11/20/2009 5:03 PM ET
(RTTNews) -
A group of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians Friday released a new manifesto on the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and religious liberty.
The document, called the Manhattan Declaration, has been signed by more than 125 religious leaders from different backgrounds, ranging from several Catholic Archbishops to the leaders of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
"The declaration gives a common Christian witness across the historic lines of ecclesial difference on three foundational issues, issues that are foundational to our society … the sanctity of human life in all stages and in all conditions, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife and the principle of religious freedom and the freedom of conscience," said Prof. Robert George, one of the crafters of the document.
Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., said the document was an effort to enshrine the great traditions of Christianity.
"Today we simply come together, in a period in our time when that needs to be said and said with the collective voice," he said. "To do it in our nation's capital is a sign that this voice is meant to reverberate through our entire community."
Timothy George, the dean of the divinity school at Samford University, another drafter of the document, said the issues addressed in the document are not new.
"What is new today is the kind of unprecedented coalition that we see around us," he said. "The three issues we are talking about today do not constitute the entirety of Christian moral concern … but they are threshold issues on which everything else we do is related: our concern for the poor, for peacemaking in our world, for the care of creation, our concern for nurturing children in the faith."
Archbishop Justin Rigali, of Philadelphia, said the declaration was prompted in part by recent legal decisions permitting gay marriage, the fear of abortion being expanded and the seeming unwillingness of governments to permit Christians to decline to recognize practices they find morally wrong, pharmacists being forced to dispense or refer patients for "morning after" pills.
"These are not sectarian causes any more than the cause of racial justice championed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a sectarian cause," he said. "We will ungrudgingly render unto Caesar what is Caesars, that too is a commandment of the Lord."
He added, "We will not render unto Caesar what is God's. Neither we nor the institutions for which we have responsibility will yield to pressure of any type to facilitate or implicate ourselves in the taking of innocent human life."
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