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Article: A note on separation of Church and state.
- Article from:
- Catholic Insight
- Article date:
- April 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Catholic Insight. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It is always around election time that the principle of 'separation of Church and state' is most frequently invoked by the media, and always in connection with moral issues. Both in Canada and the United States, separation of Church and state is currently interpreted to mean that the state ought not to impose the moral conclusions of the Catholic faith, for example, on the citizens at large. To do so would be to violate this principle.
But this popular understanding is simply a misunderstanding. Separation of Church and state means just what it says. No secular prince can rightly usurp ecclesiastical office, as we saw happen in 16th-century England. And since the ...