Could there be a more egregious violation of 1st amendment rights? Like you say: religion, assembly, speech, petition.

Why has a district court not jumped all over this? I hate running to court for anything, but this is tailor-made for court intervention.

and now this.

Methinks there’s a pattern beginning to emerge here. It appears local liberal wacko governments are becoming emboldened by the newly-found fortune of having a radical hegemony in Washington. Apparently the time has come to put those crazy Christians in their place.

This - as with seemingly so many things in America of late - is uncharted territory. The awakening of government sanctioned persecution against mainstream religion appears to be at hand.

Pardon me while I go pray…..seriously.

…something like this happened in a major developed nation was when the Nazis ordered the Crucifixes removed from the classroom walls in Bavaria.
As in Connecticut today, there was to be no room for Bishops, Priests, or Nuns in the 1930’s Third reich

in and with money collected by the Roman Church, I think there might be legitimate reasons for demanding more transparency in such church funds. Albeit logically I think it would make much more sense for the state to demand that such Roman ministers operating in their state be married and have families. We know from the New Testament that St Peter did and St Paul certainly recommends it. The Orthodox Church still makes marriage a requirement for parish ministry and the Roman Church in this country would certainly be less on the verge of bankruptcy in many places if they did so.

Romans may forget that one of the big issues that caused the Reformation in the Western Church was the amount of money being extracted for the embellishment of Rome, the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica and the liberal enrichment of the Pope, the Cardinals, the curia and other servants of the papacy.

It is also frequently forgotten that the laity in the middle ages found excellent ways around giving money directly to the Church. Parish and other guilds quite often hired their own priests and did quite well until the secular authorities quashed them and took their funds and property.

But my real question would be: who knows how much of money donated to the Church actually gets to the diocese instead of being skimmed off by the rector or one of his assistants and just how much of the money that gets to the bishop is forwarded to the pope or used for Church purposes instead of being spent on the bishop’s girl friend. And those of us who read the papers in various parts of the country know that such things have happened.

…..World War ended, the Allies interviewed the surviving Nazis to obtain answers to various questions. One of the questions asked, was how did the Nazis silence what should have been the Church’s natural, unyielding, vociferous opposition to the Nazi’s campaigns of mass murder and oppression?
The answer was “we found a few church officials, priests and such, busily bent over young men and boys in back alleyways, and fed the stories of their activities in their news machine ( read as MSM today). The Church fell silent.”
The ‘ high fivers’, the fist bumpers, and the same gander marriage folks in the Connecticut Legislature are just getting a running start on this generation’s campaign to silence the Church’s opposition to their newest and latest abominations.
When you have a knife poised at someone’s throat, like the political power to bankrupt an organization at a moment’s notice, that someone is not likely to vehemently protest activities they find distatsteful.

…”Divide and Conquer”. Austria, Czechoslovokia, Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France. England, the Soviet Union, The United States..?
I understand one of the editorial staff at Newsweek just today proclaimed THE OBAMBI as “some kind of God.’

ancient pantheons of gods. Wonder which one he meant.

I’ve always felt O was a djinn, or wandering spirit. Able to grant wishes that usually backfire on the wisher.

I highly support Connecticut Bill 1098.

In New York State, the Religious Corporation Law allows Catholic bishops to have 100% financial control of the parish, school, rectory, convent, the contents of the buildings and all of the money collected from the collection basket. They are able to run each parish community as a personal dictatorship.

The current law allowed Bishop Matthew Clark to close 50 Catholic schools and over 25 parishes “against the will” of the parishioners, because he has total financial control. More than 75 parish and school communities were destroyed.

The parishioners built these parish and school buildings and financially supported them for generations.

Bishop Clark’s negative actions have driven away parishioners. Now only 23% of our parishioners attend Sunday Mass in our diocese. Two hundred and seventy thousand (270,000) parishioners stay home.

It is time for change. Existing state laws which actually protect the bishops instead of the parishioners, have to be changed.

I understand that the Catholic Church is hierarchical and not a democracy.

Why is it necessary to have a New York State “civil law”, to protect the bishops and give them ownership of all church property?

This is existing legislation that determines ownership of all parish and school property. Civil Law is already intervening into ownership of the Catholic Church.

When a parish is closed, the parishioners are astonished to find out that the parish community doesn’t own the parish and school, that they “paid” to build and maintain.

