If the President and his apparatchiks at HHS thought the outrage
voiced by various cardinals, bishops, and countless lay Catholics
over the anti-conscience mandate was mere bluster, they got a
wake-up call yesterday. On Monday, 43 high-profile Catholic
organizations, including the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and
the University of Notre Dame, filed suit against the Obama
administration. In an open letter, the Archbishop of Washington
summed up the collective position of the plaintiffs by
explaining that the mandate “fundamentally redefines the nation’s
long-standing definition of religious ministry… HHS’s conception of
what constitutes the practice of religion is so narrow that even
Mother Teresa would not have qualified.”
Of more immediate concern than Mother Teresa’s status, of
course, is that of hundreds of Catholic health care organizations,
schools, and charities. The anti-conscience mandate is a brazen
attack on the autonomy of these institutions, and President Obama’s
belated
accommodation is nothing more than camouflage for that assault.
It requires them, as Cardinal Wuerl correctly puts it, “to provide
their employees with coverage for abortion-inducing drugs,
contraceptives, and sterilization, even if doing so violates their
religious beliefs.” Thus, the Consortium of Catholic Academies,
Archbishop Carroll High School, and the Catholic University of
America are co-plaintiffs with the Archdiocese of Washington in the
federal lawsuit filed yesterday.
Collectively, Catholic organizations provide services to more
Americans than any other entity except the federal government
itself. Its 600 health care institutions, for example,
provide care to one in six patients treated in the United
States every year. Catholic schools provide education to millions
of elementary and secondary school children, while more than a
million students attend the nation’s 200 Catholic colleges and
universities. And it is this very ubiquity that is the real target
of the anti-conscience mandate. The “fundamental transformation”
Obama and his accomplices wish to inflict upon America can’t be
managed while large, autonomous institutions like the Catholic
Church and its charitable organizations remain in place.
But the leaders of this particular institution are not inclined
to surrender their mission or their dignity as easily as have
others, like the Fourth Estate and secular academia. As Cardinal
Timothy Dolan
wrote shortly after the anti-conscience mandate was announced
by HHS, “We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the
government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to
curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and
Americans. We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from
it.” And Cardinal Dolan is a man of his word. Cardinal Dolan’s New
York Archdiocese and the Catholic Health Care System were among the
43 plaintiffs who filed lawsuits yesterday against the federal
government.
The Obama administration and its many allies in the “news” media
will, of course, claim that these lawsuits are without merit, just
as they did with the Obamacare challenges that are about to be
decided by the Supreme Court. They will characterize them as an
attempt by a group of reactionary religious zealots to restrict the
“reproductive rights” of women. This is Orwellian nonsense. It is,
in fact, the Obama administration that seeks to deny millions of
Americans freedom of conscience. As Cardinal Wuerl put it
yesterday, “The lawsuit in no way challenges either women’s
established legal right to obtain and use contraception or the
right of employers to provide coverage for it if they so choose.…
This lawsuit is about religious freedom.”
Indeed it is. As a new website launched
yesterday by the Archdiocese of Washington phrases it, “This
lawsuit is about an unprecedented attack by the federal government
on one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to
practice one’s religion without government interference.” And the
Obama administration has obviously launched this assault on
religious liberty in an effort to propitiate the feminist left,
whose support it apparently deems more valuable than that of
millions of Catholics and countless other people of faith. This is
a bad call. It may garner Obama a few extra votes from naïve
college kids, but the American electorate is among the most
religious on the planet. The HHS mandate will lose in court and it
may cause Obama to lose at the ballot box.
