Abp. Dolan: "...the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”

Do you think it is a coincidence that this is happening immediately prior to the anniversary of Roe v. Wade? As reported by TheHill.com:

Most healthcare plans will be required to cover birth control without charging co-pays or deductibles starting Aug. 1, the Obama administration announced Friday.

The final regulation retains the approach federal health officials proposed last summer, despite the deluge of complaints from religious groups and congressional Republicans that has poured in since then. Churches, synagogues and other houses of worship are exempt from the requirement, but religious-affiliated hospitals and universities only get a one-year delay and must comply by Aug. 1, 2013.

“This decision was made after very careful consideration, including the important concerns some have raised about religious liberty,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services."

The "balance" being along the lines of "Heads we win, tails you lose"?

The provision has attracted more than 200,000 comments, HHS said — most of them in favor of access to birth control, which the vast majority of healthcare plans already cover. Some religious institutions, however, said they would sooner close their doors than cover birth control, which they liken to abortion in some cases.

"What war and disease could not do to the congregation, the government of the United States will do," Nashville's Dominican congregation said. "It will shut them down."

The dealers of death, of course, trumpet the decision as yet another step toward the Promised Land of Choice Without Consequences:

Abortion-rights groups immediately applauded the decision.

"Birth control is not just basic health care for women, it is an economic concern," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. "This common sense decision means that millions of women, who would otherwise pay $15 to $50 a month, will have access to affordable birth control, helping them save hundreds of dollars each year."

And Nancy Keegan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, praised the administration for standing "firm against intensive lobbying efforts from anti-birth-control organizations trying to expand the refusal option even further to allow organizations and corporations to deny their employees contraceptive coverage.

Cardinal-to-be Timothy Dolan of New York was blunt in his response, as reported by CatholicVote.org:

This morning President Obama called New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan to break the news.

Secretary of Health and Human Services and pro-abortion Catholic Kathleen Sebelius just announced that the proposed mandate requiring all insurance plans to pay for contraception, sterilization and some abortion drugs is official -- and Catholics cannot escape.

...and the fig-leaf exemption for religious groups will not be modified, apart from allowing some groups an additional year to comply.

Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan responded minutes ago, saying: “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”

Exactly right. But recall that it was only a three months ago that Abp. Dolan had said, after meeting with Pres. Obama, that he felt “a bit more at peace [about religious liberty] than when I entered” and that he believed the president to be “very open to the sensitivities” of Catholics about religious liberty. But before anyone criticizes the Archbishop for being played by the POTUS, ask yourself, "Who hasn't he played?" The list is short. The CatholicVote.org piece continues:

Beginning August 1, 2012 (less than eight months from today), the insurance premiums we pay, including the insurance premiums paid by Catholics for employees of churches and schools -- will be used to cover drugs and procedures that are in direct conflict with the teachings of our Church.

That's right. Our government will now force us to pay for insurance coverage for birth control, sterilization and even some abortion drugs.

President Obama ignored the organized efforts of Catholics across the country, including bold statements from the Bishops, university presidents (including Notre Dame's Rev. Jenkins), and even his Catholic allies like Sr. Carol Keehan.

Instead, President Obama stood with his real friends -- Planned Parenthood.

As you might recall, it was primarily orthodox Catholics and conservative Evangelicals who kept saying during the last presidential campaign that then-Sen. Obama's record revealed a man with an unswerving, ideological obsession with making access to contraceptives and abortion available to just about anyone, anytime, anywhere—and on the taxpayers' dime. Yet it is those very folks who are continually painted as the extremists and the rigid zealots, blinded by their religious faith. But, really, who are the extremists and zealots here? How much physical, familial, cultural, social, and spiritual damage must take place before the scales fall from the eyes of those who want a drug for every problem, an excuse for every sin, and the government's heavy hand at every turn in the road of life? As Phil Lawler noted in a recent essay about "same-sex marriage":

Since our society embraced the routine use of contraception, the damage to the family—and thus to all of American society—has been far more devastating than anything Al Qaida could have imagined. And while we have arguably made great progress in the war against terrorism, the casualties of the sexual revolution continue to pile up, and the assault on the family is intensifying.

