E. J. Dionne: Not all bishops agree with the USCCB’s religious-freedom strategy
Just posted to the homepage:
There is a healthy struggle brewing among the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops. A previously silent group, upset over conservative colleagues defining the church’s public posture and eagerly picking fights with President Barack Obama, has had enough.
The headlines this week were about lawsuits brought by forty-three Catholic organizations, including thirteen dioceses, to overturn regulations issued by the administration requiring insurance plans to cover contraception under the new health-care law. But the other side of this news was also significant: That the vast majority of the nation’s 195 dioceses did not go to court.
It turns out that many bishops, notably the church leadership in California, saw the litigation as premature. They are upset that the lawsuits were brought without a broader discussion among the entire membership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and wanted to delay action until the bishops’ June meeting.
[...]
But in a letter to the bishops conference that has not been released publicly, lawyers for California’s bishops said the lawsuits would be “imprudent” and “ill-advised.” The letter was not answered by the national bishops’ group before the suits were announced.
Read the rest right here.
Yay, yay, yay, Bishop Blaire!!! At last. A bishop with the guts to speak out.
Well, good for Bishop Blaire. He’s broken the ice.
With a feint condemnation of the early filing, he heaped praise on the initiative .. better than the other 300 silent ones though.. unity is their highest virtue when on trial and mine is courage.
I applaud Bishop Blair’s courage and honesty. His approach brings to mind the style of leadership that characterized the “Bernardin era” of the USCCB. Cardinal Bernardin was the ultimate conciliator who always sought conciliation and concensus, both within the Bishops’ Conference, but also in its relationship with the government. And he was successful. The Conference of Bishops, precisely because of the style of their engagement with the government, was taken seriously and was able to achieve many of its goals. I personally long for those days in the Church. The hard line being taken by the contemporary leaders of the USCCB is only leading to deeper rifts between Church and State in the USA. Too little true humility, too much smugness.
Let’s not get too excited here. No palace coup is underway. Revolt is not in any bishop’s vocabulary.
Here in California there has been some very pointed push back to the bishops’ attack on American religious women. In letters to the editor in local newspapers there have been calls for open defiance of and public shunning of bishops who participate in these Vatican witch hunts.
There is strong sentiment here in California that if Catholic bishops continue to involve themselves in partisan politics that maybe the church should loose its tax exempt status – an episcopal nightmare of the first magnitude.
Most dioceses in California are still reeling from the fallout of the abuse scandal having paid out nearly a $billion just here in CA. It has not gone down well with California voters that California Catholic bishops got in bed politically with fringe evangelical groups and out-of-state groups, especially the Mormon Church, to outlaw same-sex marriages (Proposition 8). Rumors still circulate that retired Cardinal Mahony used his financial empire to scuttle any attempt at holding him accountable for his complicity in the abuse scandal and financial mismanagement.
Just this week Brian Cahill, prominent SF Catholic, former head of SF Catholic Charities, wrote in NCR of how the bishops attack on the LCWR was the “elephant under the carpet” at a celebration of 50th anniversary of SF Archbishop George Niederhauer’s ordination casting a pall over the festivities [Attendees included Cardinal William Levada - who only comes home to California now that the federal courts have decided that he can't be subpoenaed due to his "diplomatic immunity" as an official of a foreign government.]
Cahill’s article: http://ncronline.org/news/women/lcwr-elephant-room-celebration-san-francisco-archbishop
No matter how you slice this it is a big deal. After the Nuns and the Girl Scouts someone had to say something. The craziness that we now see with Dolan and Co. was begun by Cardinal Law and his anti-Bernard cohort until their moral behavior blew up on them. Hopefully, Dolan will begin to realize that he needs to chart a more sensible and viable direction.
This may be tangential. So be it.
At the end of the day, what strikes me as so sad about the stuff coming out of the USCCB and a number of dioceses is that it obscures, rather than illuminating, the Christian message.
In today’s world, there are just so many column inches in the press that will be devoted to Christian topics, just so much air time and interview space for presentations of what we are supposedly about as Christians.
What is the basic Christian message? Jesus has come to save us, to give us a share in the divine life. We are to respond as the Beatitudes would have us . We are to take up our cross of everyday human effort and suffering to join with Jesus in his salvific work. He rules by compassion and forgiveness. He repudiates insistence on institutional prerogatives (e.g., the Pharisees’ concerns) that come at the expense of genuine human needs.
I don’t hear the USCCB making this profession of faith. Instead, I hear, from FOCA onward a tremendous concern about the Church’s legal or constitutional “rights and prerogatives” that all of us are supposed to go to the barricades for.
Just terribly dispiriting and disappointing!
Bernard: I agree with you wholeheartedly that what you’ve recapped is the core Christian message. And you do hear it on occasion here at dotCom (as in your comment just now). More to the point: I hope you hear it every week at your local parish. Weekly or daily mass isn’t newsworthy, but it is a likely place to find the day-by-day preaching and mission of the church that constitute’s a bishop’s core responsibility.
It would be wonderful if the bishops could devise a way to leverage the media to spread this core message. It’s hard to do, as the media news-gathering machine has little or no interest in cooperating in the spreading of that message. The media is very good at reporting political conflict, and its coverage of the church, as often as not, is made to fit that template.
From time to time, I find it worthwhile to pop over to usccb.org and see what the press releases are about. Here are the most recent 10 headlines as of now. As you can see, several of them are HHS mandate-related, and a number of others do touch on current events. How they relate to the Good News of Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension may not always be self-evident, but may be worth some reflection.
US Bishops to Meet with Bishops from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean to Discuss Migration Issues.
