First day of Fortnight For Freedom, a Religious Freedom fourteen day prayer and protest novena*, from today until July 4th. (Fasting and almsgiving are good stuff too.)
Everybody from the US, talk to God, your neighbor, and your congressional representatives about it! Whatever your beliefs are, these two weeks are for you! Folks not from the US, feel free to pray and protest in your own country as needed!
Atheists, agnostics, and freethinking philosophers, don’t forget that religious freedom protects you, too.
Here’s the USCCB site, which is being hammered, so be patient. It includes links to local activities, if a diocese has listed any. Here’s the EWTN site, which is more stable from being used to hammering.
National Catholic Partnership on Disability and the Catholic Bioethic Center have some nice color downloads and activity suggestions.
A good column about the history of American Catholicism, and how it was associated with the general fight for religious liberties. He mentions Bellarmine and Aquinas’ work on natural law and civil liberties. (But there’s also Gratian, whose “Treatise on Laws” declared that natural law included “the identical liberty of all.”)
* Technically, a 14-day novena would be a “quartadecena,” and a 40-day one would be a “quarantina”. So yeah, there’s a reason why we don’t go to the logical extremes with wording….
