Bishop Flores on religious freedom

One of the members of the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty is Bishop Daniel Flores, from Texas.  Here (HT:  Distinctly Catholic) is an excellent lecture he gave, a week ago, on religious freedom, the problems with the HHS mandate, and also the problems with some illegal-immigration-related legislation.  A bit:

The Church has a responsibility to defend the prerogatives of reason, and of opening up the perceptibility of the true and the good, and the beautiful. In some ways this theme dominates the writings of Pope Benedict 16. The Regensburg address was all about defending reason as capable of attaining to the truth. Western culture, though, has adopted a naked skepticism about the power of reason to read reality adequately well so as to inform political decisions based on a standard of justice. 

The reason the popular good has replaced the common good as the focus of political discourse is that to discuss the common good you have to think reason can adjudicate reality fairly in most big issues. Justice relies on a judgment of reason. With the decline of confidence in reason, has come a collapse of political discourse about the good and the just into the single criterion of the popular will. Hence most all the effort and energy of the public discourse aims at shaping at least the perception of what the popular will might be.

The “public sphere” as Charles Taylor describes it, is the media and social matrix where the public appears to talk to itself.[4] It is currently dominated by efforts to define the good in terms of popular consensus, real or imagined. This, however, takes place in a public social context that ignores religion as a merely private concern, a context that is skeptical of reason, and is driven by the aims of molding popular perceptions of the good. This is what I mean by the shift in public secularity. . . .