For Catholic voters in November, Lori advises, “The question to ask is this: Are any of the candidates of either party, or independents, standing for something that is intrinsically evil, evil no matter what the circumstances? If that’s the case, a Catholic, regardless of his party affiliation, shouldn’t be voting for such a person.”

At the convention this week, the message wasn’t just coming from Lori, the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ new committee on religious liberty, but also from a letter conveying greetings from Pope Benedict XVI, commending the Knights and their work, specifically in defense of religious liberty. The Knights have been known to get papal encouragement, but this implicit comment on a contentious political issue is not part of the routine, reflecting what the letter calls the “unprecedented gravity” of the current situation.

“At a time when concerted efforts are being made to redefine and restrict the exercise of the right to religious freedom, the Knights of Columbus have worked tirelessly to help the Catholic community recognize and respond to the unprecedented gravity of these new threats to the Church’s liberty and public moral witness,” Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone wrote in the letter to the Knights, the largest lay Catholic organization in the United States, no doubt referring to the fight over the HHS contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing-drug mandate that has Catholic diocese, universities, and even businessmen suing the federal government to protect their religious-liberty rights. Cardinal Bertone continued: “By defending the right of all religious believers, as individual citizens and in their institutions, to work responsibly in shaping a democratic society inspired by their deepest beliefs, values and aspirations, your Order has proudly lived up to the high religious and patriotic principles which inspired its founding.”

“The challenges of the present moment are in fact yet another reminder of the decisive importance of the Catholic laity for the advancement of the Church’s mission in today’s rapidly changing social context,” the letter continues.

Citing papal comments to the bishops from the United States in Rome in January, the letter went on: “As he stated to the Bishops of the United States earlier this year, the demands of the new evangelization and the defense of the Church’s freedom in our day call for ‘an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-a-vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American society’ (Ad Limina Address, 19 January 2012).”

“Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion,” the pope also said in that January address. “Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.”

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs?” the pope, perhaps prophetically, asked during his 2008 visit to Washington, D.C.

That this papal message would be sent this month to a lay organization, in particular, is “very significant,” Archbishop Lori emphasizes. “If we are going to transform the culture from within, which we are called to do, and defend our basic freedoms,” it will be primarily the role of the laity, Lori tells me.

“The bishops are teachers,” he said, but political leadership “really needs to come from the laity as citizens and mothers and fathers and voters.”

When it comes to election advice for Catholics: “The reality is we are defending something that transcends party. The defense of religious liberty,” he said, “should not be a Democratic or Republican issue.” For a Catholic voter, this should be “fundamental, as people of faith.”

And not just for Catholics: “Many in the media have portrayed the HHS-mandate fight as a fight about contraception — as well as sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs . . . but this really is a fight about religious liberty,” Archbishop Lori says. “And you can see that as Evangelicals, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews have joined us in defense. They realize if the government can do this to the Catholic Church, they could be forced to violate their consciences too. The Evangelicals include those at Wheaton College, which recently joined a lawsuit that the Catholic University of America had filed in opposition to the mandate, over [its] abortion-inducing drug aspect.”

In an interview last month, Philip Ryken, the president of Wheaton College, told me that “even if the HHS mandate had no effect on Evangelical institutions, it would still be important to me to be supportive of Roman Catholic institutions if there were invitations and opportunities to be supportive.” He echoed the immediate reaction of New York’s archbishop and president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, to the so-called accommodation that the president misleadingly touted this Wednesday afternoon in Denver, after being introduced by feminist superstar Sandra Fluke. “The most disturbing thing to me,” explains Ryken, who was a Presbyterian pastor in Philadelphia before becoming president of Wheaton, “was the government’s provision of a ‘safe harbor’ that would defer for one year the implementation of the mandate — and presenting that as somehow being a reasonable accommodation of religious liberty. I found that offensive — the hope that we would change our religious convictions over the course of the intervening year, or that religious convictions had somehow been honored if you violated them later rather than sooner.” “It was clear to me,” Ryken adds, “that there was no understanding of the true nature of religious liberty in the administration.”

“Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights,” now Cardinal Dolan said.

Cardinal Dolan joined the papal greeting in Anaheim, encouraging the continued witness of laity in the defense of religious liberty. Alongside him was the president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Richard Smith of Edmonton, who said: “Our call at this moment is to affirm the right of religion to be active in the public square . . . to defend the freedom of people of faith and of religious institutions to act in accordance with their beliefs and nature; to maintain healthy church state relations; to understand conscience correctly and to form it according to objective truth; and to protect the right to conscientious objection. Believers are summoned now to stand up for their faith, even if they must suffer for doing so.”

