The Courant And Catholics

The magisterium of the Hartford Courant -- its editorial board -- has issued a pronouncement on the matter of an interpretation of a federal bill by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius that would require Catholic institutions to assist in dispensing birth control pills and abortifacients.

The ex-cathedra pronouncement from Courant editors opens with the following lede:

“Roman Catholic protests against certain requirements of the health care reform law, though heartfelt, are misplaced. No one’s first amendments rights are being compromised, and – despite loud cries to the contrary – religious liberty is not in jeopardy…”

There are at the moment numerous suits filed by Catholic prelates and institutions challenging the constitutionality of Ms. Sebelius’interpretation of the Obamacare bill. The Supreme Court is due to rule on the bill before its session closes at the end of June. The Obamacare bill very well may be unconstitutional, in which case the entire bill will be overthrown– because the Solons who wrote the law did not include in it a severability clause that would have permitted its authors to retain portions of the bill not deemed unconstitutional by the high court.

While the Courant’s obiter dictum that “no one’s First Amendment rights are being compromised” certainly is heartfelt, it is premature. A late Associated Press report advises that the Obama administration is taking precautions should the Supreme Court strike down Obamacare as unconstitutional.

One of the objections made by Catholic bishops to Ms. Sebelius’interpretation of the Obamacare bill is that the state should not be permitted to determine the mission of any Christian Church. And by “church” the bishops mean “both clerics and laity united in the faith.”

In connection with the Catholic Church, G. K. Chesterton speaks of the “democracy of the dead,” and it is a common belief among Catholics that their “church” includes all who, from the beginning of the world, have believed in the one true God, and have been made His children by grace, a very large assembly indeed

Since pre-Civil War days, churches and the American state have developed a tender political ecology that leaves both state and church unentangled in a church-state alliance, so that churches could enjoy the wide door of liberty vouchsafed to them by that clause in the First amendment that prevents the state from restricting the free exercise of religion, as determined by religious institutions. As soon as one allows the state to fix in law the mission of a church, this organic political accommodation is overthrown, and the authoritarian state then is permitted to determine the boundaries of religious expression, a commonplace occurrence in all fascist authoritarian regimes such as the former Soviet Union or present day China.

Brave Courant editorialists do not fear to enter—with hobnailed boots -- where the better angels of our natures, not to mention those of the founders of the nation and the U.S. Constitution, fear to tread.

“When operating colleges and hospitals,” the Courant magisterium writes, “Catholics step out of a purely religious setting into one that must comply with the laws of the country, which may not necessarily be the laws of the church. The Church of Rome, for example, admits only men to the priesthood; but when Catholic colleges or hospitals hire administrators, they must adhere to federal laws forbidding employment discrimination on the basis of sex.”

No one has yet suggested to Courant editorialists that since for purposes of law Catholic administrators consider priests to be independent contractors, the Roman Catholic Church SHOULD be forced by the civil authority to hire women as priests. Nothing in its editorial interpretation would forestall such a use of force.

What the paper is saying is this: In any Catholic institution – a university or a hospital, to mention but two instances – in which Catholics mix with non-Catholics, the Catholic layperson loses his or her Catholic character and therefore is no longer entitled to the constitutional protections afforded Catholics who find themselves in an unadulterated religious setting such as a mass.

This view not only radically redefines the mission of a church; it redefines the meaning of the very concept of a church – which, in the Catholic understanding, is the unity of clergy and laity in the faith. Under the Catholic definition of a “church,” a Catholic non-cleric is not less Catholic than a priest. And religious obligations weigh upon him or her no less heavily than they weigh upon church administrators.

It is absolute nonsense – a radical categorical mistake, a form of linguistic anarchy – to say that a Catholic cannot be Catholic in a partly secular setting. It would be like saying a Courant editorialist ceases to be an editorial writer when he is not writing editorials or that the sun ceases to be a sun at night or that blue is really red when it is found beside red in a child’s paint box.

Catholicism, which is an articulation of the historic church, inheres in people, not buildings. A Catholic does not become less Catholic when he leaves a church service and goes forth into the world to live his faith by establishing Catholic universities and hospitals and services for the poor. And the radical secular, anti-Catholic, re-interpretation of a church-- the operative principle of Obamacare -- applies not just to Catholics, but to all religious laypersons, whatever their creed. Obamacare severly punishes Christians and obliges them to abjure the precepts of their faith when they work in a Christian institutions that has in it one non-professing Christian.

The Courant concludes its editorial by deploring the “various groups” -- mostly Christians adhering to Matthew 5:16 – for having created a muddle: “The arguments over the adherence to the health care reform law is muddled by various groups’ claims that abortion is somehow involved. It isn’t. Birth control, and only birth control, is the issue.”

