President Obama claims to be willing to accommodate worries of the Catholic bishops and many Protestant ministers about the Obamacare contraception mandate. But the president’s message apparently hasn’t been communicated to the chief executive’s staff.
Check out these astounding paragraphs from a recent letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from their president, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan:
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“At a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff, our staff members asked directly whether the broader concerns of religious freedom—that is, revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table. They were informed that they are. So much for ‘working out the wrinkles.’
“Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the ‘enlightened’ voices of accommodation, such as the recent, hardly surprising yet terribly unfortunate editorial in America. The White House seems to think we bishops simply do not know or understand Catholic teaching and so, taking a cue from its own definition of religious freedom, now has nominated its own handpicked official Catholic teachers.”
Not only is the White House refusing to even talk about the core issue of religious freedom, the president’s advisors are presuming to know Catholic doctrine better than the Catholic bishops themselves! This is the precisely the sort of authoritarian presumption that makes it impossible in the long run for republican liberty to co-exist in a regime dominated by a leftist political vision that government always knows best.
Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign that many Americans “cling” to their religion and their guns. It seems the president doesn’t realize that guns were required to gain religious freedom in this country in a revolution against another authoritarian political leader who claimed the power to define the rights of Americans.
For that reason, this observation from Dolan bears close reading by all concerned in this debate:
“Given this climate, we have to prepare for tough times. Some, like America magazine, want us to cave-in and stop fighting, saying this is simply a policy issue; some want us to close everything down rather than comply (In an excellent article, Cardinal Francis George wrote that the administration apparently wants us to “give up for Lent” our schools, hospitals, and charitable ministries); some, like Bishop Robert Lynch wisely noted, wonder whether we might have to engage in civil disobedience and risk steep fines; some worry that we’ll have to face a decision between two ethically repugnant choices: subsidizing immoral services or no longer offering insurance coverage, a road none of us wants to travel (emphasis added).”
You can – and should – read the full Dolan letter and watch a video statement from him here.