For proof of that, we need look no further than the next question in that New Hampshire debate. Following up on the line of questioning by Stephanopoulos, Diane Sawyer asked for the candidates’ thoughts on same-sex marriage. But rather than pose the question directly, Sawyer eased into the issue with a smarmy introduction. Rather than continue talking about constitutional issues, she said, she wanted the candidates to talk about a “real” issue—the sort of issue that people talk about at home. (She thereby seemed to dismiss the Constitution as a “real” issue, or one that ordinary Americans could be expected to discuss. The authors—and original readers—of the The Federalist Paper were spinning in their graves.) That issue, Sawyer said, is how same-sex couples could form stable, lasting relationships without the benefit of legal marriage.

As William McGurn noticed in his Wall Street Journal essay, Sawyer’s line of questioning had the same purpose as Stephanopoulos’s: to help pigeonhole Republican candidates as extremists. After all, who would dare to say anything negative about those nice homosexual couples, who want nothing more than to live a quiet suburban life? Thus the question was framed in the terms most favorable to the gay-rights movement, and defenders of marriage were on the defensive.

Sebelius, who has now replaced Nancy Pelosi as the face of those are Catholic Without Catholicism or a Conscience, said in her statement, "We will continue to work closely with religious groups during this transitional period to discuss their concerns." Right. And contraceptives are like little bits of candy that magically make women healthy, wealthy, and wise. Abp. Dolan is entirely correct, and his point echoes the remarks made by Benedict XVI a few days ago in his ad limina visit with bishops from the Washington, D.C., area:

In the light of these considerations, it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.

Here once more we see the need for an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American society.

The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. The Pope gets it. Abp. Dolan gets it now. Many other bishops do as well. But, sadly, many Catholics simply don't, or simply don't care. 2012 is going to be a most interesting and challenging year.

Comments

[Dave]

With respect, if you wish to not have your conscience violated do not use birth control. This is different from abortion in that birth control is an act to prevent birth, while abortion ends life after conception. So if you wish to follow Church teaching simply decline the free birth control. What am I missing??

[Carl E. Olson]

What am I missing??

Simply put, the stage is being set for the federal government to require religious institutions (churches, schools, hospitals, etc.) to provide sterilization and contraceptives in their health care coverage/insurance. Or, in the words of Abp. Dolan: "Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights..." See more on the USCCB site.

[Charles E Flynn]

Obama Administration’s War on Religious Liberty: we have one year to comply!, by Father Z.

[Maureen E. McCabe]

This move reminds me of a government of dictators not a democracy. China's government limits the number of children, why are we imitating this move??????
Our founding fathers had more moral principles than today's leader, why we would even get involved in this idea in a country of the people and for the people.
This is morally wrong as well as against all of the Principles of out "Preamble" to the Constitution.
Religious interference is against the First Admenment!

[Alan]

Problem is this battle is already lost. Over 90% of Catholics use birth control during their reproductive years. The Obama Administration knows the bishops have almost no support even within their own community. The contraceptive mentality has taken over all but a small minority of Americans.

[Wendi]

Dave, the information you appear to be missing is that the birth control pill is in a small but measurable number of cases an abortifacient. That information is part of package insert along with the other possible side effects.

This law requires Catholic organizations to provide medication known to cause abortions, as well as surgical sterilization both of which are directly contrary to the teachings of the church.

Catholic organizations, run by Catholics, cannot "just decline the free birth control". They are now required by law to provide and pay for it. If Catholic organizations decide to stop hiring people who want these services, they will then face the risk of being sued for discriminatory hiring practices. If these organizations stop offering health insurance they face punitive fines which will then be used to provide these services anyway. There is no exemption and no work-around.

The only moral option this law allows religious employers is to close their doors.

That is the problem.

[Joe]

Pre-marital sex is the norm. Contraception is the ultra-norm. People don't like abortion, but don't want 21 yr olds having babies. And they want their nice gay priests left alone.

