Day 274: Social Duty of Religion (2025)
The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Ascension
4.9 • 11.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
The social duty of religion and the right to religious freedom are presented to us in the Catechism. We examine what it means to have respect for other religions and the freedom, within limits, to exercise our convictions. Fr. Mike makes it clear that it is our calling as Christians to evangelize and bring our Catholic Christianity to the public square. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 2104-2109.
This episode has been found to be in conformity with the Catechism by the Institute on the Catechism, under the Subcommittee on the Catechism, USCCB.
For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/ciy
Please note: The Catechism of the Catholic Church contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, |
| 0:09.0 | where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith. |
| 0:15.1 | The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 274. We're reading paragraphs 2104 to 2109. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach. But you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting |
| 0:39.9 | ascensionpress.com slash CIY, and you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app if your |
| 0:44.8 | podcast app allows you to do that. And if they don't, wow. Just wow. If you do, you get |
| 0:52.9 | daily notifications. And if you don't, you get to hunt for this |
| 0:55.8 | podcast every single day, which you've done maybe for the last 274 days because you found us. |
| 1:00.9 | So what we are talking about today is the social duty of religion and the right to religious |
| 1:05.5 | freedom. There's only a few paragraphs we're looking at. Basically, I think there's five, |
| 1:09.5 | six paragraphs. But in these |
| 1:11.3 | paragraphs is so much. It is packed with content because one of the things we recognize is that |
| 1:17.0 | there is, again, the first part, a social duty of religion. The second part, there is every individual |
| 1:23.3 | exercises, experiences is granted by their creator the right to religious freedom. So as you look at |
| 1:29.8 | this, even more closely today, there are some complex ideas at the same time. Once we start |
| 1:37.3 | talking about the social reality of religion, the way it's lived out in our public life, in the public |
| 1:43.6 | square, one of the things that can happen is we might have opinions on that already. |
| 1:48.2 | We might have opinions on how religion is lived out in the public square, how it's carried out in the public square. |
| 1:53.4 | And this might be something that confirms your opinion or confirms your assumption. |
| 1:57.3 | It might be something that challenges your opinion or challenges your assumption. |
| 2:00.3 | So keep this |
| 2:01.2 | in mind, the church has to be in the public square. And this is how the church sees itself as being |
| 2:07.2 | in the public square. So as we're talking about today, in order to have as open hearts as possible, |
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