Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
February 17, 2012
After three weeks of unrelenting outrage from all corners about the Department of Health and Human Services’ trampling of religious freedom in its January 20 mandate for free contraception, sterilizations and abortifacient drugs, President Obama last Friday announced what he insisted was an “accommodation.” If religious service organizations — like Catholic hospitals, schools and social service programs — objected to providing coverage for these items in their employees’ health plans, the president said they would no longer be required to pay for them; rather their health insurance companies would be forced to offer them for “free.”
The shift of the onus of the mandate from religious service employers to insurance companies was readily seen by objective observers as a political obfuscation and accounting trick. As the editors of the Wall Street Journal remarked, “Insurance companies won’t be making donations. Drug makers will still charge for the pill. Doctors will still bill for reproductive treatment. The reality, as with all mandated benefits, is that these costs will be borne eventually via higher premiums.” Just as there’s no such thing as a totally free lunch, so there’s no free tubal ligation, abortion-causing pill or contraception. The religious organizations will still be funding these objectionable offerings, one way or the other.
The Journal also noted two other obvious problems. First, many religious organizations self-insure in order to save costs and to ensure that programs offered do not violate religious teachings; the “accommodation” doesn’t change one iota their being forced to pay for and cooperate in what they believe is immoral. Secondly, there is the larger Constitutional and common-sense point: “There is simply no precedent for the government ordering private companies to offer a product for free, even if they recoup the costs indirectly.” The same pro-abortion and pro-contraceptive ideology that doesn’t hesitate to trample on religious freedom by executive decree likewise thinks nothing of forcing private companies — in America — to “offer” something for “free.”
Beyond the financial smokescreen, none of the three fundamental issues for which the U.S. bishops have been criticizing the mandate was addressed by the president’s pretended accommodation.
The first principle is respect for religious liberty. The administration is trying not only to intrude into the affairs of religious institutions but to coerce them — and all religiously or morally motivated private employers — to engage in or cooperate in what they believe is immoral. As Bishop Coleman noted in his January 31 letter to the faithful of the Diocese of Fall River, “The administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics and other faith-filled people our nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so).”
This lack of respect for religious liberty is not isolated. As Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote on Sunday, infringements against religious liberty are “developing into a pattern. Whether it was the administration’s early shift toward the anemic language of ‘freedom of worship’ instead of the more historically grounded and robust concept of ‘freedom of religion’ in key diplomatic discussions; or its troubling effort to regulate religious ministers recently rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna Tabor case; or the revocation of the U.S. bishops’ conference human trafficking grant for refusing to refer rape victims to abortion clinics, it seems obvious that this administration is — to put it generously — tone deaf to people of faith. … In reality, no similarly aggressive attack on religious freedom in our country has occurred in recent memory.” Archbishop Chaput went on to say that, despite all the administration’s protestations of a culture war being waged in the past by those on the political right, “the current administration has created an HHS mandate that is the embodiment of culture war,” an ideological war of the administration’s own timing and choosing that is being waged against those of religious conviction for our moral teachings. This belligerent stance of the administration has the bishops justly concerned.
The bishops’ second major concern is about who defines religious identity and ministry. The only organizations that the administration recognizes as “religious employers” are those non-profits that have the primary purpose of inculcating religious values, and employ and serve persons who share their religious tenets. The vast majority of religious social service agencies, which care for but also often employ people of various faiths or no faith, do not come under this definition. They’re not “religious enough,” in HHS’ estimation. This is totally different from what the IRS considers a religious non-profit and diametrically opposed to the interpretation of the Constitution expressed unanimously by the Supreme Court on January 11 in the Hosanna Tabor decision. There is serious concern that this same narrow understanding of religious charity would become a precedent for other regulations. But there is the larger issue of the understanding of works in the practice of faith.
When President Obama addressed the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, he said that we cannot limit our religious values “to personal moments of prayer or private conversations with pastors or friends,” but we need to act on the command to “love thy neighbor as yourself.” He added that “caring for the poor and those in need” are “values that have always made this country great — when we live up to them; when we don’t just give lip service to them.” He praised Catholic Charities and various other faith-inspired organizations for whom “the biblical injunctions are not just words, they are also deeds,” saying, “Every single day, in different ways, so many of you are living out your faith in service to others.” He clearly recognized the intrinsic connection between religious faith and charitable works; yet in the HHS mandate he pretends that those who carry out charitable works based on religious faith aren’t religious employers at all. The president, logically, can’t have it both ways. Either he was giving lip service to living faith at the National Prayer Breakfast or the HHS restrictions are a contradiction of his own ideas.
The connection between faith and works is something on which progressive Catholics have been insisting. Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter who until January 20 was an enthusiastic cheerleader of the president, penned, “The most offensive part of this whole mess is the suggestion that our faith-based charities, schools and hospitals are not sufficiently religious to qualify for a religious exemption. It is this that offends us social justice Catholics who see our work on behalf of the poor as integral to our faith, different but just as important as our Sunday worship. It is now clear that President Obama, as opposed to candidate Obama, no longer sees this, or is, at any rate, unwilling to draw the logical conclusions from it.”
The third point that the bishops have been stressing is that they are fighting not just for a broader exemption to the mandate for Catholic institutions but for the mandate as a whole to be rescinded. No individual or institution, religious or otherwise, should be forced to pay for others’ abortion-causing pills, sterilization, or contraception, which are not “preventive services” like mammograms, because children are not cancers. The HHS mandate is bad law on many grounds and is divisive, unconstitutional, and simply disdainful to those with religious convictions. There was no reason to make it, except for a radical ideological push, flowing from the sexual revolution, to have everyone underwrite the desire of some for sex without consequences, including financial. That’s why the U.S. bishops wrote to American Catholics that “the only complete solution … is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.”
In his January 31 letter, Bishop Coleman asked all Catholics of the diocese to pray, fast and work for this rescission, because “we cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law.” Catholics are asked to call the White House (202-456-1111) to persuade the president to make the only truly acceptable “accommodation” and rescind the mandate. They’re also urged to call on their congressmen and senators to pass the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (HR 1179, S 1467), which will prohibit the health care reforms being used as a weapon to take away our First Amendment rights and force religious believers from having to fund for practices they consider immoral.