23 January 2021
Saturday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time
Yesterday’s call to prayer in defense of the unborn deserves more consideration. It has been the common attack against those defending the rights of the unborn that in the United States there is a “wall” between religion and the Constitution and that those who hold religious opinions have no right to enforce their opinions on their fellow citizens. Errors aplenty reside in this proposition. First, there is no mention in the Constitution of the United States of any wall between those with religious views and civic practice. This often quoted image of a “wall” occurred in a letter of Thomas Jefferson to the Danebury, Connecticut Baptist community in 1802. In this letter Jefferson quotes the Constitutions of the United States. He writes that the legislature should…
“make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
The “wall” refers to the control of a single religious practice mandated as uniform for all a nation’s citizenry. An interpretation that negates the allowance of dialog of opinions by persons of belief is a gross misinterpretation of this statement. The second error implicit in the above statement identifies abortion as solely an argument based on religious sentiment. This is false. Reasonable persons arguing outside of the insights of faith can understand the contradictions of abortion rights advocates, especially any person with the slightest training in biology and or logic. The third error lies in the fact that persons with ideas which have their basis in a religious faith have no right to discourse. This again runs contrary to the idea that government is “by the people” and certain persons within a society are not allowed to express their opinions. The demise of civic discourse has been one of the great evils within our society which has been developing for decades. One of the great promoters of civil discourse was a classic Jesuit education in which a sound training in the humanities permeated with logic received a philosophical examination. This philosophical examination, that is, what was known by reason, provided alumni of Jesuit schools with the tools to argue effectively against the problems of the day such as racism and wage disparity and to do so in a language that was based on common experience and reason. This philosophic inquiry provided a firm foundation for what was known by revelation, creating a synthetical and unified study of the world that began with the studies of physics, literature, and history, and concluded with God’s revelation in theology that completed humanity’s understanding of the dignity of the human person from conception to natural death. This relationship between faith and reason have been pillars on which the Catholic faith has stood and by means of these firm foundations continues to stand in defense of the dignity of the human person.