• About Us
  • Activity
  • Advertising
  • Books
  • Business
  • Contact
  • Dashboard
  • EB5
  • Entertainment
  • feedback
  • Forgot Your Password?
  • Government
  • Home
  • Interviews
  • Login
  • Members
  • Meme generator
  • National
  • Nevada
  • Nevada News and Views
  • Newsmax
  • NN&V Ads
  • Opinion
  • Pick a New Password
  • Politics
  • Polls
  • Privacy Policy
  • Profile
  • Recent comments by me
  • Recent comments on my posts
  • Register
  • Submit post
  • Subscribe
  • Subscription Confirmation
  • Survey
  • Survey
  • Terms of Service
  • Today’s Top 10
  • Travel
  • Travel
  • Travel
  • Welcome!
  • Yop Poll Archive
Nevada News and Views
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Contact
  • More
    • Nevada
    • Opinion
    • Business
    • Travel
    • News
    • Sports
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Pinterest

  • RSS

Opinion

Gingrich: Pope Francis and Religious Liberty in Cuba and the United States

Gingrich: Pope Francis and Religious Liberty in Cuba and the United States
N&V Staff
September 23, 2015

Pope Francis and religious liberty in cuba and the US(Newt Gingrich) – The most important message Pope Francis will bring to Washington this week is about religious liberty.

The right to worship freely was a key part of the Pope’s message in Communist Cuba. It will be a key part of his message in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York.

It is especially fitting that the Pope is coming from Cuba, where the dictatorship is officially atheist. The Castro regime has tolerated the Catholic Church to some degree but has stopped the Church’s social missions in hospitals and schools. The anti-religious policies are enforced by prison sentences and the power of the state to coerce those who are too enthusiastically religious.

In Cuba, Pope Francis described the Church’s need for liberty “so that the Church can continue to support and encourage the Cuban people in its hopes and concerns, with the freedom, the means and the space needed to bring the proclamation of the Kingdom to the existential peripheries of society.”

The Pope’s allusion to a powerful government crowding out the institutions that make society flourish should sound familiar to those of us here in the United States. That’s because our government, founded on the ideal of religious liberty, has become increasingly hostile to religion–not only in our civil institutions, but even in the individual conscience.

Immediately following his plea in Cuba on behalf of the Church’s social services, the Pope is visiting a nation that was for centuries a model of religious liberty, a heritage that is now threatened by the most aggressive–indeed, in many respects totalitarian–secularism in its history.

Here in America, the anti-religious secular left has taken the position that Catholic institutions can only survive if they cease being Catholic. Catholic adoption services, schools and hospitals are increasingly threatened by the state’s drive to curtail “the freedom, the means and the space” to live according to our faith.

For instance: The Little Sisters of the Poor, who devote their lives to serving society’s most vulnerable, have sincere religious objections to the administration’s decree that they must provide their employees with free contraception. If they do not comply with the demand, the totalitarian secular state wants to impose multi-million-dollar fines that would destroy their ability to operate.

Using claims of “intolerance” as an excuse, colleges and universities adopt speech codes–at the government’s urging–that repress religious thought, ban religious expression and demand conformity with secular doctrine.

Just as he did in Cuba, the Pope will find in America that the drift toward secular totalitarianism and away from religious liberty is a real threat to the Church’s mission to “bring the proclamation of the Kingdom to the existential peripheries of society.”

When Callista and I made Nine Days that Changed the World, a documentary film about Pope John Paul II and his 1979 pilgrimage to then-communist Poland, we were struck by the parallels between the anti-religious elites of the Communist dictatorship and the patterns we have been watching in here the United States today.

The Communists outlawed even voluntary school prayer. The Communists went out of their way to tear down religious symbols including crosses. The Communists made life difficult for people of faith.

At almost every turn, we can find in the U.S. today clear parallels to the Communist regimes’ assaults on religion. Religious liberty is less important and the imposition by the state of a politically-correct, secular ideology is more apparent than ever.

I hope the President, the members of the Supreme Court, and the members of Congress who hear Pope Francis this week will listen carefully to his call for religious liberty.

I hope the reporters and analysts who cover the Pope’s visit will take to heart his appeal for religious liberty as they have embraced his some of his environmental and economic writings.

If this first pope of the New World can reach into the hearts and minds of our elites as Pope John Paul II did in his historic pilgrimage to Poland, then this will truly be a historic visit.

 

Mr. Gingrich is a former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

Prev postNext post

Related ItemsCubaPope FrancisPope John Paul IIReligionReligious Liberty
Opinion
September 23, 2015
N&V Staff

Related ItemsCubaPope FrancisPope John Paul IIReligionReligious Liberty

More in Opinion

Question 1 on Nevada Ballot is Not What It Seems

N&V StaffNovember 1, 2022
Read More

Roadmap To Saving Nevada

Troy La ManaOctober 21, 2022
Read More

The Lil Governor That Couldn’t

Troy La ManaOctober 10, 2022
Read More

Nevada Continues To Fail Our Students

Troy La ManaOctober 9, 2022
Read More

This Failed Policy Needs To End

Troy La ManaOctober 8, 2022
Read More

Viguerie: If We Stand Up for Parents’ Rights Now, We Will Win!

N&V StaffOctober 7, 2022
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Subscribe Free By Email

Looking for the best in breaking news and conservative views? Let Chuck do all the work for you! Subscribe to his FREE "Muth's Truths" e-newsletter.

* indicates required
Nevada News and Views
Nevada News & Views is an educational project of Citizen Outreach Foundation, a non-partisan IRS-approved 501(c)(3) organization. It is not associated or affiliated with any political party or group. Nevada News & Views is accessible by the public at no cost. It funds its operations through tax-deductible contributions from donors and supporters and does not accept government money or grants.

TAGS

Featured Article Nevada Politics business Muth's Truths government Opinion Government Muth’s Truths Obama Ron Knecht News Donald Trump GOP Republicans

Copyright © 2022 Citizen Outreach | Maintained by VirtualAlly

Bonanza High School to host Inaugural Alumni Social and Silent Auction
Premise of lawsuit challenging education savings account law is flawed