Campus Notes

The bishops of Maryland issued a 16 page report warning that the American people’s religious liberties are “being silently and subtly eroded.”

The right to religious liberty has come under attack from recent actions by both federal and state governments as well as the courts and the bishops are calling upon the “vigilance of concerned citizens” to “stand up for this right” and  “safeguard religious liberty for generations to come.”

For 31 years, the Greater Baltimore Center for Pregnancy
Concerns has had a simple mission: to help expectant
mothers in need. Since 1980, the Center has provided
pregnant women with material and emotional support like diapers,
clothing, furniture, parenting classes, and adoption referrals. In a
city where more than 20 percent of residents live in poverty, more
than 1,000 women each year receive personal assistance through
the good work of the Greater Baltimore Center for Pregnancy

The Greater Baltimore Center for Pregnancy Concerns is the kind
of charitable organization that public officials should promote. Yet
simply because the Center has a pro-life mission, it was targeted
by a 2009 Baltimore ordinance that subjected it and other pro-life
pregnancy centers to compelled speech requirements. No similar
restrictions were placed on abortion clinics. The Center was forced
to file a lawsuit in federal court to defend its right to free speech.

Sadly, the experience of the Greater Baltimore Center for
Pregnancy Concerns is not an isolated one. Efforts to restrict the
rights of individuals and institutions because of their religious
or moral beliefs are on the rise here in Maryland and around the
nation. Religious liberty – a right rooted in our human dignity and
protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – is
being silently and subtly eroded.

The entire report is available at the Archdiocese of Baltimore website. 

According to published reports, Archbishop Charles Chaput said last week, “The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past. It’s not a question of when or if it might happen. It’s happening today.”

The Cardinal Newman Society along with eighteen Catholic colleges and universities, all marked by their commitment to Catholic identity and fidelity to Catholic teaching, recently published an appeal to the Obama administration to exempt all religious objectors from a mandate requiring health insurance plans to cover sterilization and contraceptives, including some that cause abortion.