Highlights of S.K. Carl A. Anderson's Address

Highlights of S.K. Carl A. Anderson’s Address

14 Highlights from the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus Carl A. Anderson’s Address at the National Catholic Breakfast on April 19th, 2012 in Washington, D.C.

#1) We must remind our fellow Americans, and especially those who exercise power, that religious liberty - the freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment - has been essential to the founding, development, and improvement of the American Republic.
Before there was an American Revolution, there was what historians call the First Great Awakening, which swept through the colonies and transformed their outlook.
The Second Great Awakening led to the abolition of slavery, as well as the other great reform movements of the 19th century.
The Third wave of religious energy led to reforms in education, labor, & women’s rights.

#2) Alex de Tocqueville observed the profound connection between religion and liberty in our national life. “Religion does not give [Americans] their taste for freedom, he said. “It singularly facilitates their use of it.” We may ask: Is this historical connection between Christianity and liberty an accident of history or is it something fundamental?

#3) Our Founders answered that question unequivocally. The declared we are “endowed” by our “Creator” with inalienable rights. Washington’s Farewell Address insisted that religion and morality are “indispensable supports of our political prosperity,” warning that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can be retained without religion…

#4) Perhaps most notably in 1961 when President Kennedy, in his Inaugural Address, spoke of the rights for which our “forbears fought,” namely “belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” According to a poll we conducted for the 50th anniversary of that speech, 85 percent of Americans still agree with Kennedy’s statement.

#5) No one here needs to be reminded that this belief was the driving force behind the life’s work of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In his historic letter from the Birmingham jail, Rev. King said that he and his followers “were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which,” he said, “we’re dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” … be reminded that King’s letter relied upon our own Catholic natural law tradition. He cited St. Augustine that “”an unjust law is no law at all.”

#6) In 1954, the Knights of Columbus was instrumental in having Congress place the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. Those words were place in our pledge in part to mark a stark contrast between the ultimate source of our rights and pretensions o the atheist totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century.

#7) Yet today we find a new hostility to the role of religious institutions in American life at a time when government is expanding its reach in extraordinary ways. And it is not only because of the Obama Administration’s HHS contraception mandate… Arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor versus EEOC last year, the Administration sought unprecedented limits on the autonomy of churches and religious institutions… The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed… [This was a 9-0 vote.]

A Public Service Meet Your Neighbor Info by the blogger ‘cinops be gone’ - Wed., July 11, 2012