Fr. Robert Barron, just returned from a trip to the UK, reports http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh9AiESvImM&feature=uploademail on the longevity of the persecution of Catholics in the UK. It’s still not over. Typically, Fr. Barron glides over what appears at first to be a cursory overview of his topic. His audience follows, quite off-guard as it were, when suddenly one finds oneself in indisputable specifics and unexpected depths. (E.g., what is the common denominator of all tyrants vis-à-vis religion? To abolish it? No, not at all. In fact—never. Tyrants never want to destroy a religion; they want to usurp it.)

Early Elizabethan “tolerance” is disturbingly similar to Obaman “tolerance.” Elizabeth magnanimously declared freedom of religion “in private” and then very swiftly made it impossible to practice any religion other than the church of the state, headed by—guess who. Tyrants don’t aim for abolishment of religion, but for usurpation. It begins in increments, in ways that should look disturbingly familiar to an American Catholic these days …