At a wedding reception last Saturday night, a Catholic woman approached me to talk religion. I’m a pretty easy target for those kinds of conversations since she just saw me conduct a wedding an hour earlier. And since some people make it their policy not to talk religion or politics, people see me as someone who will at least be willing to talk about the former. It turned out her conversation had to do with the latter as well.
She and a group of Pro-Life Catholics had taken a bus down to Notre Dame to peacefully protest Barak Obama’s presence there as commencement speaker (I think it was commencement, at least). Their protest consisted of a few dozen people in a cordoned off portion of the campus singing and praying.
Notre Dame campus security ordered them to leave. They refused. In this woman’s thinking, since Notre Dame is a Catholic owned university, it belongs to all the people of the church, and she had a right to be there at “her” university. So eventually the Indiana State Police came and arrested all of them (she mentioned that they did it politely and even apologetically).
The only reason we both could think of for their arrest is a perceived security threat to the president. But there was no mention of that from either Notre Dame security or the State Police. The reason for her arrest is still a mystery to her, but it’s a troubling sign of our times, don’t you think?
It reminded me of when I had listened to Bob Dutko (a Christian talk show host here in Detroit), and heard that President Obama’s appointee as Head of Homeland security was pushing for Pro-Life groups to be classified as terrorist organizations (or had already taken that action – my memory fails me). Regardless, as our nation’s 233rd birthday approaches, let’s spend some time praying that our country will continue to be a place where we are free to express our understanding of God’s will.
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