Harsh, yes, but true? Yes.

Bishops have been busy doing what? How often do you hear counter-cultural teaching on sex that is clearly and patiently explained, with objections answered, that says you do the hard thing because truth matters .... Crickets .... Sorry, but you can't do a poor job teaching for decades while the culture is sprinting the opposite direction, and then cry the sky is falling. Anyone with an ounce of sense who looked at Obama, his words, his life trajectory, his friends ... this has all been lit in neon for years.

[Howard]

There are two possible ways to defend the Church's position.

One is on the basis of Freedom of Religion. The strength of this approach is that it does not depend on convincing anyone that the Church is right about issues like contraception and abortion.

That is also its weakness. If freedom of religion allows a Catholic to be an OB/GYN without having any contact with "medical procedures" like contraception, sterilization, and abortion, the same argument would allow a Jehovah's witness to practice surgery without the possibility of blood transfusions -- as would have been routine a little more than a century ago. If people find this conclusion outrageous (on the grounds that it will expose the patient to needless risk), they will reject the whole premise on which it is based. There is a very real chance that this is exactly what will happen.

Another problem, of course, is that a doctor who has a "religious conviction" that women have the right to abortions at any time for any reason (and there are "churches" that support this claim) does not/should not have the right to practice in a Catholic hospital. This is because the Church has never believed that an individual conscience, no matter how well or poorly formed, is the final arbiter of right and wrong.

The other defense is to drop the pretense that all religions are equally true and insist that there is more truth in the Catholic Church than among the Jehovah's Witness, for example. It would not be necessary to prove that the Catholic Church is the one true religion, but it would be necessary to show that it is right about contraception, sterilization, and abortion. This is hard work, because it is not what people want to believe.

We can still say that some things should be up to the conscience of the individual health-care provider and others should not, but when dealing with any specific problem I think we can only use one argument or the other. In the cases we're talking about now, I think we have to insist that we are RIGHT, not that these are quaint but protected idiosyncrasies.

[David K. Monroe]

It does not matter what the majority of Catholics tolerate within their community or within their private lives. The Catholic Church cannot capitulate to this demand without overturning its own teaching on sexual morality and the nature and value of life. This will not happen.

As Pius VII reportedly said to one General Radet when ordered to annul the excommunication of Napoleon, "We cannot. We ought not. We will not."

[Charles]

Alan,
The 98% statistic is bunk. All newspaper reports claim NSFG as their source. However, NSFG notes the claimed usage of contraception (minus NFP which NSFG incorrectly puts under the contraceptive heading) and sterilization (which it doesn't put under the contraceptive heading) among women 15-44 is 61.6%. And the only figure they show for Catholics (which they define as 'raised as') is not the percentage who use, but used on their first intercourse and a breakdown of the kinds of contraceptives those that do violate Church teaching use.
According to the newspaper reports, it seems the figures were re-engineered by the pro-abortion Guttmacher to match the line the dissident group Catholics for Choice have been pushing to lie about their support. Is it possible that Catholic men and women are using contraceptives in violation of Church teaching? Very likely. Even of those that attend Mass weekly? More than enough (1) to want to re-evangelize. But 98%? Absurd claims from an unbelievable organization and unfounded in the official statistics.

[irishsmile]

This goes far beyond birth control. This is about sterilization and abortion in the fine print. My grandson is an RN at a Catholic hospital. How long will he be able to keep his job when it becomes mandatory for the staff to cooperate in these procedures? The right to die, abort, euthanize, and sterilize, will fast become the obligation in a totalitarian, socialist America.

[Robert Miller]

A fundamental problem we need to address is the notion, widely accepted among US Catholics of all stripes, that the "Founders" or the "framers" were men of goodwill who were engaged in a good faith effort to erect some kind of Christian commonwealth in North America.
Hogwash, I say. The men in question were activated mainly by fear that Great Britain's geopolitical aspirations were likely to result in the toleration of nearby Catholic Frenchmen, Catholic Spaniards and Indians. The British Quebec Act was the real casus belli of the Revolution, not the laughable antics of the Boston Tea Party rebellion against transitory British tax enactments.
The Founders' Revolution was the precursor of The Revolution -- and, in this sense, it truly did provide the "shot heard round the World".
Until we Catholics realize that the trajectory of the US republic has been anti-Catholic from the beginning, we never will be able to mount an adequate response to that republic's unconscionable provocations.
Obama, Sebelius, Pelosi & co. are as American as apple pie.

