May 22, 2025
2025 Canterbury Medal Gala

To borrow medieval language that was used in another strikingly beautiful room two weeks ago, I was just asked, “You have been nominated to receive the Canterbury Medal. How do you respond?” And I reply, “Accepto!” Then I am asked, “How shall you be called?” and I now answer, “I shall be called ‘grateful!” There! I finally got to answer those two questions!

Grateful I am indeed; to Becket, an organization I highly esteem; to you, Bill Mumma, and the board; Mark Rienzi and passionate staff; Elder Quentin Cook and Professor Robert George; all of you devoted good people who bless me with your company, and who, unlike me, paid to be here, so many leaders and friends united in the sacred defense of religious freedom. I am indeed to be called “grateful” this radiant evening.

While it is obligatory, it is also sincere of me to observe I hardly deserve this high award; yet, I readily admit that you are absolutely on spot to claim I am intensely devoted to the protection of our “first and most cherished liberty,” religious freedom.

In anticipation of this happy event, I have wondered “why?” Why do I take religious liberty so seriously? Well, for one, surprise! because I take religion seriously! And I am in very good company tonight, to be sure, with all of you co-defenders; but also in good company with the founders of this grand republic we are proud to call our earthly, temporary home, the United States of America. They and their parents had come here precisely because they were frustrated in countries where religion was imposed or proscribed, nations where battles were waged to coerce religious conviction, where they were hounded and harassed for their beliefs. Not here, they insisted! This was not the way they, or, more importantly, God intended it. Nothing is more free than creedal assent; nothing merited more protection than religious freedom; nothing deserved more top billing in our constitution.

Not only was religious freedom to be vigorously guarded; it was downright essential for the flourishing of this noble experiment in democracy. As the father of our country observed, our liberty will not be degraded into mob rule as long as our people are religious, for faith is needed, fostering the virtue and responsibility essential to the common good. The most perceptive commentator on the American experiment, the Frenchman Alexis De Tocqueville, would write four decades after George Washington’s insight, that democracy would shine and endure here precisely because these Americans take religion seriously!

And I take religion so seriously because I was raised that way. In the seventh grade I was moved to read that our Catholic ancestors came to Maryland to escape religious restriction, and flourish indeed they did, such that one of the most celebrated family of first patriots was the Carroll family, whose Catholic members included Charles, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; Daniel, a representative at the constitutional convention; and John, our first bishop. My own Irish ancestors would share that value, as they left a beloved, starving island where they were oppressed for their faith, often the only possession they brought with them on those ships called “coffins”.

If I needed yet another reason to take religion seriously, I’d find it in the classroom called “history” that shows the every noble cause in our American pedigree was inspired by faith: from independence itself, to the fight against slavery, to the rights of workers, to an end to racial bigotry, to the cause of peace, to the amelioration of the poor, to the defense of the innocent baby in the womb and grandma in hospice.

So, I take religious liberty so seriously because I take religion so seriously. And, secondly, because religion is not only a good, but its freedom is a given—a given, not by any government or charter, but a given inherent in the dignity of the human person, a given by God. Thus is religious liberty not a hobby or a nice idea, but a fact, a given, part of our very nature that cannot be erased.

Thus, our passion for this primary liberty is not just because we happen to be a believer, or a patriotic citizen, but because we are a person, endowed with certain ingrained rights.

Thus do we bristle when told that religion is fine for an hour on the sabbath, a crutch for superstitious people, but never to be taken seriously by enlightened folk, and never allowed to influence society or culture. Such is not anti-religion but anti-human nature, anti-human rights.

Thus do I only reaffirm my canonization of religious liberty when my brother Cardinals from around the world pleaded with me in Rome this past month, “Timothy, please! We look to America as a model for a just society, where the right to worship and freely exercise religion is enshrined, because we live in countries where paranoid despots despise any allegiance other than to them! Please, keep showing us this is not the way.”

Thus do I salute Becket! In the lineage of Thomas Becket, John Fisher, Thomas Moore, the Carrolls, the Cristeros, the Solzhenitsyns, Martin Luther Kings, and Cesar Chavezes, and the Jimmy Lais of this planet, Becket “calls the bluff” of those who consider religious freedom an outdated enemy of democracy, insisting it is instead the very cement keeping the architecture of our house of democracy securely tuck-pointed.

Thus am I called grateful to accept this Canterbury Medal, and to you for bestowing it!