Archive for the ‘secularist onslaught’ Category
Dr. Richard Land is blowing the trumpet in America!
Thursday, February 9th, 2012This leading Southern Baptist — but more importantly Protestant Evangelical — is calling upon all of the Church leadership to prepare for grave moral conflict with the federal government.
God Bless his prophetic zeal.
Excerpt to follow, and then links of interest from this blog over the past five years …. while the State of Indiana assaulted my (Bryan 
Brown’s) rights to conscience and freedom of religion via test oaths and discriminatory processing.
Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD.
“We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just like Dr. King wrote his from the Birmingham jail,” Dr. Land said.
Dr. Land wrote an op-ed on Tuesday with Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy and research at ERLC, calling his fellow Southern Baptists and evangelical Christians throughout America to oppose any infringement on the First Amendment.
“The Obama administration has declared war on religion and freedom of conscience,” they wrote. “We consider this callous requirement by the Obama administration to be a clear violation of our nation’s commitment to liberty of conscience and a flagrant violation of our constitutional protection to freedom of religion.”
Past links on this topic gathered here
Aux Bishop James Conley on the rising tide of persecution
Friday, January 27th, 2012
Jan. 25, 2012
“The Bell is Tolling”
By Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., Apostolic Administrator
“Any man’s death diminishes me,” wrote John Donne in 1624, “for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
The bell is tolling for religious liberty in America. All of us should listen well.
On Friday, Jan. 20, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that most religious institutions – including Catholic hospitals, schools and social service agencies – would not be exempted from a federal government requirement that employee health plans must provide free contraceptives. This is a critical issue for us that must not be ignored.
The announcement was a death knell for religious liberty in the United States. Many recall that in August, HHS announced the obligation of contraceptive coverage in private insurance plans, and a narrow religious exemption which will cover, in fact, only some churches – and almost no other religious entities.
Many recall the outrage of religious leaders over this plan. Many recall that the Catholic Church, among others, pleaded with the federal government to reconsider. The pleas fell on deaf ears.
Moving forward with the plan, and in a weak attempt to provide concession to religious institutions, HHS announced that nonprofit groups would be given a year to “adapt” before being required to provide contraceptive coverage. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebellius stated that “this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.”
Let’s be clear. This decision does nothing to respect religious freedom. Without change, Catholic institutions will soon be legally required to provide services which violate a fundamental principle of our religious beliefs. If plans go unchanged, the Catholic Church, acting through our Catholic institutions, will no longer have legal protection for the free exercise of religion.
Secretary Sebellius is wrong; this is not a year to “adapt.” The Catholic Church will not adapt by violating fundamental elements of our faith. Instead of adapting, this is a year to unify, and to fight injustice and flagrant disregard for the institutional protection of our religious practice.
The recent decision by HHS should make clear for all Catholics that under the proposed health care plan, the freedom to practice our religious faith is in jeopardy. Catholic groups who claimed that this health care plan, with its narrow “conscience clauses” and “religious exemptions,” would respect Catholic teaching must face the facts. Compromising with pro-choice, pro-contraceptive political agendas can have dangerous consequences. The bell tolls for our religious freedom.
Catholics must take the lead in restoring our Constitutional religious freedom. We need to work in all reasonable ways to convince the Department of Health and Human Services to reverse its policy; the Church will continue to lobby for this change. If that fails, which it may, we need to work with Congress to protect basic religious liberty.
There is an answer to this attack on our religious freedom. The “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act,” now before Congress, is more important than ever before. All Catholics need to support its passage. All Christians should join us by praying for a return to justice and by visiting www.usccb.org/conscience to begin contacting their representatives.
For many Christian denominations, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has just concluded. Unity has never been more important. Certainly, there is disagreement among Christians about the legitimacy of contraception. But there should be no disagreement among Christians about religious freedom. Each of us has an interest in defending liberty. Now is the time. The bell tolls for us all.
Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., is Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese of Denver.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals finds discrimination against Christian activists in the legal profession
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012BJB Note: Replace “law school” with “bar admission review process” and replace “hiring” with “certifying” and this case could be my own. Of course, we yet await a ruling from a sister court, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ….
Suit by Conservative Sees Bias in Law School Hiring
By ADAM LIPTAK
January 9, 2012
WASHINGTON — Teresa R. Wagner (pictured) is a conservative Republican who wants to teach law. Her politics may have hurt her career. An official of the University of Iowa College of Law, where Ms. Wagner applied for a job in 2006, certainly seemed to think so. “Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it),” Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson wrote in 2007 to the law school’s dean, Carolyn Jones.
