The End of the Age of Distraction | R. Michael Dunnigan | Catholic World Report
After decades of questionable pastoral statements, the US Catholic bishops’ statement on religious liberty is a triumph.
During the last third of the previous century, serious Catholics in America increasingly came to wince at the news that the body of their bishops had issued a new document. The reason was that the bishops’ most notable pronouncements in that period often were ill-conceived and verbose statements that could seem more partisan than pastoral. Worse yet, documents issued by certain committees of US bishops contained disturbing moral guidance that, far from transmitting the faith, actually posed dangers to it. If lay Catholics who endured this period of confusion and irresponsibility came to hope never again to see another document from the US bishops, they perhaps can be forgiven.
Nonetheless, even the most exhausted and exasperated Catholic would do well to attend carefully to the recent statement issued by the US bishops’ ad hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. That document, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty (April 2012), is a welcome break from the pattern that the bishops set in the late 1960s and followed for three decades. This powerful and lucid statement on religious liberty seems to have closed out the long period of questionable and verbose pronouncements from the American bishops, and it holds out the promise of a new era of gravity, clarity, and courage.
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One cannot fully appreciate this new statement without first recalling the tumultuous history of the documents that the Catholic bishops in America issued between 1968 and 1998.
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