Supreme Knight, Carl A. Anderson on Religious Liberty # 2 of 6

Supreme Knight, Carl A. Anderson on Religious Liberty # 2 of 6

In pursuit of the truth - www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com - Thurs. May 17/12
Reference to the address in #1

Preface: Prayer Intentions of Pope Benedict XVI for May, 2012 - The Family: That initiatives which defend and uphold the role of the family may be promoted within society.

“But perhaps we do need to be reminded that King’s letter relied upon our own Catholic natural law tradition. He cited Saint Augustine that “an unjust law is not law at all.” And he asked, “How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. A unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with moral law.”

“He went on to say, “To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. There you have the ancient teaching of the Catholic Church, summed up by a Baptist preacher under arrest for living by it.

“When you visit the new memorial to Dr. King on our national mall, read carefully the 14 quotations inscribed there. You will not find a single reference to God. Not one. Imagine how those in authority must have searched to come up with 14 quotes of Dr. King without one mention of the Almighty.

“There is no more shocking symbol of the ongoing campaign to drive religion out of our public life. King’s statue looks across the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial dedicated to the president who is now championed by secularists for inventing a “wall of separation” between Church and the State. Ironically, while the King Memorial was scrubbed by any reference to our Creator, in Mr. Jefferson’s memorial, the wall reads that “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty.”

“And they ask us, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are a gift of God?” A great deal hinges on how we answer that question.

“On the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke of the ideological manipulation of history that occurred in Russia under Soviet communism. It was, he said, “a closing, locking up, of the national heart, [and an] amputation of the national memory.” He warned that when this happens, a nation “has no memory of its own self. It is deprived of it spiritual unity. And even though compatriots apparently speak the same language, they suddenly cease to understand one another.”

“Solzhenitsyn devoted his life to prevent the militant atheists in his country from destroying the soul of the Russian people by re-writing their history. How would Solzhenitsyn have viewed the controversy surrounding the King Memorial? Would he have seen it as preserving the spiritual unity of America or as one more symptom of a trend to separate Americans from their religious heritage?

“In 1954, the Knights of Columbus was instrumental in having Congress place the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. Those words were placed in our pledge in part to mark a stark contrast between the ultimate source of our rights and the pretensions of the atheist totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century. These pretensions were well summarized by Benito Mussolini in 1919 when he said, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, everything for the state.”

George H. Kubeck, to be continued