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Mary Ann Glendon: Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government
The main goal of the contraception mandate is not to protect women’s health. It is a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda.
By MARY ANN GLENDON
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TUESDAY, 22 MAY 2012
This week Catholic bishops are heading to federal courts across the country to defend religious liberty. On Monday they filed 12 lawsuits on behalf of a diverse group of 43 Catholic entities that are challenging the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) sterilization, abortifacient and birth-control insurance mandate.
Like most Americans, the bishops have long taken for granted the religious freedom that has enabled this nation’s diverse religions to flourish in relative harmony. But over the past year they have become increasingly concerned about the erosion of conscience protections for church-related individuals and institutions. Their top-rated program for assistance to human trafficking victims was denied funding for refusing to provide “the full range of reproductive services,” including abortion. For a time, Catholic Relief Services faced a similar threat to its international relief programs. The bishops fear religious liberty is becoming a second-class right.
Along with leaders of other faiths who have conscientious objections to all or part of the mandate, they hoped to persuade the government to bring its regulations into line with the First Amendment, and with federal laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that provide exemptions to protect the conscience rights of religious institutions and individuals.
On Jan. 20, however, HHS announced it would not revise the mandate or expand its tight exemption, which covers only religious organizations that mainly hire and serve their co-religionists. Instead, the mandated coverage will continue to apply to hospitals, schools and social service providers run by groups whose religious beliefs require them to serve everyone in need.
Continued attempts to solve the problem by negotiation produced only an announcement by the Obama administration in February that insurance providers would pay for the contested services. Since many Catholic entities are self-insured and the others pay the premiums, the bishops’ concerns were not alleviated.
Associated PressProtesters rally against the HHS mandate in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on March 23.
The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.
The media have implied all along that the dispute is mainly of concern to a Catholic minority with peculiar views about human sexuality. But religious leaders of all faiths have been quick to see that what is involved is a flagrant violation of religious freedom. That’s why former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, declared, “We’re all Catholics now.”
More is at stake here than the mission of all churches, including the Catholic Church, to provide social services like health care and education to everyone regardless of creed, and to do so without compromising their beliefs. At the deepest level, we are witnessing an attack on the institutions of civil society that are essential to limited government and are important buffers between the citizen and the all-powerful state.
If religious providers of education, health care and social services are closed down or forced to become tools of administration policy, the government consolidates a monopoly over those essential services. As Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, put it, we are witnessing an effort to reduce religion to a private activity. “Never before,” he said, “have we faced this kind of challenge to our ability to engage in the public square as people of faith.”
With this week’s lawsuits, the bishops join a growing army of other plaintiffs around the country, Catholic and non-Catholic, who are asking the courts to repel an unprecedented governmental assault on the ability of religious persons and groups to practice their religion without being forced to violate their deepest moral convictions.
Religious freedom is subject to necessary limitations in the interests of public health and safety. The HHS regulations do not fall into that category. The world has gotten along fine without this mandate—the services in question are widely and cheaply available, and most employers will provide coverage for them.
But if the regulations are not reversed, they threaten to demote religious liberty from its prominent place among this country’s most cherished freedoms. That is why Cardinal Dolan told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on April 8: “We didn’t ask for this fight, but we won’t back away from it.”
Ms. Glendon is professor at Harvard Law School.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
Secularism functions as a religion to radical secularists. Therefore it cannot exist in peaceful coexistence with Roman Catholicism. It tolerates Christianity the way Caesarism initially tolerated other religions, that is, only in so far as other religions were subordinate to the absolute power of the Roman Empire.
We are not living in a time of the village atheist. And atheism as an organized force is no longer “out there” in communist or fascist dictatorships. Catholic philosopher Michele Federico Sciacca back in the 1950’s predicted that the materialism of the West could not long fend off the materialism of the East and that it was only the persistence of Roman Catholicism that fought off totalitarian secularism from every continent in the world.
Today, American atheism is organized and militant. It is no longer the province of the strange anti-social neighbor down the street or the first year philosophy major. It is no longer the province of the faculty lounge. It is political, funded, organized, savvy in the methods of mass communications. And it attempts to wear the flag of the red, white and blue.
