USCCB's top lawyer brings love for religious liberty to new post

Published: 2007-11-07

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Anthony R. Picarello Jr. is passionate about religious freedom. Whether it involves a pastor facing interference from local zoning officials over where he can build a church or a religious organization seeking to preserve its identity by hiring employees of the same faith, the issue of religious liberty has long fascinated the new general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Zoning ordinances and hiring practices might not seem likely battlefields over First Amendment rights, but Picarello said that when government officials try to tell religious leaders what can or cannot be a worship site and who they can hire it "attacks the church where it lives. It attacks core religious beliefs to say you can't assemble for worship," he said in a Nov. 5 interview with Catholic News Service in his office on the fifth floor of the USCCB headquarters. "And in order to stay religious for more than one generation, religious organizations have to be able to hire people based on religion." Picarello, who turns 38 Nov. 29, came to the USCCB in mid-September. For the past seven years, Picarello worked at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a secular organization that describes itself as "a public-interest law firm protecting the free expression of all religious traditions."

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