Free Republic

On the feast of St. Stephen, the Church’s first martyr, Pope Francis recalled “many martyrs today who are suffering persecution” and stressed how St. Stephen’s capacity to forgive showed him to be a “true witness.” The Pope’s words came just days after Islamist militants attacked a bus in northern Kenya. Two people were killed and three were injured, but the Christian passengers, whom the Islamists had started singling out to be killed, were largely shielded from their attackers by local Muslims. According to reports, the Muslims refused to be separated from the Christians, telling the militants “to kill them together...

Do you see religious liberty as under threat in the United States? The debate over Republican candidates’ comments about Islam reveal how bitterly divided Americans are over how to view a basic right. For the past few years, several of the biggest and most influential religious groups have made the cause of religious freedom a top priority, saying a crisis is afoot. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Mormon Church and many prominent faith leaders have focused intensely on a campaign for religious liberty, saying that it is threatened by liberalizing changes like gay marriage...

ROME — The threat of terrorism must be confronted sensibly and not by restrictions based on religion, which ultimately threaten religious freedom and incite more violence, said Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the US bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. “As citizens and as believers, Christians and Catholics in the United States cannot possibly countenance” denying people entry into the country due solely to religious affiliation, he told Catholic News Service. Lori was in Rome for a Dec. 10-12 international conference on Christian persecution in the world, held at the Pontifical Urbanian University. While the continuing...

<p>A man’s comments about Donald Trump have gone viral and spoke before a group in Milwaukee on Saturday, December 12th.</p> <p>Tayyib Rashid is a Muslim who has served three tours of duty as a marine — he lives in Chicago. Rachid called out Trump for his plan to force Muslims to carry a special card. He tweeted he already carries a special badge — showing his Military I.D.</p>

COACHELLA, California — Holy prayers at a mosque here on Friday were canceled with families gawking behind fire lines after discovering the front of their holy house had become one big fireball. Late Friday night, authorities announced that they believe the fire was deliberately set, and the local branch of the FBI is investigating as a possible hate crime. In addition, a person of interest has been detained, but not identified. Members of the congregation are blaming GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump for setting the ugly tone that charred their house of worship. The mosque began to burn at around...

Now that gay marriage is here, you didn’t think that would be the end of things, did you? The Column reports on colleges and universities that have sought, and in most cases received, religious exemptions from Title IX requirements. The story frames these schools as bigot colleges (“Training schools to discriminate”). Excerpts: Nearly three dozen religious institutions of higher learning have asked the federal government to waive laws that protect LGBT students, according to government documents obtained by The Column. The schools are asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive portions of Title IX that might apply to students...

According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, many white evangelical Christians in the early primary states support Donald Trump. That’s surprising. Trump’s call Monday to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S. is perhaps the biggest act of religious bigotry in modern presidential politics. Such a proposal is a total affront to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s stunning that Trump would ask the American people to punish Muslim refugee families for the sins of ISIS. It’s even more stunning that such positions have traction with the American electorate. As we come upon Christmas, the business mogul turned presidential candidate has...

have said these past couple of days that as gay rights and the ideology at its heart continues to conquer our culture, I expect us small-o orthodox Christians to have to take a hard, sacrificial stand against the state and society, for the sake of religious liberty. Kim Davis’s situation, I’ve said, is not the hill to die on. The reason for this is certainly contestable, but here it is, in a nutshell. 1. Kim Davis’s position is unwinnable. Nobody seriously expects her to get gay marriage overturned, or even to succeed in carving out a special zone of protection...

The fiscal conservative group Club for Growth put out a news release that reads, in part: “Donald Trump’s threat to impose new taxes on U.S. car companies will hurt the American economy and cost more American jobs,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh. “It should thrill liberals and Democrats everywhere that Trump wants to create new taxes and start a trade war to force American companies to work where he demands. “Instead of lowering corporate taxes, cutting unnecessary regulations, and fostering a more profitable environment in the U.S., as some Republican candidates have proposed, Trump wants to unilaterally threaten...

In response to the series of Planned Parenthood videos that clearly reflect the utilitarian ethos of the global abortion organization, Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago advanced an extreme application of the “consistent ethic of life.” Yet his own interventions on social teaching indicate that the principal criticism of the “consistent ethic” approach, namely that it serves to marginalize abortion in the Church’s public witness, is valid in Archbishop Cupich’s case. ‘No Less Appalled’ “The widespread revulsion over the tapes arose because they unmasked the fact that, in our public conversation about abortion, we have so muted the humanity of the...

