Catholics will have ‘something great to offer’ by living their faith in public

Carl Anderson 

Threats to Religious Liberty Bring Opportunity

for Authentic Catholic Witness

 The Knights of Columbus strongly supports the Fortnight for Freedom, a two-week period during which the U.S. bishops have called for prayer, fasting, education and public action. What do you hope the outcome will be?

For the Knights of Columbus, it has certainly energized us. It’s a call to action and to rededicate ourselves to the great tradition we have as Americans and as Catholics for the free exercise of religion and also demonstrate that to our fellow citizens and to continue to reach out in works of charity and other ways to make lives better in our parishes and communities. For us, it is something which we talk about as a fortnight and we hope will lead to a platform in which action will develop way beyond the fortnight.

The Knights has had a long history of defending religious liberty.

The Knights of Columbus was founded in 1882 by the sons of Irish citizens, and, really, the organization developed from a whole era of anti-Catholic prejudice and bigotry of the Know Nothings. So religious liberty was always very important to the Knights.

Then we move into the 20th century, and the Knights are standing up against the Ku Klux Klan, which as a part of a national strategy wanted to close down all the Catholic schools in America. We fought them on that. We then were very much involved in trying to help our brother and sister Catholics in Mexico when the Church was being persecuted there in the 1920s and ’30s. Then in the ’50s, (with) the question of communism and the Iron Curtain and the churches there, we were trying to work for them and their freedom. And that pretty much brings us up to today, the HHS mandate and other issues. 

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