Ms. Wagner, who graduated from the law school in 1993 and had taught at the George Mason University School of Law, was not hired. She sued, alleging discrimination because of her political beliefs. Late last month, a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, ruled that her case should go to trial, saying she had presented enough evidence to suggest that “Dean Jones’s repeated decisions not to hire Wagner were in part motivated by Wagner’s constitutionally protected First Amendment rights of political belief and association.”
Ms. Wagner’s lawyer, Stephen T. Fieweger, said the decision was a victory for an important sort of academic freedom. “It’s gotten to the point where the law school’s diversity efforts are to eliminate everyone from the mainstream,” he said. “They espouse cultural diversity, but won’t consider the conservative viewpoint.”
According to Ms. Wagner’s lawsuit, the law faculty at Iowa in 2007 included a single registered Republican among its 50 or so members. The Republican professor was appointed in 1984. In 2009, The Des Moines Register found that there were two registered Republicans on the faculty.
Ms. Wagner would have added some balance, her lawyer said. “My client is an ideologue,” Mr. Fieweger said. “She does believe in conservative values.” Ms. Wagner has worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion and euthanasia, and the Family Research Council, which takes conservative positions on social issues.
Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian group, and the author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America,” said there was nothing unusual about the number of Republicans on Iowa’s law faculty.
“What would count as freakish would be to find two dozen registered Republicans on a big law faculty,” Mr. Olson said. “Law schools are always setting up committees and task forces to promote diversity on their faculty, which can serve to conceal an absence of diversity in how people actually think.” (more…)
Christian persecution in the USA?
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011In a recent interview from the Vatican, the head of the Roman Catholic “Rota” (the ecclesiastical court rooted in the believer’s court system first mentioned by our Lord in Matthew 18 and then the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 6) warned that secularism is a very real threat to the freedom of Christians in the West.
VATICAN, November 28, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – One of the highest ranking cardinals in the Vatican has said that the United States is “well on the way” to the persecution of Christians.
Cardinal Raymond Burke
Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of St. Louis and now the head of the Vatican’s highest court, told Catholic News Agency that he could envision a time when the Catholic Church in the U.S., “even by announcing her own teaching,” is accused of “engaging in illegal activity, for instance, in its teaching on human sexuality.”
Asked if the cardinal could even see American Catholics being arrested for their faith he replied, “I can see it happening, yes.”
In his remarks to several U.S. Bishops meeting with him Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI made similarly emphatic warnings about the U.S. The pope told the bishops that “the seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated.”
He added: “The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers.”
In the interview published today, Cardinal Burke declared that “it is a war” and “critical at this time that Christians stand up for the natural moral law.” Should they not, he warned, “secularization will in fact predominate and it will destroy us.”
I, Bryan J. Brown, can testify firsthand as to the desire of secularists to destroy those who stand on natural moral law. My law career was impacted by my refusal to renounce the Higher Laws doctrine (i.e., deny the Kingship of Christ) when ordered to do so by agents of the Indiana judiciary.
The rest of this LifeSiteNews article is right here ….
In a related story, Pope Benedict XVI recently said the following to the U.S. Bishops:
Speaking to various bishops of the United States Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI responded to concerns expressed by the bishops about “the grave challenges” coming from secular society against the practice of faith. The pope noted that many in society are now beginning to recognize the damage of crumbling moral foundations and urged the bishops to speak out in defense of Christian morality. 
“The present moment can thus be seen, in positive terms, as a summons to exercise the prophetic dimension of your episcopal ministry by speaking out, humbly yet insistently, in defense of moral truth, and offering a word of hope, capable of opening hearts and minds to the truth that sets us free,” he said.
I can also testify firsthand to the state of this “prophetic dimension” among the prelates of the United States and the extent that “hope” is extended to those who are, like me, under the heavy hammers of the secular powers. The secular elite acts out, the religious elite ….. (My situation would make a fine case study in this topic for any interested journalists.)
The rest of this LifeSiteNews article is right here ….
More on this general theme of a coming (and even here now) persecution of American Christians is found throughout this website, including in this category: http://www.archangelinstitute.org/category/rrr/secularist-onslaught/
Thanks to LifeSiteNews for these fine articles. Consider donating to that fine alternative media source right here: https://www.z2systems.com/np/clients/lifesitenews_us/donation.jsp?campaign=34
America’s political class intensifies the kulturkampf
Friday, July 15th, 2011According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, KulturKampf is
The name given to the political struggle for the rights and self-government of the Catholic Church, carried out chiefly in Prussia and afterwards in Baden, Hesse, and Bavaria. The contest was waged with great vigour from 1871 to 1877; from 1878 to 1891 it gradually calmed down. On one side stood the government, the Liberals, and the majority of the Conservatives; on the other, the bishops, the priests, and the bulk of the Catholic people.