Orwell, call your office. In the name of tolerance Emmanuel College is actually refusing to permit its athletes to play a game with Gordon College athletes: “At Emmanuel College, a Catholic school in Boston, athletic director Pam Roecker said that Emmanuel would no longer compete against Gordon sports teams after the 2014-15 academic year, according to the student newspaper The Hub,” reports the Washington Times. “‘The foundation of everything [in Emmanuel athletics] is based on fair and equitable treatment,’ said Ms. Roecker in a statement.” The ugliness of kicking around a small island of Evangelical Christianity in a sea of...

Most voters still oppose a religious freedom law in their state like the one adopted in Indiana. Yet despite concerns that such laws may lead to discrimination against gays and lesbians, voters also continue to strongly defend the right of a Christian photographer to turn down a same-sex wedding. Many also believe the media portray religious freedom laws unfairly. Arkansas this week came a step closer to joining the 20 states that have laws prohibiting the government from forcing businesses to provide services they find objectionable on religious grounds, but 53% of Likely U.S. Voters oppose such a law in...

Read it, and consider what a parish priest and a Catholic high school principal will do to a veteran teacher and parish worker who spoke intemperately on Facebook about homosexuality, ticking off Susan Sarandon and a drama queen who was on the Real Housewives of New Jersey:

No one in American life is more committed to religious liberty for all than the Latter-day Saints. We disagree strongly on crucial matters of faith—including the question of what the gospel is and what the church is, even over the question of who and what God is. But we work together for religious liberty, because we can have those debates while simultaneously agreeing that we ought to have the freedom to have them without government interference. We don’t have to agree on whether Joseph Smith was right about golden plates to agree that Thomas Jefferson was right about inalienable rights....

The Utah compromise contains way too much legalese for me to comprehensively evaluate it today. But reading the bill, and the response to it from the gay-rights establishment, leads me to say, sincerely and from the bottom of my heart, something I never expected to say: Thanks, Human Rights Campaign.

s they have almost every Friday for two years, Muslim students gathered at Duke University’s chapel for weekly prayers at midday Friday.. But a university plan to sound the prayer call from the Duke University Chapel’s 210-foot bell tower for the first time was hastily called off Thursday in the face of anti-Islamic tirades on social media and what a school official described as credible concerns about security. Instead, the call to prayer, or adhan, was sounded in Arabic and English on Friday from a small portable speaker set up on the chapel steps. Many among the hundreds of students...

Mike Huckabee, the ordained minister turned presidential hopeful, will begin a nationwide book tour on Saturday near his home on Florida’s panhandle. But his aides say the real kick-off for the tour promoting his latest title, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” will be in (where else?) Iowa. Huckabee will be barnstorming churches and bookstores over the next three weeks, with stops scheduled in 43 cities in 14 states. Officially, Huckabee is traveling the country to sell and sign books. But the former Arkansas governor and Fox News Channel personality also will be test-driving a campaign message that he hopes might...

Facebook and Twitter are on fire. I haven’t seen people so angry about anything since the 2012 decision on Obamacare. One item of interest: people announcing boycotts of Hobby Lobby and confidently predicting that it will soon be out of business. If you are among those hoping for the rapid demise of the company, I have bad news: The boycott is almost certainly going to fail. Almost all boycotts fail, but especially those staged as proxy battles in the culture wars. Most boycotts fail because most people just don’t have the intensity to keep them up. In 2003, folks were...

Rick Santorum is bringing the nationwide fight over religious liberty to the big screen, and it is chilling. As the Supreme Court weighs the Hobby Lobby case and activists at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference denounce the war on Christianity in America, Christian movie company EchoLight Studios, of which Rich Santorum is CEO, is preparing to release One Generation Away: the Erosion of Religious Liberty. The trailer, above, shows just how seriously Santorum and many fellow conservatives are taking the issue: if the United States continues down a path that erodes religious freedom, the country could...

The Church’s service to the poor and vulnerable, and leadership by laypeople in promoting religious liberty, feature prominently in this year’s event. The “Fortnight for Freedom” has launched into its third year in the United States. But the two weeks of the year dedicated by the U.S. bishops to religious liberty have made the greatest impact in places where laymen and women have seized the initiative with the support of their bishops behind them. Hillary Byrnes, an attorney for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Freedom, told the Register that the levels of participation in...