Holly Springs, U.S.A. — Liberty Institute vows to continue with the defense of Opulent Life Church after the City of Holly Springs surprisingly announced it amended its discriminatory ordinance.

After conceding that their original city zoning ordinance violated federal law, opposing counsel representing the City advised the Court that the City had adopted yet another discriminatory ordinance that continues to prohibit the church from occupying space on the town square. Opposing counsel conceded that the Fifth Circuit now can decide the validity of the new ordinance.

Liberty Institute anticipates the Fifth Circuit will request additional briefing on the legality of the new ordinance, so the Court can rule on whether it also violates federal law and the First Amendment.

“We will continue to defend the religious liberty rights of Opulent Life Church against the City of Holly Springs’ new ordinance that is as discriminatory as, if not worse than, the original ordinance,” said Hiram Sasser, Liberty Institute’s Director of Litigation. “Churches should be able to grow and expand free from discrimination. Placing special burdens on them is unfair, unconstitutional and illegal.”

Then, Sasser added, “The City appears to be making good on the statement its counsel made to the U.S. Magistrate Judge that it will never allow a church on the town square.”

In the case Opulent Life Church; Telsa DeBerry v. City of Holly Springs, Mississippi , the Church sought to move to a new space in the town square area of Holly Springs, Miss. Due to zoning restrictions, the city told the church it must get the approval of 60 percent of local property owners and the city’s mayor before it can exist in the downtown area. This ordinance only applied to churches. Businesses and other groups were not subject to this requirement.

In January 2012, Liberty Institute filed a lawsuit on behalf of Opulent Life Church and its pastor, Telsa DeBerry, and sought a preliminary injunction, which the federal district court unfortunately denied. In March 2012, Liberty Institute filed an appeal, arguing that the city’s zoning ordinance unfairly singles out churches, and asking the court to reverse the lower court’s decision.

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California, U.S.A. — As more than 2000 Knights of Columbus and their family members gather for the organization’s 130th International Convention – together with more than 80 archbishops and bishops, including 12 cardinals, and scores of clergy – the Pope has praised the organization’s work for religious liberty in a letter to be released to attendees Tuesday.

The letter’s distribution will come just two days after the Knights of Columbus – along with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles – drew tens of thousands to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe in what was described as the largest celebration of the Virgin Mary in Southern California in a generation.

At a time when Catholics in the United States face unprecedented attempts by the federal government to limit First Amendment religious liberty, the Pope has applauded and encouraged the work of the Knights of Columbus to protect Americans’ religious freedom.

The letter, signed by Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, offers Pope Benedict XVI’s encouragement of the organization’s work for religious liberty and expresses confidence that the Knights will take a leadership role in leading the laity “to counter reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about issues which are determining the future of American society.”

The Knights – led by Supreme Knight Carl Anderson – have been actively involved in the defense of religious freedom, speaking out publicly in the face of proposed limits to First Amendment rights including the HHS Mandate. That regulation seeks, with only the narrowest of exemptions, to force employers to cover medical interventions which are contrary to Catholic teaching – and the government’s arguments Hosanna Tabor, which sought to eliminate the exception from general employment law granted to religious ministers.

The letter expressing the Pope’s sentiments states: “At a time when concerted efforts are being made to redefine and restrict the exercise of the right to religious freedom, the Knights of Columbus have worked tirelessly to help the Catholic community recognize and respond to the unprecedented gravity of these new threats to the Church’s liberty and public moral witness.

By defending the right of all religious believers, as individual citizens and in their institutions, to work responsibly in shaping a democratic society inspired by their deepest beliefs, values and aspiration, your Order has proudly lived up to the high religious and patriotic principles which inspired its founding.”

It continues: “His Holiness is confident that the Supreme Convention will carry on this distinguished legacy by providing sound inspiration, guidance and direction to a new generation of faithful and dedicated Catholic laymen.

As he stated to the Bishops of the United States earlier this year, the demands of the new evangelization and the defense of the Church’s freedom in our day call for ‘an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-a-vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about issues which are determining the future of American society”

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore – Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus and Chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee for Religious Liberty – said: “The sentiments expressed by Pope Benedict XVI in the letter to the Knights of Columbus makes clear that our work on behalf of religious liberty is important not only to the Knights and to the Catholic Church in the United States, but also to the universal church.

United with our Holy Father, the Knights of Columbus will continue to actively take the lead among the Catholic laity in supporting the First Amendment rights of our Church and of all Americans in the face of the unprecedented threats to our freedom confronting us today.”

Supreme Knight Carl Anderson noted: “The message from the pope to the Knights of Columbus is clear. We must continue to stand up for our religious liberty and to point the way for our fellow Catholics to do the same. Defense of religious liberty has long been a part of the Knights of Columbus history – dating back to our defense of Catholic education from the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

We are honored by the pope’s encouragement and confidence in our work, and will continue to do all we can to protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans from laws and regulations that would encroach on the first freedom guaranteed in our bill of rights – the freedom to practice our religion.”

The Knights of Columbus is the world’s largest fraternal group, with more than 1.8 million members worldwide, the majority of whom live in the United States. One of the country’s most active charitable groups, last year the Knights of Columbus set records by giving more than $158 million and 70 million hours to charitable causes.

The Organization’s 130th convention in Anaheim, Calif. will run from August 7 – 9. It is the largest gathering of Catholic bishops and cardinals in the United States outside of the annual United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual meetings.

Image Courtesy of   Martin Ezequiel Gardeazabal / Shutterstock.com

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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have issued the following statement: The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare.

That is why we raised two serious objections to the “preventive services” regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans—nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease.Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage.

We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers” that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

The President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

• It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.
• It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer’s policy, not as a separate rider.
• Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected.

And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

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