In the United States, the freedom of the Church to make its voice heard in public debate is being seriously threatened, and the alarm was sounded by Pope Benedict XVI in a meeting with a group of U.S. bishops in Rome for their visit “ad limina”.
The alarm was designed to resonate strongly overseas, especially as it comes in the midst of a fierce campaign for the choice of a Republican candidate to challenge Barack Obama next November.
The Pope spoke to the bishops, who came from the heart of American political power, primarily Washington.
Leading the delegation was the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl - but also that of Baltimore, birthplace of American Catholicism, and the ordinary soldiers charged with providing spiritual assistance to the U.S. troops deployed around the world.
Pope Ratzinger did not hide his concern about the situation of the “most appreciated'' of Amertican freedoms - religious freedom. This freedom, he explained, is based on the existence of a basic consensus, within society, on what is right.
Yet, “today this consent has been significantly reduced in the face of new and powerful cultural currents that are not only directly opposed to several central moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.”
In short, according to Benedict XVI, there are those who - in the name of science or the “political power of the majority” - want to reduce the Church's right to propagate its “unchanging moral truths” into society.
For the Pope, this threat does not only affect the Christian faith, because it is “humanity itself” that is being called into question: the risk, when you “attempt to suppress the size of the ultimate mystery,” is in fact to fall into a “totalitarian and reductionist reading of the human person and the nature of society.”
That this should happen through “religious freedom” is a deep concern for the American Episcopate, witnessed by the fact that recently the U.S. Conference of Bishops decided to create a special commission.
Last September, the president of the American bishops, soon-to-be Cardinal, Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, had warned his brothers that freedom of religion in America is “facing an unprecedented attack.”
The last plenary session of the Conference of Bishops, in November, was dedicated to just this subject, so much so that many Catholics protested the fact that the central themes of the electoral campaign - the economy and the growth of poverty and inequality - were largely ignored.
In the eyes of the U.S. bishops, the reasons for concern are many, beginning with the echoes of the ongoing battle regarding the health care reform put forward by Barack Obama. The Catholic world was divided on this issue: on one hand, the bishops were resolutely opposed to it, while hospitals and other Catholic health care institutions supported the requirement for most Americans to have health insurance.
But now, even liberal Catholics who had supported democratic reform are having trouble, finding themselves obligated to sign health insurance policies that cover “un-Catholic” practices such as contraception.
And there is far more than just one casus belli: there are the Catholic NGOs in many countries which have lost their public funding because they refused to consider adoption for same-sex couples, the laws in various parts of America that are opening the door to gay marriage, and so on, including the most symbolic events, like the “Cross at Ground Zero”.
All of this is sure to enter into the meat grinder of the campaign, especially if the Republicans choose a strongly religious candidate such as Newt Gingrich or the very Catholic Rick Santorum.
“In recent debates,” says Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Christian History at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, and author of Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning, “religious and socially conservative Republican candidates (Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry) have accused the Obama administration of 'declaring a war on religion' in America, and on the Catholic Church in particular.” And that is an accusation that can be very costly in America.
In 2008, the majority of Catholics voted for Obama, despite the deep skepticism of the bishops. It will be difficult if, four years later, that “rebellion” repeats itself to the same extent this November.
This is especially true because Pope Benedict XVI expressed his clear support of those who asked the bishops to “reign in” those Catholic politicians (particularly Democrats), from Vice-President Joe Biden to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who do not respect the Church's teaching on ethical issues, with abortion at the top of the list.
The bishops, said the pontiff in his address to the U.S. episcopate, must make the politicians understand that they have a “personal responsibility to give public witness of their faith” on “the great moral issues of our time: respect for God's gift of life, the protection of human dignity, and the promotion of genuine human rights.”
Above all, Catholics must have “a strong critical sense in relation to the dominant culture and the courage to deal with a reductive secularism that wants to delegitimize the participation of the Church in the public debate on issues that will determine the future of American society.”
For the Pope - and the U.S. bishops along with him - there is a definite game afoot to win the future of America, whose stakes are the survival of a “civil order clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
The presidential vote in November will certainly be a fundamental step - for the Church as well.