On the Square Today

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. on  evangelizing young adults :

The current White House, and many others in our nation’s leadership classes, have a very different understanding of religious liberty from what our country’s founders intended. As a result, I’ve thought a great deal about St. Thomas More. We revere the witness of Thomas More because we know his story. But the reason we know his story is the courage of his daughter Meg.

Also today, George Weigel on  marriage and what states can’t do :

In his acute analysis of the character and institutions of the United States,  Democracy in America , Alexis de Tocqueville, a nineteenth-century French liberal, stressed the importance of what we call “civil society.” American democracy, Tocqueville understood, wasn’t just a matter of the state,  here , and the individual,  there . Between the state (or government) and the people there were the many free, voluntary associations that formed the sinews and musculature of America. Those free associations performed many essential social functions: they educated the young, served the poor, and cared for the sick.