The administration’s breach of faith.
Jonathan V. Last
February 13, 2012, Vol. 17, No.21
On the last weekend of January, priests in Catholic churches
across America read extraordinary letters to their congregations. The missives
informed the laity that President Obama and his administration had launched an
assault on the church. In Virginia, Catholics heard from Bishop Paul Loverde,
who wrote, “I am absolutely convinced that an unprecedented and very dangerous
line has been crossed.” In Phoenix, Bishop Thomas Olmsted wrote, “We
cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law.” In Pittsburgh, Bishop
David Zubik wrote that President Obama had told Catholics, “To Hell with your
religious beliefs.” Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria asked his flock to join him
in the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, which concludes: By the Divine
Power of God / cast into Hell, Satan and all the evil spirits / who prowl about
the world seeking the ruin of souls.
It was a remarkable moment, in part because despite their
stern reputation, most Catholic bishops are not terribly conservative. They
tend to be politically liberal and socially cautious. If they were less holy
men, stauncher conservatives would call them squishes. Real live conservative
bishops are so few and far between that whenever one appears on the scene, such
as Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput, he’s seen as a vaguely threatening
curiosity. You can tell when a bishop is conservative because you will hear him
referred to as “hardline” or “ultra-orthodox,” so as to mark him apart from the
rest of the herd.
But what made the moment even more remarkable is that the
bishops were not exaggerating. It is now a requirement of Obamacare that every
Catholic institution larger than a single church—and even including some
single churches—must pay for contraceptives, sterilization, and morning-after
abortifacients for its employees. Each of these is directly contrary to the
Catholic faith. But the Obama administration does not care. They have said, in
effect, Do what we tell you—or else.
The beginnings of this confrontation lay in an obscure
provision of Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which stated
that all insurers will be required to provide “preventive health services.”
When the law was passed, “preventive” was not defined but left to be determined
at a later date.
This past August, Health and Human Services secretary
Kathleen Sebelius finally got around to explaining the administration’s
interpretation of the phrase. Based on a recommendation from the Institute of
Medicine, the administration would define “preventive health services” to
include contraceptives, morning-after pills, and female sterilization. And they
would interpret the “all insurers” section to include religious organizations,
whatever their beliefs.
Sebelius included one
small conscience exemption: A religious employer who objects to medical
treatment aimed at prevention of the disease commonly known as “pregnancy” may
leave it out of their health insurance coverage provided the employer satisfies
three criteria: (1) It has religious inculcation as its primary duty; (2) It
primarily employs people of the same faith; and (3) It primarily serves people
of the same faith. This fig leaf is enough to cover most small churches—so
long as your parish employs only a couple of priests and a secretary, it would
probably get a pass. Larger institutions would not.
In the Catholic world, for instance, a diocesan office often
employs lots of people—lawyers, janitors, administrative staff—who are not
necessarily Catholic. And the duties of such offices extend far beyond
inculcation of the faith—to include charity, community service, and
education. Or take Catholic universities. There are more than 200 of them,
serving some 750,000 students. They clearly do not fit the exemption. Neither
would any of the 6,980 Catholic elementary or secondary schools. Nor the
country’s 600 Catholic hospitals; nor its 1,400 Catholic long-term care
centers. Ditto the network of Catholic social services organizations that spend
billions of dollars a year to serve the needy and disadvantaged.
As soon as Sebelius released this decision, the Catholic
church panicked. The Conference of Catholic Bishops reached out to the
administration to explain the position in which it had put them. But the tone
of their concern was largely friendly: Most Catholic leaders were convinced
that the entire thing was a misunderstanding and that the policy—which was
labeled an “interim” measure—would eventually be amended.
The reason for this optimism was that more than a few
important Catholics had previously climbed out on a high branch for Obama
politically, and for his health care reform as a matter of policy. Despite what
you may read in the New York Times, most lay Catholics are nominally at home in
the Democratic party. (Remember that a majority of Catholics voted for Obama in
2008.) And what is true of the laity goes double for those in religious life.
In 2009, Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins welcomed President Obama as
the school’s commencement speaker in the face of a heated student protest. The
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops mostly kept its powder dry during the fight
over Obamacare, and very few members of the church hierarchy actively, or even
tacitly, opposed the bill. Others, such as Sister Carol Keehan, the president
of the Catholic Health Association, actually lobbied in favor of it, early and
often. So most Catholics took the president at his word when he met with
Archbishop Timothy Dolan last fall and assured him that when the final version of
the policy was eventually released, any fears would be allayed.
That was their mistake. Obama telephoned Dolan on the
morning of January 20 to inform him that the only concession he intended to
offer in the final policy was to extend the deadline for conformity to August
2013. Every other aspect of the policy enunciated by Sebelius would remain rigidly
in place.