American Catholics need to rediscover the historical fact that “things can go bad in a big hurry.”
When Adolf Hitler arrived on the scene, it didn’t take him long to do his dirty evil work. Hitler came to power through democratic processes. The little things German Catholics could have done to stop Hitler in the beginning became almost impossible later on when the only response left was the blood of martyrdom.
It is instructive to read first-person accounts of the time of the Third Reich. People could not believe what was happening. They were in denial. Surely this could not happen to civilized German society. People thought that Naziism would burn itself out. People thought that saner minds would not let Hitler proceed with his more lunatic ideas. Surely the honorable German military leaders would not allow things to go “too far.” Things went bad in a hurry.
If Catholics do not stand up against the current threat to religious liberty in this country, the next battle line could be drawn by our children under out and out persecution. It is not simply President Obama. The Democrat Party is moving farther and farther left of center. Conservative and moderate democrats are disappearing. The Democrat Party that was once beloved by immigrant Roman Catholics doesn’t exist anymore. Classical liberalism has given up its place to welfare-state liberalism; which is socialism in all but name. This is no time for Catholics to be appeasers.
The elephant in the room in this entire debate is perhaps this: that secularism is ultimately a religion itself and not a space of tolerance for various religions. One of the greatest Protestant theologians of the 20th century, Paul Tillich had an interesting insight on the nature of religion. He defined religion as any person’s “ultimate concern” in life. So while human beings have a multitude of concerns in their lives, each person has one concern that is ultimate; one concern that integrates all the rest and to which all the rest can be sacrificed in a crisis. This insight was also reached by means of a different path by Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade. According to him, religion is either the ultimate integrating factor in a person’s life or it is nothing. One cannot just “have” a religion. Religion is all or nothing.
Following the thought of Tillich, one can see that there can be a big difference between what a person professes with his lips and what his “ultimate concern” really is. Tillich’s idea is that there are not really atheists but only idolaters. One’s ultimate concern is either the one true God or an idol. If Tillich is right, one cannot be a Christian and a secularist. Eventually either Christianity or secularism is going to be the ultimate integrating factor in one’s life, the ultimate concern. Of course a person’s ultimate concern can be health, safety, comfort, wealth, fame, lust or any other “idol.”
Radical secularism is a religion. The sooner we realize that, the better. It is a religion that has no toleration for any other religion. It only tolerates other religions so long as they are harmless to it. One can render to God the things of God only when Caesar determines that those things don’t detract from the worship of Caesar. It seems that in the present age, very few religions can hold up under this “secularism.” Atheism can. Agnosticism. Perhaps the Bahai religion. Certainly Unitarianism. Within Judaism, only the extremely leftist liberal Judaism can. Among Christians, the extreme left Episcopalians and some of the the far left Catholics [who are Episcopalians without knowing it]. Marxists of all stripes are acceptable. And yes, Virginia, Marxism is a religion. And the ACLU? I won’t go there.
Radical secularism has no place for “freedom of religion” because radical secularism is a religion.
Today for some reason I jumped ahead to the Office of Readings for Friday, the Seventh Week of Easter and came upon these words of St. John: “Anyone who is so ‘progressive’ that he does not remain rooted in the teachings of Christ does not possess God, while anyone who remains rooted in the teaching possesses both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you who does not bring this teaching, do not receive them into your house; do not even greet him, for whoever greets him shares in the evil he does.”
Why did I think of President Obama? Why did I think of Kathleen Sibelius? Why did I think of Georgetown University? Why did I think of all those closet Episcopalians who call themselves Roman Catholics? Venerable Cardinal Newman, a convert to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism was right: liberalism if the death of religion:
“For 30, 40, 50 years, I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when alas, it is an error overspreading as a snare, the whole earth.” He foresaw the future of the Anglican Church and now threat against the Roman Catholic Church as far back as 1879.
Secularism is becoming the State religion of the United States. Believe it. It will happen unless we stand up against it. Pray and work to save the United States of America. God save the United States of America.