IWKnights Corner (Bulletin Insert) for February 24, 2019

Did you know this about the IW Knights of Columbus?

Recently, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus wrote a timely and cogent message to the membership regarding recent signs of prejudice against Catholics.  The following are the lead paragraphs of a longer article.  You can find the link to the entire article in the final paragraph of this article.

"Dear Brother Knight:

There have been times in our country’s past when uninformed or prejudiced people questioned whether Catholics could be good citizens or honest public servants.  That’s why Father McGivney chose the name “Columbus” for our Order — because the discoverer was the Catholic figure from American history most admired and accepted at the time.  In fact, from our founding in 1882, until the election of Brother Knight John F. Kennedy in 1960, many still held that Catholics were unfit for public office.  Throughout that time, the Knights of Columbus worked to counter such prejudice.

Sadly, it seems that in some quarters, this prejudice remains.  First, in 2017 a Notre Dame law professor was deemed unfit for a federal judgeship by a United States Senator who feared that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”  Now, two more senators have questioned a Brother Knight’s fitness for the federal bench precisely because our Order holds firm to the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life and marriage.

Such attacks on the basis of our Catholic faith are hardly new.  The Knights of Columbus was formed amid a period of anti-Catholic bigotry.  We stood against that then, and we do so now.  We have spoken out against persecution around the world for nearly a century.  At the same time, here at home we stood against the Ku Klux Klan, including its attempts to ban Catholic education, and we published books on the black and Jewish contributions to American history decades before the Civil Rights movement.  More recently, we stood with the Little Sisters of the Poor in their fight for religious liberty and have worked with both the Obama and Trump administrations — and both sides of the aisle in Congress — to help Christians, Yazidis and Shi’a Muslims targeted for genocide by ISIS.

From our very beginning, the Knights of Columbus has been an organization adhering to the teachings of the Catholic Church.  As with the Church, our primary motivation in everything is Christ’s great commandment, that we love God completely and our neighbor as ourselves.

As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church explains, “Jesus Christ reveals to us that ‘God is love’ and He teaches us that ‘the fundamental law of human perfection, and consequently of the transformation of the world, is the new commandment of love.’......"

Find the link to the entirety of this article at www.IWKnights.com/bulletin or at facebook.com/IWknights9981 and NOW on Twitter at twitter.com/IwKnights.

Links Related to this week’s column:

• A MESSAGE FROM THE SUPREME KNIGHT
  By Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson - Knights of Columbus (1/1/2019)
  • There have been times in our country’s past when uninformed or prejudiced people questioned whether Catholics could be good citizens or honest public servants. That’s why Father McGivney chose the name “Columbus” for our Order — because the discoverer was the Catholic figure from American history most admired and accepted at the time.
    • http://www.kofc.org/en/news/releases/part-of-who-i-am.html