It’s unclear whether Obama anticipated the blowback which
resulted from this announcement, or perhaps even welcomed the fight. The
liberal Catholic establishment nearly exploded. Sister Keehan was so horrified
she threw her lot in with the more conservative Dolan in full-throated
opposition to Obama. Cardinal Roger Mahony, the spectacularly liberal
archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, wrote, “I cannot imagine a more direct and
frontal attack on freedom of conscience. . . . This decision must be fought
against with all the energies the Catholic community can muster.” Michael Sean
Winters, the National Catholic Reporter’s leftist lion, penned a 1,800-word cri
de coeur titled “J’accuse!” in which he declared that, as God was his witness,
he would never again vote for Obama. The editors of the Jesuit magazine America
denounced a “wrong decision,” while the Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne
called the policy “unconscionable.” When you’ve lost even E.J. and the Jesuits,
you’ve lost the church.
The reason liberal Catholics were so wounded is twofold.
First, this isn’t a religio-cultural fight over Latin in the Mass or Gregorian
chant. The subjects of contraception, abortion, and sterilization are not
ornamental aspects of the Catholic faith; they flow from the Church’s central
teachings about the dignity of the human person. Second, Obama has left
Catholic organizations a very narrow set of options. (1) They may truckle to
the government’s mandate, in violation of their beliefs. (2) They may cease
providing health insurance to their employees altogether, though this would
incur significant financial penalties under Obamacare. (The church seems
unlikely to obtain any of Nancy Pelosi’s golden waivers.) Or (3) they may
simply shut down. There is precedent for this final option. In 2006, Boston’s
Catholic Charities closed its adoption service—one of the most successful in
the nation—after Massachusetts law required that the organization must place
children in same-sex households.
Which means that what is actually on the block are precisely
the kind of social-justice services—education, health care, and aid to the
needy—that liberal Catholics believe to be the most vital works of the
church. For conservative Catholics, Obama merely confirmed their darkest suspicions;
for liberals, it was a betrayal in full.
As a matter of law, this decision by Obama’s health care
bureaucrats seems unlikely to survive. Last month, the Supreme Court struck
down another attempt by the administration to bully religious believers in the
Hosanna-Tabor case. In that instance, Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission argued that a religious organization does not have the right to
control its hiring and firing according to its religious belief. The Court
struck down this argument 9-0 in a rebuke so embarrassing that Justice Elena
Kagan came close to openly mocking her successor as Obama’s solicitor general
during oral arguments. It was the kind of sweeping decision that should have
deterred the Obama administration from forcing Catholics into complying with
the health insurance mandate, because it suggested that the Court will very
likely side against the administration once this matter comes before it.
Presidents typically dislike being overturned unanimously by the High Court.
The trick, of course, is that when Sebelius issued the final
protocol, her lone concession was the one-year delay in implementation. Which,
for Obama, has the happy side-effect of pushing the moment of enforcement to
August 2013. Meaning that no legal challenge can come until after the 2012
election. Which suggests that the thinking behind the policy may be primarily
political. The question, then, is whether Obama’s confrontation with Catholics
makes electoral sense.
While Catholics were blindsided by the January decision, the
left had been paying close attention to the subject for months. In November,
several leftist and feminist blogs began beating the war drums, warning Obama
not to “cave” (their word) to the bishops. They were joined by the Nation,
Salon, the Huffington Post, and the usual suspects. (Sample headline: “The Men
Behind the War on Women.”) At the same time, Planned Parenthood and NARAL
launched grassroots lobbying efforts and delivered petitions with 100,000 and
135,000 signatures respectively to the White House urging Obama to uphold the
policy and not compromise.
In that sense, Obama’s decision might be thought of as akin
to his decision halting the Keystone oil pipeline: a conscious attempt to
energize his base at the expense of swing voters, who he concluded were already
lost.
The other possibility, of course, is that Obama sees the
dismantling of Catholic institutions as part of a larger ideological mission,
worth losing votes over. As Yuval Levin noted in National Review Online last
week, institutions such as the Catholic church represent a mediating layer
between the individual and the state. This layer, known as civil society, is
one of the principal differences between Western liberal order and the
socialist view.
Levin argues that the current fight is just one more example
of President Obama’s attempt to bulldoze civil society. He wants to sweep away
the middle layer so that individuals may have a more direct and personal
encounter with the state. The attack on Catholics is, Levin concludes, “an
attack on mediating institutions of all sorts, moved by the genuine belief that
they are obstacles to a good society.”
Seen in this light, Obama’s confrontation with the Catholic
church is of a piece with the administration’s pursuit of the rickety
Hosanna-Tabor case and another incident from last October, when the Department
of Health and Human Services defunded a grant to the Conference of Catholic
Bishops. That program supported aid to victims of human trafficking. The Obama
administration decided that they no longer wanted the Catholic church in the
business of helping these poor souls. That, evidently, is the government’s job.
Of course, there is a third possibility in explaining the
president’s motives. It could be that, in deciding to go to war with the
Catholic church, President Obama has hit on one of those rare moments where his
electoral interests—at least as he perceives them—and his ideological goals are
blessedly aligned.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
See the original article posted here
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obamacare-vs-catholics_620946.html
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