Thanks for the correction.

Just a note of clarification: I am not a priest yet. I’m a Jesuit scholastic, which means I’m in studies and several years away from ordination.

There is no such law in Connecticut. What there was is a bill that never became law, introduced by a member of the state legislature in one previous session of the legislature, that didn’t even made it out of committee. There are about 5,000 state legislators in the United States. One of them introduced a bill that went nowhere. The bill did not deal with church governance but the legal title to the temporal goods of a parish. It was in specific response to a pastor who stole a huge sum of parish funds (he is now in jail as he should be) and the lack of controls to prevent such theft of the donations of the lay faithful. The Episcopate’s failures in the child abuse scandal certainly added to the ill feelings. The bill required nothing directly contrary to Catholic doctrine, mandating a form of ownership which in some parts of the world (i.e. Quebec) is what the Church actually requires.

So, sparked by the laity seeing their tithes stolen by the church authority in control of the parish’s temporal goods, this one bill, introduced in one chamber of the legislature of one state, in one session of that legislature and which died without even a committee vote and which has not been re-introduced, is cited as a reason to launch a crusade for religious liberty. Yes, it was a bad bill. No, it is not as basis for a national religious liberty crusade.

Yet, given that the State cannot be totally eliminated from a role in determining how the Church or anyone can hold legal title to temporal goods, when one looks at the whole picture, there has in our country been tremendous generosity towards the Catholic Church in allowing her to hold temporal goods in the manner she prefers, such has the existence of the “corporation sole” in many states, an extreme legal fiction almost outside the American and English legal traditions designed exclusively for the Catholic Church as well as laws in all states that generously allow the Church to protect her temporal goods in ways no other organization is allow with simultaneous central control and decentralized liability.

Again, I don’t support the bill that was once introduced in Connecticut. The best way to see such a bill never introduced again is to get your brother priests not to steal parish funds.

I don’t. In fact after 53 years as an active, participatiory Catholic, it is the cause of my disengagement from the Catholic Church. On some of these matters, it goes beyond differences of opinion to where the bishops are out and out dishonest. The bottom line is that the bishops have an irrational hatred for Barack Obama as a person. They apply measures towards him that they never used before. One can only makes guesses as to why.