Fortnight for Freedom, Day 13

The opening Mass for the U. S. bishops Fortnight
for Freedom at the Basilica of the
National Shrine of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.

OK, I'm definitely finding out how hard it is to write something of interest every day for 14 days, which is the span of Fortnight for Freedom, a campaign to preserve "religious freedom" for Catholics in America. Our bishops say that's a thing which is entirely right and good. I say the whole campaign's a ploy to keep Catholic-run institutions' women employees from getting Obamacare-mandated insurance coverage for contraceptives — and that's bad.

Desperate for a topic for today, Day 13 of the campaign, I turned to The National Catholic Reporter, a Catholic news outlet that sits, as conservative pundit George Weigel puts it, "on the port side of the Barque of Peter." I'm on the port side, too, in case you can't tell.

I immediately found, at NCR, "Fortnight for Freedom based on outdated theology," a commentary by Father Edward J. Ruetz. The Second Vatican Council's 1965 Constitution on Religious Freedom, says Ruetz, established a conception of religious freedom that put paid to an earlier "double standard," under which there had been one approach to religious freedom taken by the Church when Catholics were in the minority and a different, more autocratic one in situations where Catholics outnumbered non-Catholics. Post-Vatican II, a "new straightforwardness" made Catholic concepts of religious freedom uniform, whatever the relative numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics in a country or an organization.

"Yet this year," Fr. Ruetz says, "when the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops decided to reject the Health and Human Services mandate-compromise to have insurance companies pay for free contraceptives and sterilizations for all women under the health insurance policies of Catholic hospitals, universities and social agencies, they bypassed the 'new straightforwardness' of the 1965 Constitution to return to the old 'double standard' of the 500 years of the Inquisition and the 300 years of the Holy Office theology (1123-1965)."

We Catholics are a minority here in America. We don't set the rules. The contraception mandate has been painted with a broad, all-inclusive brush. Yet the bishops reject that, Fr. Ruetz says, and are insisting that all employees, non-Catholic and Catholic alike, who work for Catholic-run institutions must cede their rights to make yes-or-no contraception choices according to their own "private consciences." Instead, all must bow before the supposed "objective truth" of Catholic teaching about the immorality of contraception.

Fr. Ruetz says that this represents a return to the old double standard, given that Catholic employees are in the majority at the institutions in question. The "private conscience" rights of the minority non-Catholics at these workplaces would be trampled upon, if the bishops got their way — violating the letter and spirit of Vatican II's Constitution on Religious Freedom. (And, I would add, the "private conscience" rights of employees who are in fact Catholics would likewise be trampled on, since up to 98 percent of Catholic women use or have used birth control.)

Here is yet another reason why we Catholics who are truly concerned about religious freedom, and also about the rights of "private conscience," ought to object mightily to Fortnight for Freedom.