conveyed to us by our forefathers. We are this day charged as rightful stewards to defend these rights for future generations.

Come together for the closing mass of the Fortnight For Freedom to be celebrated by Bishop Robert Brennan at the Cathedral of St Agnes, Rockville Centre, NY, on July 4th at 12:10pm.

“While Americans presume that the Constitution guarantees their rights, in practice our rights survive or disappear based on how firmly we defend them”.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Philadelphia