[immoceefe]

I find the following passage to be a case in point -- which appears to me to contradict the fundamental purpose of the Church by couching the manifesto in terms of liberal tolerance, republican government, et al. Are we talking about "religious values," or are we talking about the Church???? This exposes the whole document to a liberal/secular counter argument. And while it is a poweful pledge to say that you are willing to go to jail for your beliefs, what are the theological foundations for such a pledge? I fear that in couching it in terms of passive civil disobedience we are simply being asked to go along with another cultural shibboleth. Christ was not engaged in passive civil disobedience in the modern conventional sense of the term. And on what basis does a Christian claim that the "overweening authority of the state" is a problem? Christ was not campaigning against the overweening power of the state. He stated quite clearly that the representative of the government had no power over Him that God had not permitted him to have.

In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion. We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded. Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one’s own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.1 Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.