Mr. President, together with their fellow citizens, American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination. With countless other people of good will, they are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions. And, as my brothers, the United States Bishops, have reminded us, all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.

Our secular Democracy implicitly grants religious freedoms to all. A good thing. But if you're Christian and want to vote into law tenets of Christianity, you open the possibility of a different religious majority in the future out-voting you, instituting their laws instead.

The secular iconoclasm of the current moment will not bring reconciliation, peace, and healing. Such violence will only perpetuate the prejudice and hatred it ostensibly seeks to end. Religious freedom, given to man by God Himself, and guaranteed by our Constitution, allows us as Catholics to practice our faith, build our churches, pray in public, put up statues and crucifixes on our property, and serve the common good through a remarkable network of health care, schools, and social services. We must not surrender our religious liberty to the voices that seek the destruction of our public presence, the diminishing of our sacramental worship, and the denial of our belief in Jesus Christ as the savior of the world. Only the love of Christ can heal a wounded heart, not a vandalized piece of metal.

We cannot privatise all that is religious. When we have a religious conviction, we are at the same time citizens. We cannot separate the two. It is true for Catholics and for other religions and convictions. Of course, there is a separation of Church and State, but we are still part of civil society. There is no separation between religious conviction and citizenship.

What you see today is a clear example of what happens when religion is directly involved with the government. One should not confuse secularism with something that may sound like you are against religion. It is in everyone's interest to have a clear line of separation.

It is to be feared that the Church will succumb to the temptation of power and that the political influence of Catholics will be directed toward obtaining legal protection for principles and values such as abortion and fertilization, which will then become laws imposed on everyone, undermining the secular nature of the state.

The Catholic Church claims, not only to judge infallibly on religious questions, but to animadvert on opinions in secular matters which bear upon religion, on matters of philosophy, of science, of literature, of history, and it demands our submission to her claim. It claims to censure books, to silence authors, and to forbid discussions. In all this it does not so much speak doctrinally, as enforce measures of discipline. It must of course be obeyed without a word, and perhaps in process of time it will tacitly recede from its own injunctions. In such cases the question of faith does not come in; for what is matter of faith is true for all times, and never can be unsaid.

I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism. And I know that, based on reports, that the Obama administration gave this a lot of thought – a lot of discussion. This was not some little side issue that no one thought about. They gave it a lot of thought, and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and morning after pills to the employees of the church. And that came as a shock. As I think it was Mike Huckabee said, "We are now all Catholics." Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker — or a Unitarian — or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim- -but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensible duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty, that there should be diversity of religious opinions among us: It affords a larger field for our Christian kindness. Were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and on this liberal principle, I look on the various denominations among us, to be like children of the same family, differing only, in what is called, their Christian names.

Regarding the moral obligation to oppose laws that go against the right of parents to educate their children according to their faith, and against religious freedom, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said it both ways: Catholics cannot positively approve these laws, and they also have a moral obligation to oppose them.