Before the epidemic of school and parish closings, parishioners never had a reason to talk about ownership issues. Several years ago, most parishioners never knew that the bishop is basically the sole owner of the buildings, since he appoints the other 4 members of the corporation, according to the New York State Religious Corporation Law.

If we did a forensic financial audit of all of the Bishop’s personal assets, you would be shocked to see how wealthy they have become, with the “parishioners money”.

Follow the money trail.

Following the surprise introduction of Bill 1098, a proposal that singled out Catholic parishes and would have forced them to reorganize contrary to Church law and the First Amendment, our Diocese responded in the most natural, spontaneous, and frankly, American, of ways: we alerted our membership - in person and through our website; we encouraged them to exercise their free speech by contacting their elected representatives; and, we organized a rally at the State Capitol…

On April 23, 2009, the Diocese received a letter from Thomas K. Jones, Ethics Enforcement Officer for the OSE, stating that it was “the subject of an Office of State Ethics evaluation,” which was “being conducted to ascertain whether the Diocese had violated [Connecticut General Statutes Sections] 1-94, 1-95 and 1-96 by failing to register as a lobbyist in Connecticut, by failing to submit all other appropriate lobbyist filings, and by failing to follow all applicable registration procedures.”

what I meant to say was -

In the early years leading up to and after Roe v. Wade, many Protestants and even Catholics kept out of the pro-life ranks because the pro-aborts used an anti-catholic strategy to convince America that we didn’t want some out of touch Pontiff in Rome deciding what women could do with their bodies. The Church Hierarchy became the enemy versus the pro-life ideas of the Catholic Church. Co-founder of NARAL Bernard Nathenson outlines this blatant strategy of deception here -

http://www.catholicleague.org/research/naral.htm

Now it seems the same strategy is being repeated in an effort to separate Catholic parishes from the Hierarchy and from Church teaching. The indication is that this is a new national strategy, as can be seen by the eerily similar action in San Francisco as can be seen here -

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=100140

In both cases the idea is to get the average Joe Catholic to go along with the destruction of their Hierarchy or their church teaching. Unfortunately, because there are many poorly instructed priest who came from the liberal and often dissident seminaries of the 60’s through the 80’s (more or less), there are many parish priests who have “converted” away from church teaching on one issue or another. Of course there are also many average Catholics who have been swayed by the left to abandon or misunderstand their Church’s teaching. However, because Church teaching has remained consistent through it all, the left cannot alter Church teaching. Further, quality bishops have been put in place by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. These are Bishops who will, for example condemn a Nancy Pelosi when she butchers Church teaching on life issues as described here -

http://www.newsmax.com/politics/pelosi_bishop_abortion/2008/09/07/128545.html

So the comments here throwing out school closings or hinting that Bishops must be stealing the money or any other garbage are most likely parroting this new but old strategy to attack the hierarchy and to separate average Catholics from their Church teaching as well as allowing non-Catholcis to feel that being anti-Catholic is OK, because it is only the “corrupt” Bishops that are being attacked and not the average Catholic.

What liberty is left if a government can take property because it disagrees with your religous beliefs? The defenses of this idea are non-sensical. As if sucessful, self-supporting Catholic schools and Parishes are closed by evil and stupid Bishops. Whatever - obviously the schools and Parishes that are fully self supported are not the ones being closed. As if taking control of finances from the Diocese and putting in the hands of parish Priests suddenly elimates the possibility of corruption. Is this because Parish Priests are uncorruptable? As if the parishes were all built when a few Catholics got together and said hey lets start a Catholic Church. Of course not, the diocese nearly always defined the parishes and in many cases provided the initial finances. As if any Catholic who doesnt like what the Church teaches or does can’t simply leave the Church. Do they all forget that many Catholics like myself believe in the Church teaching and the Church Heirarchy and are perfectly content with the overall structure of the Church. They are attempting to steal my religion and my Church - plain and simple and don’t let them pretend they are doing my bidding.

Don’t buy any of it. This is not only an attack on religious freedom, a slander of the highest order, a desicration of the right to free speech, and a blatant religiously and politically motivated theft by liberal politicians: This is not only an attack on every member of a religious organization: It is an attack on every individual who has deeply held beliefs that they are not willing to sacrifice merely to appease the secular thought police and their latest doctrine of debauchery