However, all of the arguments put forward by Courant editorialists to thwart Catholic opposition to birth control in Catholic institutions apply with event more force to abortion, which directly involves health issues. Why would a law forcing Catholic hospitals to provide patients with abortifacients not also force the same Catholic institutions to provide abortions?

Courant editorialists are not jesuitical enough to carve out an exception prohibiting abortions in Catholic hospitals that would not also prohibit such institutions from providing abortifacients or other forms of contraception. This is the next step for radical social anarchists who seek to so narrowly circumscribe religious faith that it will have no effect on the brave new world of their dreams. Once the nose of Ms. Sebelius’ the camel is in the tent, it will push out all religious based social restraints.

The authoritarian state, on its way to fascism, cannot abide such mediating religious institutions as Christian hospitals, schools and soup kitchens. All good works must either originate or be heavily regulated by the fascist or corporatist state as defined by Benito Mussolini: “Everything in the state; nothing outside the state; nothing above the state.”

The new Brave New World of Orwell awaits its administrators, its Newspeak and its radical redefinition of liberty – liberty for me, not for thee.

The President And The Archbishop

Thanks to James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, we now have an account of the conversations between Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and President Barack Obama on the matter of the controversial contraception coverage mandate.

“I was deeply honored that he would call me and discuss these things with me,” the newly elevated Cardinal told Mr. Taranto.

“Mr. Obama knew that the mandate would pose difficulties for the Catholic Church, so he invited Archbishop Dolan to the Oval Office last November, shortly before the bishops' General Assembly in Baltimore. At the end of their 45-minute discussion, the archbishop summed up what he understood as the president's message:

"’I said, ‘I've heard you say, first of all, that you have immense regard for the work of the Catholic Church in the United States in health care, education and charity. . . . I have heard you say that you are not going to let the administration do anything to impede that work and . . . that you take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness. . . . Does that accurately sum up our conversation?' [Mr. Obama] said, 'You bet it does.'"

This was good news. The archbishop asked if he might relay the good tidings to the bishops in Baltimore.

An ebullient Mr. Obama responded, “"You don't have my permission, you've got my request."

The Archbishop relayed the president’s message, time passed, and at the end of January the Archbishop discovered to his dismay that the president had set his foot on a more politically firm path:

"So you can imagine the chagrin when he called me at the end of January to say that the mandates remain in place and that there would be no substantive change, and that the only thing that he could offer me was that we would have until August. . . . I said, 'Mr. President, I appreciate the call. Are you saying now that we have until August to introduce to you continual concerns that might trigger a substantive mitigation in these mandates?' He said, 'No, the mandates remain. We're more or less giving you this time to find out how you're going to be able to comply.' I said, 'Well, sir, we don't need the [extra time]. I can tell you now we're unable to comply.'”

Here was the imperial Obama presidency in all its pomp and glory. When Napoleon’s ambitions met some resistance from the Pope of his day, the emperor threw down this defy: “How many battalions has the Pope?”

The Archbishop of New York had no battalions.

Following the announcement of the mandate – an interpretation of a provision in the Obamacare bill made by Health and HumanServices Secretary Kathleen Sebelius -- there was a public outcry, and the president felt called upon to make a phone call to Archbishop Dolan.

"He said, 'You will be happy to hear religious institutions do not have to pay for this, that the burden will be on insurers.'"

Was the president seeking his input, Archbishop Dolan asked?

Not at all; input of any kind was quite unnecessary. The Archbishop was told the modified policy was a fait accompli. About three hours after the Cardinal had received the perfunctory call, the president publically announced his “purported accommodation,” which was, according to some First Amendment preservationists,singularly unaccommodating and likely the default position of the administration all along.

The accommodation was designed to satisfy only those who believe – an indispensable part of the credo of secularists and what Jacques Maritain used to call “practical atheists,” some of whom are politicians regarded as respected members of various religious groups – that the mission of Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and Muslim masjids end at the borders of houses of worship.

This credo, according to the Archbishop’s Wall Street interview, cedes to the state the authority to define the mission of religious institutions:

"We've grown hoarse saying this is not about contraception, this is about religious freedom," he says. What rankles him the most is the government's narrow definition of a religious institution. Your local Catholic parish, for instance, is exempt from the birth-control mandate. Not exempt are institutions such as hospitals, grade schools, universities and soup kitchens that employ or serve significant numbers of people from other faiths and whose main purpose is something other than proselytization.

"We find it completely unswallowable, both as Catholics and mostly as Americans, that a bureau of the American government would take it upon itself to define 'ministry,'" Archbishop Dolan says. "We would find that to be—we've used the words 'radical,' 'unprecedented' and 'dramatically intrusive.'"

