“I had missed an opportunity … to clearly assert the following: Nonbelievers have just as great a stake as believers in defending religious liberty. If a society takes it upon itself to prescribe and proscribe certain streams of belief—to prohibit certain less-favored strains of conscience—it may be the nonbeliever who is among the first to be condemned.”
Mitt Romney
Former Massachusetts governor, speaking at a dinner where he was honored by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (RNS)
“It’s hard to explain the psychological effect this has on a prisoner, what it meant to know we hadn't been forgotten at a time when we thought we didn’t exist. The voice of the Holy Father was like a light.”
Ingrid Betancourt
A former hostage of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, thanking Pope Benedict XVI for his support, which she heard on a radio while being held captive (Associated Press/RNS)
“They have expanded and gilded the cage in which people of religious faith operate in the People’s Republic of China, but it’s still a cage.”
Richard Land
President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who serves on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, about the relative increase in religious expression in China (Baptist Press/RNS)
“We came to pray peacefully. Why did they have to beat us?”
Nguyen Thi Phuc
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A Vietnamese Catholic who had blood on her face as Hanoi police beat parishioners demanding the return of land taken by Vietnam’s communist government in the 1960s (Associated Press/RNS)
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