QUOTATION: Religious Liberty

The Church does not defend religious liberty based on the idea that all religions are equal. The Church defends religious liberty based on the idea that all people are equal. We are all icons of God. The divinely instilled dignity that we all share requires each of us to embrace the truth freely, without coercion—just as God acts without coercion in perfect freedom.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion 

QUOTATION: Enemies of Religious Freedom

The worst enemies of religious freedom aren’t 'out there' among the critics who hate Christ or the Gospel or the Church, or all three. The worst enemies are in here, with us — all of us, clergy, religious and lay — when we live our faith with tepidness, cheap compromises, fear, routine, and hypocrisy.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Communism

In every social class there are compassionate people who take the side of the poor and the suffering and who desire a just social order. Such people often become unwittingly the henchmen of the Communists. Their cooperation yields propagandistic gains for the Marxist movement. Often such sympathizer are won over by Communism's empty promises of equality,  the elimination of all earthly misery, the welfare state, and a happy, classless society in a free world. But the Communist ideology can achieve lasting effects only where the religious foundations of a nation have been undermined so that reason, faith in God, and morality do not offer sufficient resistence to such ideas.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: Religious Freedom

When people lose their religious freedom, they invariably lose all their other rights as well. The first three centuries of the Christian era, the French Revolution, and the Hitler Regime all teach us one lesson: those who restrict religious liberty will soon deprive citizens of all their other human rights.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Address of November 7, 1946 cited in Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: The Future is Here

Threats against religious freedom in our country are not imaginary or overstated. They’re happening right now. They’re immediate, serious, and real.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Freedom of Religion and Education

It is the great paradox of the modern world that at the very time when the world decided that people should not be coerced about their form of religion, it also decided that they should be coerced about their form of education.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Religious Liberty

Religious liberty is supposed to mean a man is free to discuss his faith, in practice it means he is hardly allowed to mention it.

--G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

QUOTATION: Church and State in America

American society was built for the most part by groups that had fled from the system of state churches that reigned in Europe, and they found their religious bearings in free faith communities outside of the state church.  The foundations of American society were thus laid by the free churches, which by the tenets of their creed and their very structure are not a state church but rather a  free assembly of individuals.  In this sense you could say that American society is built on a separation of church and state that is determined and indeed demanded by religion (a separation whose motivation and configuration could not be more different from the conflictual separation of church and state imposed by the French Revolution and the systems that followed it).  In America the state is little more than a free space for different communities to congregate; it is in its nature to recognize and permit these communities to exist in their particularity and their non-membership in the state.  This is a separation that is conceived positively, since it is meant to allow religion to be itself, a religion that respects and protects its own living space distinctly from the state and its ordinances.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: America

America today is the only country where I am truly considered a Pope in the eyes of the Government. In the nations of Europe, I have reason to fear that my acts are checked or rejected by the governments. But I can send any pontifical document whatsoever to America with complete freedom and without fear that the Government might oppose its publication.

--Pope Pius IX, 1874