Pope Francis on religious freedom in Philadelphia

Here's Pope Francis's religious-freedom text.  Lots of really good stuff, but this jumped out at me (and, I hope, to many!):

I would like to reflect with you on the right to religious freedom. It is a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbors whose religious views differ from our own.

Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families. . . .

Some will (indeed, already have) tried to (somehow) mute the force of the Pope's message on this point by noting the absence of words like "HHS mandate" or "First Amendment Defense Act," or by suggesting that the content of the views expressed by the Pope varies in some way from the public-square arguments that have been made in recent years by the American bishops. This is wrong, I think.  When the Holy Father says this:

 When individuals and communities are guaranteed the effective exercise of their rights, they are not only free to realize their potential, they also contribute to the welfare and enrichment of society.

. . . he's saying that faith-based institutions should be -- to borrow the title of a forthcoming book by Stanley Carlson-Thies and Stephen Monsma, and also the theme of the bishops' recent "Fortnight for Freedom" -- "free to serve."  An egregious example of this spinning -- and misreading -- is this New York Times editorial-masking-as-news piece, in which the author tried to suggest that the Pope's mentions of religiously-motivated violence and oppression abroad could be heard as speaking to "defiance in this country on religious grounds of same-sex marriage rulings" or that there was some distance between the Pope's observations about the role of religious freedom "in caring for others" and the efforts by (those the author mistakenly calls) "conservatives" to defend the integrity and mission of religious civil-society institutions.