Catholics in the Public Square

It strikes me that our approach to pluralism in race and culture furnishes the paradigm for approaching religion in public life. If someone suggested that an African-American had to keep his race confined to his house and wear white face in public, the suggestion would be immediately condemned as racist and bigoted. A healthy public life welcomes diversity in public and then figures out ways to share differences among peoples so as to enrich everyone. The question of religion is more complicated, of course, because religion is a way of life with moral demands, and moral demands overlap with law and politics. But the solution is not to put religion in a private closet, because that imperils the freedom of everyone. American “separation” of church and state is supposed to encourage the practice of religion as part of the common good, respecting every difference and oppressing none.

Sometimes I think that the fear of religion going public is really a fear that someone or some event will tell us to change, to convert. A call to change one’s ways is an insult to those wed to the status quo. A religious challenge can be more easily ignored by simply labeling it unconstitutional. Religious people and institutions, however, cannot quietly acquiesce in their own marginalization from public life. The nature of faith forbids that solution.

Cardinal Francis George. Excerpted from "A Lenin in America" Denver Catholic Register July 27, 2005.