A Critique of JFK's View of Catholicism in American Government

If you noticed, I have Mirror of Justice on my blog list. It is a great site. One of the most important questions of our day, a theme of this blog, is the freedom of religion in the market place, including politics. From a speech given this Autumn at Notre Dame, as noted in full on the blog at right, by Prof. Michael McConnell, the entire question of the freedom of the Catholic Church to express Her True Teachings is here expressed most eloquently. The site shows the provocative end of the speech, but here is a quotation from the body also on the site:


The Bishops’ statement was a critique—not an embrace—of the
idea of strict separation. It describes Jefferson’s famous paraphrase of
the First Amendment, the “wall of separation,” as a “misleading metaphor.”
 It offers an extended—and cogent—criticism of the
Supreme Court’s decisions in  Everson v. Board of Education
 and Illinois ex rel McCollum v. Board of Education.
 It describes those decisions as “victories of secularism,” and concludes with the “hope and
pray[er] that the novel interpretation of the First Amendment
recently adopted by the Supreme Court will in due process be
revised.”
The Bishops affirmed what they called “our original American
tradition of free cooperation between government and religious bodies—cooperation involving no special privilege to any group and no
restriction on the religious liberty of any citizen.”
 Cooperation, not separation, is the term the Bishops used, and their insistence on neutrality (“no special privilege”) and the primacy of free exercise (“no
restriction on religious liberty”) were a far cry from Kennedy’s “absolute separation.”


Many good Catholics are confused about the Church's teaching on separation of Church and State and this entry on the blog from the Notre Dame Law Review is worth reading.