Dear Friends,
As most of you know I am converting to the Catholic Church and something monumental has been announced while I am a catechumen in the Catholic Church. Last Saturday the pope announced that ALL Christian faiths would be united. The first step was taking in the Episcopal Priest and graciously accepting them into Holy Mother Church. On Saturday the pope announced that Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians should all work together and that we would accept all faiths in the church. Many religious leaders met and three fundamental truths were set out at this meeting along with many religious leaders, INCLUDING PEOPLE OF THE BAPTIST FAITH, I might add:
1. We acknowledge that there is a Holy Trinity, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
2. Embryo sre not to be killed in the making of stem cells.
3. Marriage should only be considered with a man and woman.
If you are a person that follows church history, you know the bad blood between the Orthodox Church, and the Catholic Church. Holy Mother Church does not think there should be a monopoly on Christianity. However we do acknowledge the importance of our Holy Sacrament in the fact that we still believe it to be the true Sacrament (Absolute Body and Blood of Jesus Christ). Finally the document (I posted a link at the bottom of my blog where you can download the document) states the following about religious liberty.
Religious Liberty
“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good
news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the
captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1
Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. Matthew 22:21
The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and arduous, but it is not a
novel idea or recent development. The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of
God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ. Determined to
follow Jesus faithfully in life and death, the early Christians appealed to the manner in which the
Incarnation had taken place: “Did God send Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing
fear and terror? Not so, but in gentleness and meekness..., for compulsion is no attribute of God”
(Epistle to Diognetus 7.34).
Thus the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the example
of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human person created in the image of God—a
dignity, as our founders proclaimed, inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise
of right reason.
Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from religious coercion is
the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one should be compelled to embrace any
religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the
dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.
What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.
It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a
right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated
around these practices be recognized and blessed by law—such persons claiming these “rights”
are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express
their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the
conjugal union of husband and wife.”
We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore
to compel prolife
institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and prolife
physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in
certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of antidiscrimination
statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various
sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the
judicial imposition of “samesex
marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities
chose with great reluctance to end its centurylong
work of helping to place orphaned children in
good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in samesex
households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment of a
quasimarital
“civil unions” scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status
when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to
be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions. In Canada and some European nations,
Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of
homosexuality. New hatecrime
laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.
In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious
values in the media, the academy and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free
exercise of religion. We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to
the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her faith, but because the
trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system of
republican government is founded. Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to
hire people of one’s own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for
example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer
against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so
prophetically warned of. 1 Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.
As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority.
We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we
happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to
do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and
serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust—and especially laws that purport to
compel citizens to do what is unjust—undermine the common good, rather than serve it.
Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their
proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their
answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God.
For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries,
Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.
There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one
offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly
Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught
that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose
ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim
no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s
willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.
Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports
to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryodestructive
research, assisted
suicide and euthanasia, or any other antilife
act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force
us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from
proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.
We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances
will we render to Caesar what is God’s.”
http://manhattandeclaration.org/index.php
