Bishop Jenky Teaches: "This Assault on our Religious Freedom is Simply Without Precedent"

As the election looms, Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Illinois instructed his priests to read a pastoral letter at Sunday's Masses. Excerpts from the letter, via LifeSiteNews:

"He singled out the Obama Administration’s controversial HHS birth control mandate, which would force Catholic employers to fund coverage of contraception, sterilization and abortion-causing pills for women workers, free of charge. 'This assault upon our religious freedom is simply without precedent,' he wrote. 'I do not think there has ever been a time more threatening to our religious liberty.'

He compared Catholic politicians and voters who support legalized abortion to the mob that cheered as Jesus Christ was tortured and killed. 

'Nearly two thousand years ago,' he wrote, 'after our Savior had been bound, beaten, scourged, mocked, and crowned with thorns, a pagan Roman Procurator displayed Jesus to a hostile crowd by sarcastically declaring: ‘Behold your King.’ The mob roared back: 'We have no king but Caesar.'” 

“'Today,' he wrote, 'Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters who callously enable the destruction of innocent human life in the womb also thereby reject Jesus as their Lord.'”