Asked about the controversy brewing over an invitation extended by Cardinal Dolan to President Obama to speak, alongside Governor Mitt Romney, at the annual Alfred E. Smith Foundation dinner, a fundraiser for charities in New York, Archbishop Lori urged Catholics and other concerned citizens to “keep our eyes on the ball.” The invitation, and his presence, “do not constitute an endorsement,” Archbishop Lori tells me. But he was ready to make an endorsement himself: “I don’t think there is a clearer voice in the United States about the sanctity of life and religious liberty than Cardinal Dolan . . . [he's] a very clear, clarion voice. . . . Don’t get distracted.”

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - I write this article as a private citizen. I still have a right to speak out on such matters, thank God. And this website had enough foresight to organize itself as a "for profit" business. It has avoided the growing hostility toward Christians who speak out. 

What I am about to say will make some waves; I hope so. Though said almost every four years, this actually IS, in my opinion, the most important presidential election in my lifetime. What is at stake is the very idea of this Nation and the values upon which it was founded.

On Wednesday, August 8, 2012, in Denver, Colorado, the President of the United States sent an unambiguous signal concerning his complete disrespect for Catholic voters who understand their faith and take it with them into the public square. He was introduced by Sandra Fluke at a campaign event.

Fluke, the former 30 year old Georgetown University Law student (she graduated in the spring) and past President of Law Students for "Reproductive Justice" gave testimony before Congress last March. She bemoaned allegedly having to spend $3,000 a year for contraception. She turned it into a contrived argument in support of compelling all Americans to pay for it through the Affordable Care Act.

Her testimony was an embarrassment to Catholics. Georgetown purports to be a Catholic institution. She is now a surrogate for the Obama reelection campaign. The "Affordable Care Act" mandates, through the implementation regulations of HHS, that Catholic Colleges and other Catholic outreaches dispense contraception, abortion inducing drugs and sterilization under the ruse of providing "health care".

This is a flagrant violation of the Free Exercise Clause found in the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution. The one year last minute "safe harbor" offered by the Administration was a convenient way for the administration to table the multitude of lawsuits from Catholic institutions under a legal theory that the constitutional issues are now not "ripe" until 2013.

Fluke gave an interview to the press the day before and spouted the Obama administration's propaganda, "This is a pivotal moment for us. We have a choice between someone who has stood up for women's health and defended our access to affordable healthcare and a candidate that has outright promised to turn back the clock on women's health and women's rights."

Given their numbers, U.S. Catholics can determine the outcome of this election. That is if we act in a manner which is, to use words of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "morally coherent".  That phrase was used in an instruction released in 2002 entitled a "Doctrinal Note on some questions regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life".

That teaching document was directed to "the Bishops of the Catholic Church and, in a particular way, to Catholic politicians and all lay members of the faithful called to participate in the political life of democratic societies." The teaching in the instruction also informs the "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church" sections pertaining to the political participation of Catholics. (See, e.g. #565-574) Anyone who thinks the teachers of the Catholic Church are not clear on our duty as Catholics to vote in a manner which is morally coherent has not read Catholic teaching or simply rejects it. Here is an excerpt:

"The social doctrine of the Church is not an intrusion into the government of individual countries. It is a question of the lay Catholic's duty to be morally coherent, found within one's conscience, which is one and indivisible. "There cannot be two parallel lives in their existence: on the one hand, the so-called 'spiritual life', with its values and demands; and on the other, the so-called 'secular' life, that is, life in a family, at work, in social responsibilities, in the responsibilities of public life and in culture. The branch, engrafted to the vine which is Christ, bears its fruit in every sphere of existence and activity."

"In fact, every area of the lay faithful's lives, as different as they are, enters into the plan of God, who desires that these very areas be the 'places in time' where the love of Christ is revealed and realized for both the glory of the Father and service of others. Living and acting in conformity with one's own conscience on questions of politics is not slavish acceptance of positions alien to politics or some kind of 'confessionalism', but rather the way in which Christians offer their concrete contribution so that, through political life, society will become 

more just and more consistent with the dignity of the human person."

Our insistence upon recognizing in the positive or civil law of the Nation the fundamental Human Right to Life is not about engaging in single issue politics. Human rights - such as the Natural Law Right to Life - and human freedoms - such as the freedom to be born - are goods of human persons. When there is no human person to exercise them all the rhetoric extolling them is nothing but empty air and sloganeering. 

