Whatever the history of Church-State separation in this country, the freedom of the Church here is more at risk now than it was just a few short years ago. In the past year, the attorney general of the State of Massachusetts suggested his office should pass judgement on which seminarians should be ordained priests, and dioceses in Arizona and New Hampshire signed agreements giving civil officials control of areas of Church life that had previously been none of their business. These developments are, in part, the result of bishops’ failure to supervise priests who had abused minors sexually. They are part of an understandable reaction to a failure of Church government. But if they are also part of a permanent institutionalized interference of the State in the freedom of the Church to govern herself, then we are in a new pattern of Church-State “separation.”