His comment about the progression of secularization — leading from him dying in his bed to the next archbishop but one being martyred — became so widely quoted that he addressed it in his column in the Catholic New World, quoted above. It is one of many times he has spoken or written about increasing secularization and the threat it holds for all people, not just Catholics. That 2012 column went on to quote Cardinal George Mundelein and his 1939 criticism of Hitler, after Hitler had silenced Germany’s bishops, and to acknowledge that Cardinal Mundelein, patriot though he was, knew that the church in the United States could also be pushed to the margins, and that such a development would be a disaster. “The unofficial anthem of secularism today is John Lennon’s ‘Imagine,’ in which we are encouraged to imagine a world without religion. We don’t have to imagine such a world; the 20th century has given us horrific examples of such worlds,” he wrote in the same column. “The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It’s on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters,” the column says. “The Synod on the New Evangelization is taking place in Rome this month because entire societies, especially in the West, have placed themselves on the wrong side of history.” George Weigel, a Catholic theologian and well-known writer and speaker, said that his conviction has made Cardinal George one of the foremost prelates both in the United States and in the universal church. “He’s led the church of Chicago into the new evangelization; he’s led the bishops of the United States to a deeper appreciation of the unique challenges of being Catholic in America in this cultural moment,” Weigel said. “Cardinal George prepared the church in the United States for the challenges to religious freedom that have become unmistakably clear during the Obama administration. His calm insistence that there were and are deep cultural problems in American democracy was a needed wake-up call for many.” Not just for Catholics That wake-up call has not been for Catholics only; the cardinal was applauded in 2010 for a talk he gave on religious freedom at Brigham Young University, in which he spoke specifically on areas of common cause between Catholics and Mormons. In that address, he struck another familiar note: that freedom of religion includes the right of the faithful to exercise their influence in the public square, not simply to worship privately, behind closed doors, so as not to offend non-believers. “The lesson of American history is that churches and other religious bodies prosper in a nation and a social order that respects religious freedom and recognizes that civil government should never stand between the consciences and the religious practices of its citizens and Almighty God,” he said. The same year, he took up the issue in a December column in the Catholic New World, writing: “In our own country, the challenge to the church’s freedom is basically cultural; anti-Catholic bigotry is an acceptable prejudice and the church is often regarded with contempt, which sometimes reduces her freedom of action. “For many years, the church could rely upon the law in this country to protect her against enemies; now, however, the law itself is often adversarial, used to destroy rather than protect. The Catholic Church in this country is perhaps less free to govern herself now than at any time since the founding of the American Republic. The advantage of this situation is that it makes it impossible to imagine the United States as the kingdom of God, which has been a recurring temptation in our national history.” Government mandate Those issues became more pointed with the imposition of the Health and Human Services mandate, which requires nearly all employers to include coverage of birth control, sterilizations and other procedures that violate church teaching in health insurance offered to their employees. The original mandate included a very narrow exception for religious employers; subsequent adjustments widened that and attempted to come to a compromise, but did not satisfy the original objections of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It’s a question of religious freedom when the government tells us who we are, what is Catholic and what is not,” Cardinal George said in a November 2012 YouTube video the Archdiocese of Chicago posted. “It has done that in the case of this mandate.” In the video, the cardinal explained that the church is called to corporal works of mercy, and has institutionalized those works by creating schools, hospitals, cemeteries and social service agencies to meet the needs of not only Catholics, but also their neighbors. Those institutions would not have been counted as “Catholic” under the original mandate, because they are not churches. “The church is her ministries as well as her worship, and the government has told us ‘No, you’re not. You’re just your worship,’” Cardinal George said. “So this is new in our constitutional history and the history of the universal Catholic Church.” The eventual result, he said, would be state control of all such institutions, which would be a tragedy for everyone. “Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests, entirely outside of the current political debate, I was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring. I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said, but the words were captured on somebody’s smart phone and have now gone viral on Wikipedia and elsewhere in the electronic communications world. “I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: ‘His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.’ “What I said is not ‘prophetic’ but a way to force people to think outside of the usual categories that limit and sometimes poison both private and public discourse.” — Cardinal George’s column, Catholic New World, Oct. 21, 2012