[David K. Monroe]

So, Robert, placing the blame on a bunch of dead guys will do...what exactly? I really don't see how trying to change the subject to "The U.S. is Anti-Catholic and has always been particularly Anti-Catholic" is helpful.

[Robert Miller]

David:

It's because getting over the naivete about the "founding myth" is essential to getting real about what we are faced with in the here and now.
Archbishop Gomez of LA has begun to stake out a "program" that has real promise. We stop looking for unique wisdom in the Protestant/philosophe founders, and we appropriate the wisdom of the missionaries, Catholic Kings and conquistadors who founded a new Christendom in the Americas a century before the little rag-tag band of Christendom-denying Puritans landed at Plymouth.

[LJ]

David,

Further to what Robert Miller said, whether or not you wish to concede the extent of the anti-Catholicism he describes, it does seem that a pattern has been established to deal with it.

Catholics have tried for as long as they have been in America (from the beginning) to placate and play nice to their suspicious or hateful neighbors, suffering persecution along the way. One such attempt has been from the Knights of Columbus in fact. This is not a criticism as much as an observation and my point of departure from their particular trajectory. I was asked to consider being a 4th degree and turned it down precisely for the reason that it seemed to focus on patriotism in a manner which to my mind carried that old hat-in-hand aura of I-can-be-a-good-American-patriot-too. Perhaps my sense of it was wrong, and I know there are many who might be offended by such an idea, but I think that even Father McGivney was seeking to advance some respectibility into the community of Catholic men of his time, because of that overriding hatred or at minimum distrust of Catholics.

The modern day pattern was established, or at least set in motion, by JFK. The most recent version of it we saw in Ted Kennedy and his fellow Catholic political travelers, Pelosi, Sebelius, Kerry, et. al. The idea is not only to promise not to take orders from the Vatican (which in a very real sense an orthodox committed Catholic does) but to display a disdain for the very faith you were raised in, and do everything possible to make practicing that faith difficult or impossible, and at the same time reduce wherever possible the influence of the Church in any social context.

That is what it takes for a Catholic to be accepted by the mainstream. In essence it is to not be a Catholic, at least in any meaningful way.

So Robert Miller's point is well taken. Perhaps we need to cease trying to play nice wherever and whenever it means we are expected to compromise. We need to get into the real world if we haven't already, and pray that the USCCB as a body will also get into the real world. It seems that Archbishop Dolan has learned the hard way how much the current administration can be trusted to keep their word to serious Catholics.

Practically speaking it mey well be too late to fight this current battle. The real issue is whether or not the leadership of the Church in America is willing to fight the next one, or will they once more be lulled by the lies of politicians and pretend Catholics.

[b.b.]

Archbishop Dolan was also lulled into trusting NY pols who said gay marriage would not pass. Now he is faced with a year in which being lulled is out of the question. How will he do now that being lulled is off the table.

[David K. Monroe]

I dunno guys, I have heard this sort of "unconquerable grievance" narrative expressed by every kind of political and social group and it always boils down to, "We'll never get anything done until we accept that America is racist/sexist/imperialist/anti-Semitic/anti-Christian/anti-Catholic etc. etc. etc." I see it as the first step to getting fitted for a tinfoil hat. If you want to do an academic study on Catholicism in America, then it might be relevant, but I think that in confronting clearly abominable mandates such as this one, it is better to appeal to the actual founding and governing principles of our nation which I do not believe were created to be anti-Catholic, regardless of the fact that many have exercised them in an unbalanced way, or that sectarian prejudices have thrived in our nation even though such attitudes would seem to contradict the principles the nation was founded on.