Like Communism, he explained, today's secularist ideology envisions “a society apart from God” where “men and women might live wholly sufficient unto themselves,” sharing no higher guiding principle than “satisfying their needs and desires.
This seemingly benign vision, he warned, leaves no place for the Church's work of evangelism, teaching, and activism.
And that's EXACTLY what our opponents want.
Nobody gets to dictate to Catholics how to exercise our religion, and if you try, you'll have to kill us. That is all.
The Denver archbishop also underscored the difference between “freedom of worship” and the “freedom of religion,” noting that the former is a “much smaller and more restrictive idea” in which religion has a place “but only as an individual lifestyle accessory.” On the other hand, “freedom of religion” includes “the right to preach, teach, assemble, organize, and to engage society and its issues publicly, both as individuals and joined together as communities of faith.”
...
A comprehensive attack on religious freedom, and specifically upon Christianity, the archbishop explained, has already begun. He told the Slovakian audience that this attack promotes an “aggressively secular political vision and a consumerist economic model.” Its end goal, he said, is to replace God and the Church with technology and social engineering
I.e. Replace a God-based view of the world with liberalism, which is philosophically incompatible with the natural law.
A truthful way of life, according to Archbishop Chaput, rejects attempts to hide unacceptable realities behind acceptable words: “Living within the truth also means telling the truth and calling things by their right names.” It also requires Christians to expose falsehoods foisted upon the public, “exposing the lies by which some men try to force others to live.”
Like, for example, that the fetus is not a human being. Or that a moral law does not exist.
He explained that human dignity and rights must be understood as God-given personal attributes, according to the dictates of Christian revelation. Otherwise, human rights become merely the “arbitrary conventions of men and women,” which the state can take away at will.
Before he took over as Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff wrote about human rights. He was a major player in his field. And he wrote that human rights are, in effect, arbitrary.
In this context, Archbishop Chaput explained, the legality of abortion can be understood as an indicator of secular society's deepest contradictions. What began as an unassuming philosophy of “live and let live” becomes warped into a license to kill: “The will to power of the strong is given the force of law to kill the weak.”
So that now we have pro-abortion activists saying it's okay for a woman to kill an unborn child even if the child is a human being because the woman has no moral responsibility to protect that child and respect his right to life.
Such contradictions, according to the archbishop, display “a kind of 'inner logic' that leads relativism to repression.” “The dogma of tolerance,” he explained, “cannot tolerate the Church's belief that some ideas and behaviors should not be tolerated.”
You can't tolerate if you're not willing to live with what is offensive.
Archbishop Chaput warned that when societies forbid the public proclamation and active expression of religious truths, they inevitably end up exalting the power of the state. “A society where faith is prevented from vigorous public expression,” he said, “is a society that has fashioned the state into an idol. And when the state becomes an idol, men and women become the sacrificial offering.”
Kind of makes me think of the age of the Roman Empire. Christians were not hated just because they wouldn't worship the Emperor. They were hated because they preached a divinely revealed absolute truth in a world that did not generally believe in an absolute truth, certainly not a divinely revealed truth. Christians were seen as a threat to the state due to their refusal to go along with the state religion, in spite of their profession of obedience to the Emperor and their continued prayers for him.
Our current situation has a feel of history repeating itself.
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