Loading Poll...At War With The Bishops
Dr. Michael P. Riccards is Executive Director of the Hall Institute of Public Policy – New Jersey. Riccards is a former college president and a presidential scholar who has authored 15 books.
President Obama’s Administration with its new controversial health directive has promulgated that their policies will end up requiring Catholic institutions to pay for birth control, sterilization, and the morning after pill. All of these practices are in direct violation of the current Roman Catholic teachings. A hundred bishops have signed a petition to oppose the regulation. The head of the Catholic League, Wild Bill Donahue, is talking about taking the protest into the streets with clergy and Catholic school children marching in the ranks.
The Administration headed by Catholic Kathleen Sebelius has given the Church a year to conform to this policy or suffer penalties. Now it is true that over 90% of American Catholics have used contraception of some type. Even the current conservative pope has said that contraception by using condoms is permissible to stop the risk of serious infection. One can say that the Catholic bishops have become a partisan lobbying group on so many political issues; they are the Republican Party at prayer. And many of the faithful feel that so much of their psycho-sexual theology is outdated and based on peculiar classical notions of human nature.
Obviously the issue though is not whether the laity supports birth control or not, otherwise the Catholic schools would be filled with kids. A good many theologians have departed from the teaching of Rome on the issue. The bishops stand angry and alone in their own church.
Still the hierarchy represents in some matters some 40 million Catholics, and that number can be troubling to political leaders. Forty million Catholics are a big voting group, and if a percentage of them change their usual Democrat vote to the GOP, Obama will lose majorities in a variety of swing states. Ethnic allegiance is important in this nation, and Catholics have had a long tradition being persecuted in nineteenth century America.
Catholic hospitals, orphanages, universities would be required to provide coverage that its leaders believe violates their faith. The Administration has been willing to grant waivers to unions and to other religious groups in the implementation of new health regulations. Indeed the Catholic Church isn’t a newcomer to hospitals or universities; it has had those institutions for over 150 years in the USA. In fact, it created those very institutions in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. If having access to prescription contraception is so important, then female employees, students and patients should know to avoid Catholic institutions. My current medical coverage does not provide the same benefits as my sister has. To argue that the federal government must create a single national policy, then why has the Administration been so willing to grant waivers to other groups? This policy will only add to the opposition to the Health Care Act and make it even more politically vulnerable.
These Catholic institutions are precious assets, especially in American urban areas, and to force them to close or pay a penalty is frightening and certainly not in the public and non-Catholics’ interests. The Church’s immediate strategy should be to go to the courts and argue that such an administrative (not Congressional) rule is a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of religion. To say that one can exercise his or her religious views, but be willing to incur a penalty from the government is not the way America has done business. We have made all sorts of accommodations to Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Orthodox Jews and others. The federal government has not aggressively enforced the anti-polygamy laws in Mormon areas. Most recently, the high court has proven itself very sensitive to any abridgment of church rights in a case limiting a teacher’s contract for employment in a non- Catholic school.
Such a court appeal in the one year window would give all a face-saving way out. Or Congress should pass a general sense of the Congress resolution that the rule is not consonant with the spirit of the health law they just passed.
Pluralistic societies make compromises and defer hostilities in the process. The last thing a new law needs is a phalanx of opposition by so many providers. We must respect our differences in this vast society. The bishops are overly concerned with sexuality, often to the neglect of other central moral issues, it is true. But the Administration’s responsibility is not to reform the Catholic Church’s teachings. It has granted waivers to the others, so it is not unreasonable to do that for the institutional Church.
And politically if many of the Democrat Catholics who voted for Reagan become agitated by the intense controversy, then the whole structure of liberal reform of the last two years is imperiled. The Sebelius rule is not just a mistake, it is a foolish miscalculation.