Cardinal Dolan Applauds Church Agencies as They Challenge HHS for Violating Religious Freedom
Baltimore, Washington Liturgies to Bookend National Celebration of Fortnight for Freedom
New Priests Younger, Were Altar Servers, Lectors, Carry Debt
Lawyer, Businessman, Educator Named to National Review Board
USCCB Submits Comments on Proposed HHS Rulemaking, Urges Re-Opening of Final Rule Defining Mandate, Exemption
USCCB Joins Call to White House To Change Nuclear Policy, Delivers Petition with 50,000 Signatures
Congolese Bishop Says Illegal Mining Causes Violence, Poverty, Urges Regulation in Congressional Testimony
Asian and Pacific Catholics to Hold Marian Pilgrimage May 19 at National Shrine
US Bishops Applaud Approval of North Carolina Marriage Amendment in Face of President Obama’s Recent Comments
He repudiates insistence on institutional prerogatives (e.g., the Pharisees’ concerns) that come at the expense of genuine human needs.
Bernard,
I think you are correct. But do you really believe that there is a genuine human need for free abortifacients, sterilization, and contraceptive services? And isn’t it possible that the repudiation of institutional prerogatives is actually a repudiation of HHS? If either is even possible, then the Bishops might actually be following the will of God. We do know that the will of God is little or no guide for our government.
In his NYTimes column today, Charles Blow discusses the results of the new Gallup morality poll released on Tuesday. The respondents were asked to put aside the question of whether or not something should be legal and answer on the basis of whether or not they considered something to be morally acceptable.
Concerning birth control, 87% of the self-identified Republicans polled, 89% of the self-identified Independents polled, and 90% of the self-identified Democrats polled consider birth control to be morally acceptable.
However, the poll did not include a separate question concerning whether or not health-care insurance coverage should include birth control.
Even so, it does look like the Catholic bishops are going to have a hard time selling their claims about birth control being allegedly “intrinsically evil.”
I know, I know, the Catholic bishops claim that they are concerned with their freedom of religion and that their objections to the Obama administration’s birth-control coverage mandate is only one of their concerns, even though it happens to be the one that has received the most media attention.
Bernard,
As I re-read your post several times, it occurred to me that at least one part of Christ’s personality was missing: he regularly repudiates sinful behavior and the Evil One. He is always forgiving but never tolerant and accepting of sin. And we can surmise that he must have been quite vociferous in this repudiation because the powerful elite of his day was worried enough to kill him for it.
“Even so, it does look like the Catholic bishops are going to have a hard time selling their claims about birth control being allegedly “intrinsically evil.””
They’re not really seeking to sell their views on birth control. They simply don’t want the government to force them to fund birth control. I.e., the key term is not “birth control”, it is “government force”. If they keep their eye on the ball in this respect, their sales job should be a good deal easier.
Btw, have the bishops actually stated that birth control is intrinsically evil? I don’t think it is intrinsically evil; e.g. it can licitly be used with rape victims, if I’m not mistaken.
The bisahops are selling their view of the magisterium’s approach to birth control -which a huge number inside and outside the Church reject.
Bernard’s view reflects what quite a number of the faithful see as that same hierachical credibility declines.
Bill M. summed up IMO briefly the thrust of what’s happened = viz. trying to regain power over the faithful in all things by controlling those under the authority of the Church by profession and presuring other catholic groups like our universities and the catholic press to be in line.
So now”government force” is the enemy.
Yes, of course government force is the problem. Both words in the term “HHS mandate” are operative.
A synonym for government actions that force a person to violate cherished moral principles is tyranny.
Remember: Dionne, a thoughtful liberal Catholic, supported the bishops when the bishops first objected to the HHS mandate, because Dionne recognized that the bishops’ public policy principle – religious freedom – is the correct principle. And here, Dionne is not supporting the mandate; he’s essentially arguing that the bishops, while working from the correct public-policy principle of religious freedom, may be pursuing the wrong rhetorical and legal strategy.
The biggest question is: is the government encroaching on the religious freedom of conservative Christians? If the bishops and others think their rights are being encroached upon, then it is the reasonable thing for them to defend their rights. it makes no difference whatsoever that their judgment about encroachment might be or is wrong. (I happen to think they’re being paranoid.) But given their assumptions about their rights I do not doubt their sincerity in saying that they feel threatened.
The bishops’ motives are one question, and no doubt it’s a very, very complex one. Their wisdom is another. And the third question is: given their de facto judgment that there has been encroachment and that there is likely to be more, should they take action to defend their rights?
You don’t have to agree with them about contraceptives to recognize that they too have rights and may defend them. Focusing the argument on their complex motives just changes the subject. Sure, we can talk about their motives and assumptions, but when we do we are not addressing *their* issues.
Does the bishops being right or wrong make a difference?
Yesterday Msgr. Lynn took the stand and said you never say no to a Cardinal -that’s what he was taught in the sem and that’s what he lived.
I fear that attitude is rather widespread, is being inculcated in seminaries and what Bishops really want of their flock.
We’ve moved from Roma locuta to episcopus locutus – right or wrong.
ISTM that the coinage of honest discourse and relection is undermined in that world and I also think it’s clear there’s a power issue then in play here.
Of course, I need mention so many times, that having the right to do something doesn’t of itself make something right.
‘A synonym for government actions that force a person to violate cherished moral principles is tyranny.’
Aw, c’mon, JIm. Not always. When the government forbad polygamy for the Mormons it wasn’t being tyrannical — just deciding that the Mormon belief was not consistent with the common good in a major way.