Fortnight for Freedom, Day 8

Let's recap. Today is the midway point in the Fortnight for Freedom, a 14-day campaign led by Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, who is acting on behalf of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). F4F is billed as a protest against government-mandated contraception coverage in health insurance plans offered by Catholic-run institutions and Catholic-owned businesses to their employees.

The Catholic Church teaches that the use of artificial means of birth control (pills, condoms, IUDs, sterilization, etc.) is immoral. Archbishop Lori thinks that the government is trespassing on constitutional guarantees of religious freedom when it insists employees of Catholic-run or -owned entities get the same contraception coverage in their health plans that (most) other U.S. workers get.

I strongly disagree with you, Archbishop Lori — which is why I'm saying so repeatedly in this 14-day series of posts.

HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius

Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services — who happens to be a fellow Catholic — set off a firestorm when she announced, on Jan. 20, a mandate requiring that all health plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known more briefly as "Obamacare," provide coverage at no cost for all contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration, as part of a standard package of preventive health services for women.

As the mandate was originally set up, so-called "religious organizations," such as our Catholic churches themselves, were exempted, but a broad range of Catholic-run institutions such as charities, social-services providers, hospitals, and universities were not.

The bishops rightly howled.

President announcing
contraception mandate tweak, with
HHS Secretary by his side.

On Feb. 10, the President himself stepped to the White House podium, with Secretary Sebelius by his side, to announce a change to the terms of the mandate. "Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive service no matter where they work," Obama said. "That core principle remains."

"But," the President continued, "if a woman's employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company — not the hospital, not the charity — will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge without co-pays, without hassle."

According the the revised mandate, it would be insurance companies, not conscience-bound Catholic institutions, who would have to pay for the contraception coverage.

That didn't satisfy the bishops, though. Despite an initial, if somewhat tepid, signal to the contrary, the USCCB soon went into a full-court press against the revised mandate. On May 21, according to Fox News, "Some of the most influential Catholic institutions in the country filed suit against the Obama administration ... over the so-called contraception mandate, in one of the biggest coordinated legal challenges to the rule to date."

Washington Post opinion
writer E.J. Dionne Jr.

I agreed with many liberal Catholic pundits, among them op-ed writer E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, that the original mandate did in fact encroach on religious liberty. But — as does Dionne — I think the tweak made on Feb. 10 makes the mandate acceptable. I think the bishops are wrong to take legal action against it. And I think they are wrong to have organized the Fortnight for Freedom.

But I also think that certain liberal Catholics who have called for those of us who disagree with the bishops to come right out and exit the Church entirely, once and for all, are dead wrong.

E.J. Dionne agreed with me about this on May 13, when his column titled "I’m not quitting the church" appeared. He chastised an ad placed in The Post by the Freedom From Religion Foundation ...

(Click the ad to see a larger version.)

... that said, "It's time to quit the Roman Catholic Church. Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on? In light of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ war against women's right to contraception," all those who "choose women and their rights" ought to quit the Church.

I'm right with E.J. Dionne, contrariwise, in saying that the FFRF ...

"... may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can’t ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and lay people who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized. ...

Do the bishops notice how often those of us who regularly defend the church turn to the work of nuns on behalf of charity and justice to prove Catholicism’s detractors wrong? Why in the world would the Vatican, apparently pushed by right-wing American bishops, think it was a good idea to condemn the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main organization of nuns in the United States? ...

Oh yes, and the nuns are also scolded for talking a great deal about social justice and not enough about abortion (as if the church doesn’t talk enough about abortion already). But has it occurred to the bishops that less stridency might change more hearts and minds on this very difficult question? ...

Too many bishops seem in the grip of dark suspicions that our culture is moving at breakneck speed toward a demonic end. Pope John XXIII, by contrast, was more optimistic about the signs of the times.

“Distrustful souls see only darkness burdening the face of the earth,” he once said. “We prefer instead to reaffirm all our confidence in our Savior who has not abandoned the world which he redeemed.” The church best answers its critics when it remembers that its mission is to preach hope, not fear.

That's precisely why I have to say, in the most unambiguous terms possible, "Sorry, FFRF. Like E.J. Dionne and a lot of other liberal Catholics, I'm not quitting the Church. No way."