“Seven months earlier, they had started laying the groundwork for a major new campaign to combat what they saw as the growing threat to religious liberty, including the legalization of same-sex marriage. But the birth control mandate, issued on Jan. 20, was their Pearl Harbor.
“Hours after President Obama phoned to share his decision with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who is president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the bishops’ headquarters in Washington posted on its Web site a video of Archbishop Dolan, which had been recorded the day before.
“‘Never before,’ Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, ‘has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.’”
When the Administration “retreated,” saying that the insurance companies, not the churches, would be required to provide the coverage, the Church advanced confidently. Such legerdemain would fool no one, they believed. Having bent once, the Administration would surely bend again.
Alas, and alack! Those sly secular humanists at the Department of Health and Human Services more adroit in their manipulation of accidents and substance than the neo-Thomists at the Vatican. To the consternation of the Right, the public bought the Administration’s shell game.
Why? Because, by and large, women believe in birth control. The Church has been out of step with its daughters for a good fifty years now, and the old guys in the funny hats still haven’t been able to figure it out.
The Catholic Church has been after Obama from the get go. It’s good to see them trip on their own cassocks.
Afterwords
For some serious schadenfreude, go here for George Wiegel’s howl of rage at “ill-educated Catholics” like Senator Patty Murray, or Representative Rose DeLauro or Nancy Pelosi, or HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who sold out the Church’s hard-crafted doctrine of religious freedom, so unfairly construed as the right of know it all males learned scholars to tell women what to do. According to Wiegel, it was one John Courtney Murray who carefully laid the groundwork for this sacred doctrine, now so foolishly cast away.
“When Murray began to work on the church–state problem in the mid-1940s, the regnant Roman theory — which many simply identified with Catholic tradition tout court — was that the preferred arrangement was state recognition of the prerogatives of the Catholic Church, and state support of the Church’s work. …
“Unraveling this thick knot of seemingly settled “tradition” was no easy business, either intellectually or politically, in terms of stepping on ecclesiastical and theological toes. Murray’s careful analysis of Leo XIII’s texts suggested that the thesis/hypothesis business might not be as settled as it seemed. And, in a brilliant move, Murray reached beneath the thesis/hypothesis schema into a much older stratum of Catholic tradition, where he found, in the fifth-century writings of Pope Saint Gelasius I, a clear distinction between priestly authority and political authority — which suggested that the conflation of those two authorities in the “thesis” was, in fact, not the Catholic tradition (a suggestion buttressed, of course, by reference to Christ’s own distinction between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s in Matthew 22:21). Here was a true “liberal Catholicism” at work: a Catholicism that reached back into history to retrieve a long-forgotten element of the authentic tradition that, recovered, could be the engine of future development.”
Which is to say, Murray simply discarded fifteen hundred years of Catholic teaching and practice to “discover” (that is to say, invent) the “true” Catholic teaching. And now these bitches ill-educated Catholic women have let it all fall to ruin! Just because they don’t want to do as they are told!
