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The US Conference of Catholic Bishops was surely blindsided by the HSS requirement that Catholic institutions such as hospitals and schools provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacients to employees.
For goodness sake, the Church has supported a program of universal health care and regards it as a basic human "right"; so what's with the knife in the face? Why is the hierarchy in the US Church being attacked, blatantly, by their leftist friends in the current administration?
Because, surely, team Obama really believes that providing contraception and abortion is good and that religious beliefs, whatever they may be, should be no obstacle in the path of something that is fundamentally right.
And there we have it, it's all about rights. The Church, with doubtless the best of intentions, has for decades adopted the language of its secular counterparts; for example, Pacem in Terris (John XXIII's oddly Kantian pacifist encyclical) enumerates some 53 basic human rights, from employment to health.
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But who is going to enforce these rights? In the absence of temporal power it's not going to be the Church, which leaves the State.
Unfortunately for the Church and for Christians everywhere in this country, the State's conception of right and wrong is by no means synonymous with the values of Christendom. The Catholic bishops and prominent Evangelicals appear to have woken up to this fact and we'll see how Obamacare versus The Church plays out in the Supreme Court next month.
In the meanwhile, the time for naive trust in the beneficence of the Secular Power should be, for catholic Christians at least, at an end.
We'll have to see how many stand up and are counted.
LSP