The word is, in essence, culture war and it is well demonstrated in the latest gantlet thrown down by the apparatchiks in the Obama Administration. (Read Kathleen Sebelius, former Kansas Governor.)
I speak of the recent announcement that the government of the glorious Father/Motherland, the federal power represented by the war eagle, will require its harem of private insurers to extend contraceptive services to all Americans – and thus require all Americans to pay for those same contraceptive services.
The plan is brilliant, and crassly calculated to blitzkrieg the ideological foes of the ruling elite by dividing and conquering their enemies.
The Bishops, you see, must stand up for the ancient teaching handed down from the early Church on contraception. At least I think they must.
This is tricky ground.
Most Protestants view chemical sterility as their freedom in Christ and the practice of contraception as merely good stewardship over the family. Indeed, when I was a student at Fort Wayne Bible College it was said that all pastoral and missions majors were told, in their last year of study, that they had a duty to practice contraception so as to not constitute a burden upon their “sending church” by birthing too many children.
Natural law is not taught in such Bible Colleges. Neither is the theology of the body. That explains more than some of the ongoing fracturing of the Church.
Not that Catholics are all that good on either of the above, statistically speaking.
It is no secret that many rank and file Catholics contracept rather than obey the teaching of Humana Vitae.
And so see how brilliant this move to mandate contraception is? It will divide the Protestants from the Catholics and separate rank and file Catholics from their clergy. The Catholic Bishops are asked to either stand up now and defend the ancient teachings — maybe all alone — or shrink back from the battle in the interest of a false unity that will only lead to more compromises and less Christian living down the road.
With most pro-life groups focusing on surgical abortion (a dying technology) while ignoring contraception (or even teaching it is acceptable), the Bishops cannot count on much solidarity from that zealous quarter.
Sun Tzu (a great Chinese military strategist of ancient times) advised generals to carefully choose their battlefields. Evangelical Protestants and Catholic Bishops have been making much progress the past twenty years on a unity born of necessity, a unity mandated by the belief that we just might, someday soon, share the same civil disobedience foxhole. The time of civil disobedience is fast approaching, and the cultural elites see it coming on the horizon. Thus they have run ahead to claim the ground upon which the first skirmishes will take place. They have chosen a battle over the forced funding of contraception – with the hope, on the part of such coalitions as Democrat leadership, Planned Parenthood, RINOs and other assorted enemies of the Church – that upon this unholy ground the Evangelical/Catholic coalition will fracture and the hope that upon this unholy ground most Catholic Bishops will lose the rank and file.
I fear that their nepharious strategy is sound (that is, will prove effective toward the goal), as nepharious strategies usually are. (Consider the source.)
And so I must ask: Are America’s Catholic Bishops prepared to pay the price that all pagan governments have demanded of the Church? (Or rather abandon Humana Vitae, as the “progressives” have urged for the past 43 years.)
More posts on this subject:
http://www.archangelinstitute.org/christian-civil-disobedience-time-to-think-about-it/
http://www.archangelinstitute.org/how-do-we-preach-jesus-in-this-post-modern-world-creeds-post-29/
http://www.archangelinstitute.org/gathering-storm-clouds-on-the-horizon/
http://www.archangelinstitute.org/happy-postmodern-mothers-day-the-pill-turns-50/
http://www.archangelinstitute.org/thanks-be-to-god-the-catholic-hierarchy-is-not-silent/
http://www.archangelinstitute.org/pro-life-is-not-enough-post-1-klusendorf-does-colombo/
ArchBishop Charles Chaput sees a bad moon on the rise (initial post)
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011This post begins a new series (our end of summer series) here at the Institute. 
This series raises the question of Christian, and more specifically Catholic, persecution in the West.
The ArchAngel Institute has sounded this concern from our launch — and lived it as well. See the posts gathered under “the whirlwinds” and “refuse, resist and/or rebel”, posts such as this one, as examples of us warning of a coming persecution. (Actually here now for some, as is developed in this post.)
That said, we cannot raise the alarm as eloquently, academically or authoritatively as Charles Chaput, Catholic Archbishop of Denver Colorado. The heroic Archbishop addressed the first session of the 15th symposium for the Canon Law Association of Slovakia in August, 2010, prophetically issuing a spiritual call to arms through a speech entitled Living within the truth: Religious liberty and Catholic mission in the new order of the world (here). (more…)