Surrendering to the state such authority, quite common in totalitarian regimes, also violates what most American historians might regard as the American consensus on the proper relationship of church and state.

The excessively polite Archbishop scrupulously avoided in his interview with the Wall Street Journal using the term “un-American.”

Murphy’s Line In The Sand

Appearing on “Face the State” with Dennis House, U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, who has announced his candidacy for Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat, passionately defended an administrative edict that would require members of some religious faiths to commit what boilerplate secularists and practical atheists winkingly call “sin.”

“We need to draw a line in the sand,” Mr. Murphy told Mr. House. “Enough is enough, a women, where ever she works, has a right to a full range of reproductive health care; that should be the law of the land.”

It may have escaped Mr. Murphy’s notice that the edict promulgated by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius forcing religious affiliated institutions, hospitals and schools among them, to dispense contraceptives, some of which are abortifacients, and to offer sterilization under the so called "Affordable Care Act” is not a LAW in the strict sense. Congress has not written a bill that when signed by the president becomes a law compelling orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims to choose between their religious obligations and their duties as citizens. As a plus for legislators, Government by edict spares vote conscious politicians the embarrassing necessity of putting their fingerprints on bills that may induce a “no” vote during election season.

President Obama’s administrative edict does not go quite so far as Mr. Murphy’s “line in the sand” non-negotiable demand.

Nuns, for instance, are women who associate with churches, and yet the administrative edict does not require their employers to supply them with birth control pills, contraceptives and morning after abortifacients. Under Mr. Murphy’s line in the sand rule, even nuns would have a right to the full range of options supplied by Planned Parenthood, and employers who balked at providing them with such “health services” would be subject to crippling fines. Mr. Obama’s administrative edict imposes obligations, the news media continually tells us, not on “churches” as such but on religious people working in businesses associated with religious institutions. The opposition to the administrative edict from Catholic hospitals, for instance, has been very insistent, and those who argue that constitutionally protected religious rights inhere in people rather than administrative instruments such as churches do after all have a point.

Mr. Murphy perhaps will agree that drawn lines, must pass constitutional muster. And then too there is that little impediment in the First Amendment preventing congress from passing laws that infringe upon “the exercise of religion.” Mr. Murphy is familiar with this clause because he has passionately invoked it in the past on other occasions.

When Lowes home goods stores pulled their ads from a TV program called “All American Muslim,” Mr. Murphy took to the well of the House to condemn Lowes’ anti-religious bias:

“Murphy: This is a major American company rubberstamping basic foundational bigotry against a major American religious group. This nation was founded on the premise of religious freedom, and this body should never remain silent when a group of people is marginalized just because they worship a different God. And though we certainly have got more important things to worry about -- like the economy – it’s traditionally during bad economic times that this kind of social marginalization has been at its worst, because people don’t speak up against it.”



Mr. Murphy also opened a rhetorical front on (Keith) Olbermann’s program,

“Olberman: How important is this issue to freedom of expression in this country?

“Murphy: Well listen, there’s nothing more basic to the founding of America than that you can come here and practice whatever religion you choose. And the fact is that this latest action [the withdrawal of a Lowes ad from the television program “All American Muslim”] is part of a really troubling pattern of running mosques out of town, of stopping people from teaching the history of Islamic nations in schools. You know, we used to celebrate the fact that you could practice any religion that you wanted in this country. It is a complete re-write of the strongest part of American history to allow this kind of garbage to continue. Look, Lowes is a good American company. Umm… this is way out of step with their commitment to the community we live in, and that’s why I still have maybe this unrepentant optimism that they’re gonna change their mind.”



Mr. Murphy’s is a fulsome defense of the historic posture of federal and state governments towards religion in the United States that even a Catholic Bishop might endorse. It is true the Catholic Church has more theological skin in this political game than other faiths, but it would be a fatal mistake should other religious faiths assume that an edict dismantling Catholic theology would leave them untouched. Jews, Protestants and Muslims, a sometimes scorned profession hotly defended by Mr. Murphy numerous times on constitutional grounds, also provide educational and social services.

Yet one would wrongly suppose that a fervid First Amendment supporting Non-Denominational Christian such as Mr. Murphy would readily understand that an administrative rule, possibly unconstitutional and certainly hostile to the American consensus on religion, that attacks one faith is an assault on all faiths. Ardently supporting the Obama administration’s rule, Mr. Murphy patronizingly claims, “I certainly have a lot of sympathy for the church's argument, but if you're talking about Catholic hospitals and universities, these are institutions that are integrated into the community and [have] public funding streams ... [they] have already crossed the firm boundary between church and state.''