Martin John Spalding Quotes
[On the 1st Amendment:] For us, this is a great beneficial provision which I would not want to see disturbed; otherwise great harm would come to our Holy Religion.
Papal Secretary of State
Martin John Spalding, Roman Catholic Archbishop (Baltimore), Letter to Giacomo Antonelli February 21, 1865
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While this principle is very clear to us today, and was to the people who originally ratified The Constitution, there were many attempts by Christian groups to establish a privileged position for Christianity. For example, for years the Sunday Sabbath was legally enforced by unconstitutional Blue Laws that prohibited businesses from operating on the Christian Sabbath and prohibited activities that compete with Sunday church attendance. Supreme Court Justice Story even argued that the First Amendment allowed Christian religious supremacy and Cooley wrote this to refute Story’s now discredited doctrine.
This is a critical quotation on the government establishment of religion issue. There are a few people who have argued over the years that the Founding Fathers and their culture was religious and where they were careful to avoid favoring one religion over another, they did NOT intend to put atheism on the same equal plane as religion as far as government action is concerned. However, some of the Founding Fathers were atheists, and some others like John Adams were deists—they believed in a God but not in the Trinity or in Judaism or any organized religion. So this quotation makes it clear that the First Amendment does NOT favor religion over non religion or secularism. Atheism must be on an equal footing but not on a higher plane.
The then current example was with same sex marriage. Some people who claimed that their religion declared same sex marriage as a sin and prohibited their aiding and abetting that activity. As a result, they claimed that their right of religious freedom allowed a county clerk to refuse to issue the marriage license or a hotel to refuse to allow a gay couple to rent their facility for a wedding, or a retail store to refuse to sell the couple bedding.
Kennedy was being hurt be fears that as a Catholic, he would be beholden to the Pope and the Catholic Bishops. There were many protestants who believed that the Catholic Church was antithetical to democracy and some who even believed that Catholicism was the religion of Satan. Kennedy decided to confront the issue head on.
Pen name: Jack Nipps. Leland was a Baptist evangelist who had worked with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to secure Freedom of Conscience in Virginia. Many people think that ideas such as this are the views of irreligious men and women, but Leland was a devout, evangelical Baptist and Baptists suffered discrimination in early Colonial America. Freedom of conscience was essential for all religions who were not in the local majority. Tolerance essential. See 43,065.
Catholics were blamed by some for the defeat of Henry Clay in 1844. Anti catholic sentiment was high:. Johnson was then a Congressman representing a district where there were few Catholics and strong anti-Catholic feeling.
It is an error to say that. It is an error to say that He was the last Pope to hold temporal power. Years later, the Vatican rejected this view and adopted the modern concept of freedom of conscience. See {612714}.
Prior to Vatican II, freedom of conscience was not explicit in Catholic Doctrine. The controlling view had been that of Pope Pius IX a hundred years earlier. See {612299}.
Martin John Spalding was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Bishop of Louisville (1850–1864) and Archbishop of Baltimore (1864–1872). He advocated aid for freed slaves following the American Civil War. Spalding attended the First Vatican Council, where he first opposed, and then supported, a dogmatic proclamation of papal infallibility.
