Where Milk & Honey Flows -- The Sonshiners Quartet

Yesterday, Cardinal Timothy Dolan reminded an audience, gathered at a Catholic high school in a New York City suburb, of a sage observation by a consummate Democrat politician, President Lyndon Baines Johnson:

As an American I look to the church -- I look to religion as a beehive. If you leave them alone they're going to give you tons of their honey. But if you stick your head in there, you're going to get stung bad.

Lyndon Johnson knew whereof he spoke: descended from a famous Baptist minister, he was born into a family who took religion very seriously.

The Catholic Church has given this country plenty of honey, by pursuing, in the words of Cardinal Dolan, "the noble tasks of healing the sick, teaching our youth, and helping the poor, all now in jeopardy due to this bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church."

And we were doing all of those noble works rather well, I dare say, without these radical new mandates from the government.  The Catholic Church in America has a long tradition of partnership with government and the wider community in the service of the sick, our children, our elders, and the poor at home and abroad.  We’d sure rather be partnering than punching.

Clearly. When American Catholics thought Barack Hussein Obama was about partnering for the good, 54% of them gave him their votes. Many, sadly, were not paying attention. Among those who were paying attention was then Archbishop Dolan, who received Obama's "personal assurance that he would do nothing to impede the good work of the Church in health care, education, and charity, and that he considered the protection of conscience a sacred duty."

Whatever trust that once existed is gone as Obama is requiring believers to choose between shutting down their consciences or closing the honey tap. Ask American citizen, lawyer, and parish priest Father Sammie L. Maletta, Jr., who told his Indiana parishioners:

We will close down our schools, our hospitals, our nursing homes, our orphanages. We will go out of business… before we will pay to have a child murdered.

This cannot be. People who value religious freedom and human life must, and will, fight the good fight in pulpits, the public square, Congress, and the courts.

Where you see honey flowing, you can expect busy bees to be on patrol.

Which brings me to today's Sunday hymn, one which I am sure was familiar to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Enjoy:

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