Nor is our insistence only a matter of our adherence to our "religious" beliefs. It is a response to the truth revealed by the Natural Law and confirmed by medical science. The Child in the womb is our neighbor. It is always and everywhere wrong to take innocent human life. The child in the womb is innocent human life. It is thus wrong to intentionally kill him or her through procured abortion.

The embryonic human person, the child in the womb, the disabled, the needy and the elderly are all members of our human family. We can never condone their intentional killing as some kind of exercise of some "freedom" to choose. It is never a moral choice but a crime, whether the positive law prosecutes it or not.

Our opposition to the judicial manufacture of a "right" to take innocent human life in the womb must never take a back seat to any other concern in the public policy arena. Freedom must be exercised with reference to what is true and good in any just and moral society.

Abortion, in the words of Blessed John Paul II, is only the "cutting edge of the culture of death." Any time human persons are treated as "products" to be used, aborted, discarded, manipulated, enslaved, traded, made a means rather than an end, we find the "culture of death."

We must expose, oppose and replace it. Catholics will be judged the most severely if we fail to act in a morally coherent manner when we exercise our right to vote. The Biblical adage should echo in our ears, "To those, to whom much is given, much more will be required!" (Luke 12:48)

We are living under what Pope Benedict XVI called a "Dictatorship of Relativism" in the West. The culture stumbles, drunken on the false notion of freedom as giving some people a "right" to kill the innocent, divorced from norms to guide the exercise of human choice and govern our behavior.

When there is a wholesale effort to deny the existence of anything objectively true which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life, then there is no real freedom. Instead, we teeter on the brink of anarchy.

On the predominant human rights issues of our age the current controlling National leadership of the Democratic Party has lost its way. I contend that it should not be supported on the National level. I hope that changes. Perhaps a massive loss in November would prompt just such a change. One simply cannot be a faithful Catholic and hold what is euphemistically called a "pro-choice" position on abortion or fail to defend true marriage and the family and society founded upon it.

I, like many Catholic Americans, grew up equating being Catholic with being a Democrat because I thought Democrats cared more about the poor, the working class, the marginalized and those with no voice.

The failure to hear the cry of the child in the womb while mouthing the language of caring for the poor is unbridled hypocrisy. Medical science has confirmed what our conscience has always known, that child in the womb is one of us.

His or her voice cannot be heard because it is muffled in the once hallowed home of the womb and disregarded by political opportunists. Yes, there may be a few truly Pro-Life Democrats. However, after the experience of the Health Care debate, even this former Democrat is beginning to have my doubts.

The same elite who currently control the Democratic Party - which abandoned its one time support for all the poor, including children in the womb - has now abandoned true marriage and the family and society founded upon it.  They will reflect this in their official party platform during their convention in September. It is unopposed. 

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church explained in 2003, "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose."

"No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives."

Catholic Christians insist that there is a Natural Law, "present in the heart of each man and established by reason." This law "is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties." (Catechism of the Catholic Church# 1956)

It is here that we find the ground for the moral truths which should inform our life together in every truly just and free society. It is here where we also find those fundamental and foundational human rights which we must insist must be recognized by the civil or positive law as rightfully belonging to all men and women.

The Catholic position to the efforts to undermine true marriage through what I call the "Homosexual Equivalency Movement" - the movement which wants to call what can never be a marriage a marriage and then use the Police Power of the State to force all of us to do the same - is also rooted in this Natural Law which binds all men and women.

There is a Cultural Revolution underway in the West with two conflicting visions of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing and marriage and the family founded upon it as the first cell of a truly just society. We must never support efforts to give promiscuous heterosexual or homosexual relationships the same status as monogamous marriage.

Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a "right" to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract. Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for the family, and the family forms the foundation of civil society.

To "limit" marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory now, nor has it ever been. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To now "confer" the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy. To state this is not to be "anti-gay". It is to defend marriage.

Catholics are not one more "interest group" which can be polled, pandered to and bought. Our social obligation is to promote the true common good. We need to promote the truth as taught by the Church no matter what it is labeled in the political parlance of the hour.

Our political participation must be uncompromising in its committment to human life and dignity, marriage and the family, authentic human freedom, and solidarity directed by the application of the principle of subsidiarity.  'Morally Coherent' Catholic Voters can and should decide this Presidential election. Will we rise to the challenge?