SEPARATION OF (THE CATHOLIC) CHURCH AND STATE

The foundations of the United States of America were laid in the carved out soil of Europe of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The economic and political systems in place in those centuries provided New World thinkers – and some revolutionary European thinkers – with the ideas that led to the establishment of this country under a constitution that overthrew bedrock ideas of royalty, religion, and relationships among and between man and government and man and man.

Separating church from state destroyed a long established hierarchal pillar that enabled the establishment here of the revolutionary idea that “All men are created equal.” After years of struggle of women and slaves and disenfranchised and un-propertied, the term “men” came to mean human beings. Even in this election year of 2008, human beings of voting age still fight legal battles for the right to vote.

Notwithstanding that contractual separation between religion and “We the People” and its government, the Catholic Church has continually waged war against that contract and has been joined by other fundamentalist religious orders to penetrate and destroy one of the foundation walls of America.

By demanding from Catholics that they vote against or not vote for an individual who holds unapproved or unorthodox beliefs though he holds himself to be Catholic, by threat of all the sanctions a religion may bring to bear on individuals who contest a firmly held religious belief or on those who might vote for such an individual, religion is destroying a different sanctity; the sanctity of the separation of church and state.

We look at the fanaticism of Muslimism with dismay. We are shocked at the teaching of children in Moslem madrassahs that a way to heaven is through suicide bombings and the murder of Jews and Americans. We Americans look with shock and awe at “religious” actions that are so contrary to the well-being, the very lives, of people.

How can the Catholic Church DARE to come into the political lives of American Catholics and threaten them with ex-communication, with not receiving holy communion, with homilies on unholiness stemming from political choices. Do today’s Catholics not know that their forbears were persecuted by other religionists and are still persecuted to this day? Is separation of church and state anti-religious? Is beheading and burning at the stake more sacrosanct than voting for the non-believer or the believer in a woman’s right to chose. Is it more sacred for a Catholic woman to bear many children who will grow up Catholic than to enable a woman to fulfill her own destiny by choosing, yea or nay, to bear a child? Every individual, including a pregnant woman, deserves the fullest term that life can provide. To pit religious belief that life begins at conception against the legal belief that life begins at birth is to pit religion against state. And now, to intervene in the electoral process to establish that belief as legal, is politically unholy to a criminal degree.

Yes, we can trace the roots of our core belief in the separation of church and state to those identical horrific, bloody, torturous actions and teachings of our European forbears that led our wise constitutional congress to separate, firmly and constitutionally, church and state.