George Weigel on America's founding principles

And whether the Catholic Church now has become their standard bearer. An excerpt:

This recovery and development of a great intellectual patrimony has had an impact not only on American public life. It has had a profound effect on ecclesiastical life in these United States, as the Catholic bishops of America have taken up the cudgels, first in defense of the primordial right to life (one of the first truths in Murray’s architectonic scheme), and now in defense of religious freedom. For the bishops today sense that this first of American liberties — first both conceptually and in constitutional pride of place — is being threatened by those who attempt to impose relativism as the official national creed, and who are trying to do so through coercive state power.

Murray was right, then: Catholics would continue to make a serious intellectual contribution to the country’s cultural and political life by defending the first principles of American democracy. But he was only half right, because more than a few Catholics, including many in prominent positions in government and the commentariat, haven’t gotten the message. Indeed, these Catholic politicians and commentators exemplify, in a way that Norman Vincent Peale (who helped lead the charge for “Protestant America” in 1960) couldn’t have imagined, a truly divided Catholic loyalty: But in this instance, the tension is not between fidelity to the Creed and to the Pledge of Allegiance, but between claims of loyalty to Catholicism, on the one hand, and, on the other, what always seem to be the trumping claims of progressivist politics, especially as the latter is articulated by the Obama administration.

Thus House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, whose capacity for rational thought (never overdeveloped) is fast waning, recently challenged the U.S. bishops’ protest of a proposed Obama administration regulatory scheme that would compel insurance providers (and Catholic institutions that buy the insurance) to provide abortifacient drugs to their clients. The bishops, Mrs. Pelosi complained, have “this conscience thing” that “insists on [putting] women at physical risk.” Pelosi, in this instance and others, is the running-mate of HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who, like the former House speaker, is terribly confused both about Catholic teaching and about the first principles of democracy; it was Sebelius’s department that issued the draft regulations on implementing Obamacare, and it is Sebelius who has vociferously defended both the abortion license and the dictatorship of relativism involved in imposing that license on the country through Obamacare.

While the pro-life cause has been a staple of the U.S. bishops’ public commentary for decades, it’s the religious-freedom issues engaged by the proposed implementation of Obamacare (issues that find a parallel in the attempt to coerce the Catholic Church and other Christian communities into tacit or explicit endorsement of “gay marriage”) that have drawn the bishops’ recent counter-battery fire. And their robust defense of religious freedom was in turn given solid support by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent discussion with American bishops visiting Rome. The president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, stressed the religious-freedom theme in his presidential address to his confreres and in his homily at a Mass they celebrated together during their November national meeting. Dolan has also appointed an all-star special bishops’ committee on religious freedom, which includes many of the most intellectually hefty members of the U.S. episcopate and is backed up by an equally notable list of lay consultants, including some of the country’s finest First Amendment scholars.