A rather silly article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune concerning my participation in the President’s Religious Liberty Commission. The author, Karen Tolkkinen, claimed that I “advocate erasing the boundaries between church and state.” This is a gross mischaracterization of my position. The first amendment to the Constitution does indeed say that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, and I completely support this. But the amendment contains a second clause in regard to religion, namely, that Congress shall make no law “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Though there can never be an official American religion, there can indeed be expressions of religion in the public space and in civic life. The relegation of faith to the private sphere, which has been encouraged by some of the regrettable jurisprudence of the last seventy-five years, is happily being overturned by a number of recent decisions of our Supreme Court. It is no accident, in fact, that freedom of religion is the first liberty guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. For if the capacity to express one’s deepest moral convictions in public is denied, all of the other freedoms can and will, in time, be denied. Ms. Tolkkinen represents the elite liberal class that, unfortunately, controls many of the institutions of our society. What she and her colleagues fear the most are confident and assertive religious people who refuse to stay sequestered in private. So I say: fight hard against any formal establishment of religion, but fight just as hard for the right to exercise religion in the public space.

Friends, today is Holy Thursday, the beginning of the Sacred Triduum, the holiest days of our liturgical calendar. This evening, priests will wash the feet of congregants as Christ did for his disciples and we will celebrate Mass for the final time until Easter.