Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
March 9, 2012
It’s a new day for the Catholic Church — and for truly religious believers in general — in the United States. While the Church in the U.S. experienced discrimination in the past — most notably during the Know Nothing era of the mid-19th century — for the most part, this discrimination, despite its occasional mockery of Catholic beliefs, was fundamentally ethnic and anti-immigrant in its motivation. Once this rabid xenophobia passed and Catholics had the chance to demonstrate that they were good Americans — hardworking, family-oriented, community-building, patriotic, and self-sacrificial citizens — even those who may have had theological issues with Catholic teaching couldn’t help but recognize how much Catholics and Catholic institutions contributed to the common good.
From hospitals, to schools, to orphanages, to soup kitchens, to local St. Vincent de Paul chapters, to scores of other parochial, diocesan and national social work, Catholic individual and institutional charity justly won the respect and admiration of almost all Americans; proof-texting Protestants, hard-core hedonists, supercilious secularists and assiduous atheists alike all seemed to agree that the Church’s charity was a cause for the common good that should be praised, protected, participated in and promoted. Those who opposed the Church’s teachings generally agreed to disagree with the Church in those areas, while enthusiastically supporting all the Church does and continues to do for the poor through her institutional charity. The good the Church did far outweighed in their opinion the problems they had with Church doctrine.
But that was then. We have entered an era when hostility toward the Church’s teachings on the part of militant secularists and ethically-emancipated voluptuaries has become so aggressive that they are hell-bent on shutting down the Church’s charity unless the Church sacrifices fidelity to its moral teaching and capitulates to incensing before the altars of Ba’al (sex) and Moloch (abortion). Until recently, these attacks have come primarily through the courts, where activist groups would seek to find activist judges to try to ignore the Constitution, centuries of laws and standard legal interpretations to invent rights, for example, to abortion or same-sex marriage and to eliminate rights to religious expression in public ceremonies or public property. It happened through the courts because the unpopular things they wanted to achieve basically didn’t stand a chance of winning referenda or elections. What has changed recently, however, is that those who would sacrifice the Church’s charity in order to advance a radically-secularist agenda are now seeking to do so through intentionally-ambiguous legislation and the decisions of increasingly-powerful unelected officials in agencies of the executive branch.
This change led the U.S. bishops in September to establish an ad-hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, to help the bishops not only to stay alert to the multivalent coordinated attack on religious freedom that threatens the Church’s charitable work but also to help them inform all Catholics and conscientious citizens of these unconstitutional incursions. The Archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, pointed out then that there were “increasing threats to religious liberty in our society,” which is now “in unprecedented ways under assault in America.” He noted the attempts of the Obama Administration through the Department of Health and Human Services to eliminate the Church’s charitable work from the government’s understanding of religious institutions and to force these charitable institutions to pay for abortion-causing pills, sterilizations and contraception. Churches could either cave in against their moral teaching and believers’ consciences, or pay a crippling annual fine, or close their doors, as Church adoption agencies have had to do in Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere.
But that wasn’t an isolated infraction. HHS, Cardinal Dolan stated, also stripped the bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services agency of its contract to continue its award-winning work with sex-trafficking victims because it refused to offer the “full range of reproductive services”— something the Obama Administration, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, has also been threatening to do to Catholic Relief Services unless it likewise facilitates abortions, sterilizations and access to contraception. The administration has shown that it is willing to sacrifice all the good the Church has done in these areas unless the Church cooperates in what in considers evil, even though there are plenty of other groups that can deliver these “services.” Furthermore, Cardinal Dolan described how the Obama Administration’s Justice Department wants to compel religious groups to adhere to anti-discrimination employment laws, even when these violate the groups’ religious teachings — something that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually unanimously overturned in January — and regards the Church’s defense of marriage as the union of one man and one woman as an instance of unconstitutional bigotry; this latter position portends that, if the administration gets its legal way, the Church would be breaking the law if it continued to preach and practice that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.
The Fathers of the Church, when commenting on Christ’s command to love our enemies, noted that while Christians are never supposed to make enemies, they will nevertheless have them involuntarily, when others make themselves the adversaries of the Church. That is what is going on now. As Cardinal Dolan noted in a March 2 letter, “We did not ask for this fight.” The fight has come from those who have decided to treat the Church and her charitable institutions as enemies and to use the coercive power of the executive branch to compel the Church to acting against its religious teaching and individual consciences.
Church leaders have been understandably reluctant and slow to acknowledge the presence and intentions of those who have made themselves the Church’s enemies. Spiritually trained to see the good in others, pastorally experienced to working together for the common good with those who don’t agree with the Church on everything, and politically committed to engagement and conciliation rather than withdrawal and condemnation, many Church leaders were caught off guard by the sustained virulence of the recent attacks on religious freedom. Many believed President Obama when at Notre Dame he said that he wanted to “honor the conscience of those who disagree” with him and to “make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound conscience but also in clear ethics.” They took him at his word when he assured Pro-Life legislators that the health care reforms would not push abortion and would have adequate conscience protections. Cardinal Dolan himself believed him when in November at the Oval Office the president assured him that he would do nothing to impede the good work of the Church. But the bishops have had to conclude, reluctantly, that the president is not an honest man. Even more troubling, after the president’s phony “accommodation” that didn’t even get published in the Federal Registry, after the administration didn’t even consult the Catholic bishops before announcing it, and after the administration informed the bishops after announcing it that questions of religious freedom would not even be considered in the specifications of the accommodation, the bishops have now reluctantly had to adopt a position of justified skepticism toward the president’s stated desire to harmonize free contraception with “important concerns raised by religious groups.”
The first thing that we’ve all been learning is that, unbidden, the Church is now in a fight not of its making against members of an administration intent on using the power of government, in open defiance of the First Amendment, to compel the Church to act contrary to her teaching with regard to abortion, sterilization and contraception. This fight, as one commentator recently said, is not about contraception any more than the Revolutionary War was about tea.
Next week, we’ll examine several other lessons we’ve been learning.