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	USCCB's Top Lawyer Brings Love for Religious Liberty to New Post By Nancy Frazier O'Brien Catholic News Service November 7, 2007 http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0706344.htm 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, succeeding Mark Chopko, who had been USCCB general counsel since 1988. 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." Many of the issues Picarello will confront as USCCB general counsel are the same ones he saw as vice president and general counsel for the Becket Fund. But others are new, such as the laws that some states have enacted or are considering that extend their statutes of limitations for legal cases involving the sexual abuse of minors. "The church nationwide should be concerned" about those efforts, which "are fundamentally unjust and threaten to bankrupt the church," Picarello said. In California alone, financial settlements to victims of clergy sex abuse have exceeded $1.8 billion since 2005, after the state lifted for one year the statute of limitations on civil suits for sexual abuse cases against private entities. That figure is more than the $1.7 billion in estimated church costs related to clergy sex abuse between 1950 and the early 2000s. Picarello said he is concerned about the possibility that other states could pass "a series of unjust laws that could do very great damage to the church." It is especially unfair that these huge financial settlements are receiving media attention at a time when the church is "hitting its stride" in implementing protections against child sex abuse through its "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People," he said. "The church has a lot to be proud of in that respect," Picarello said. But the media coverage "leaves people with the impression that the church is not adequately addressing these issues. ... It's as if the scandal is intensifying, and it's not at all." No matter what issue his office might be dealing with, Picarello said his role as general counsel is to help preserve "the freedom of the bishops to carry out the mission of the church." "I always say, 'The bishop's got to bish,'" he said. "That's their job. The last thing I want to do is to be making any part of a bishop's decision. ... We're here to support them." Picarello came to his post by what he called "a long and convoluted path" that began in Brooklyn, N.Y. A lifelong Catholic, he attended a public elementary school and a private middle and high school and said he has "never been to a Catholic school in my life." But he found "outstanding resources for connecting with the faith" through campus ministry in college. He earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in social anthropology and comparative religions at Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Student Association, and a master's in religious studies from the University of Chicago before graduating from the University of Virginia Law School in 1995. Picarello said his wife, Martha, is "thankfully not an attorney." She works for the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia, which provides adult literacy education, especially for immigrants. After law school Picarello spent the next five years clerking for a judge and working for a Washington law firm. He felt a call to do "something else" but said, "I didn't know what the something else was." "I was moving by faith rather than sight," he added. The path led to the Becket Fund and eventually to the USCCB.
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