“Catholics Hear Anti-Obama Letter in Church.” That was the headline on a CBS News story about the bishops’ pastoral letter last Sunday, objecting to the anti-religious, anti-conscience provisions of the morally monstrous Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known in infamy as Obamacare.
Of course, the actual text of the letter has nothing “anti-Obama” in it at all, unless (as the Left fervently believes) any criticism of any kind of any Obama administration policy is ipso facto “anti-Obama” on a personal, visceral, and very probably racist level.
Here’s the operative text:
. . . the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Obama Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.
Note the either-or, as the bishops pathetically frame the issue. Either knuckle under to the atheist Leviathan and get with the Culture of Death, or knuckle under and drop coverage and knuckle under and pay the fines. Not a word about engaging in widespread civil disobedience by refusing to acknowledge’s the law’s legitimacy, by refusing to accept Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s unconstitutional arrogation of authority in direct violation of the First Amendment, by citing the long leftist tradition of conscientious objection and telling the government to shove it, or by carrying on with the status quo until either the Supreme Court sorts this out or the Church is forced by imperial Washington’s legions to capitulate.
Instead, they offer these brave words:
We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens.
But people of faith are already being made second-class citizens, especially when that faith is Christianity — the faith of the overwhelming majority of American citizens and of the Founding Fathers. The poison injected into the American body politic in 1963 by Madalyn Murray O’Hair (whose grisly end is often forgotten by her hagiographers) and the Supreme Court is still snaking its way through the system. Sebelius’s high-handed edict is just one more brick in a wall that will end in the “separation” of Church and State the way Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” ends for the stunned and hapless Fortunato, entombed alive and crying out for the love of God, Montresor.
The bishops, however, seem clueless, already accepting their chains as a fait accompli:
We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.
So what do the descendants of Dagger John propose to do about it? In a sentiment echoed by Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, the Bishop of Marquette, the Most. Rev. Alexander Sample, recommends this:
First, as a community of faith we must commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be restored. Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible. Second, I would also recommend visiting www.usccb.org/conscience, to learn more about this severe assault on religious liberty, and how to contact Congress in support of legislation that would reverse the Obama Administration’s decision.
That’s it — pray, fast, and go to a website. Only the Bishop of Trenton, David O’Connell, offers a glimpse of the old Irish fighting spirit.
“This is not an attempt by the Church to interfere with anyone’s politics,” he writes in conclusion. “It is, rather, an attempt to lift up and live our Catholic faith the way that our nation and our constitution have always guaranteed us the freedom and the right to do so. Please join me and all of those harmed by this legislation in prayer and in an all-out effort to have our freedom restored. History cautions us repeatedly that once we walk down such a dangerous path, we will get lost in the process.”
That’s one way of putting it. Another is that once Montresor’s got you inebriated and chained to the wall, and is just about to cement the last brick in place, it’s way too late to figure out that you’re in big trouble. And here you thought he was your friend and neighbor…
“The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” snorted the former seminarian, Communist mass murderer, and leftist icon Stalin. Guess we’re about to find out.
Don't count on the leftist clergy to actually fight. After all, if they got their exemption, would they care about anyone else getting stuck with the bill? Especially don't count on them if the decision is rescinded. The lefty priests will fall all over themselves to tongue bathe Obama if he did.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne of the biggest problems I have with the Church heirarchy as a Catholic, is the generalized wussification of the Church. Christ's manliness is lost on us. That this burly young carpenter drove the money changers out of the temple, shouted at demons to make them leave, made drinks for his friends at a wedding, and then willingly and knowingly stepped up to take one of the great beatings of all time and face his own death, is utterly missed by most of our Church leadership. He was not afraid to be around thieves and lowlifes, He was not afraid of sinners or soldiers or tax collectors or hostile Pharisees, and he was comfortable among the Samaritans. He was a man's man, and not afraid to take a stand for what was right, and he called us to plant our feet, stand tall, and testify, not to whimper and cringe before Caesar or anybody else.
What we get instead of that manliness is sheepishness. Only the gentle parts of the gospels come across in today's Church - not the tough love guidance of Paul and the other disciples, not the Old Testament rules-based system that we are to integrate into our understanding of the new testament. Not the tough spiritual and lifestyle challenges Jesus put to us. Instead we get this lukewarm pabulum of warmed over gospel of if-you-play-nice-that's-good-enough. This in a country where it doesn't take any particular bravery to stand up for your beliefs. One suspects most of these bishops would not hold up well under real persecution.
The reason attendance is declining and vocations are down is because people want and expect institutions that purport to hold to timeless moral principles to stand for something, not to be wishy-washy temples to subjective reasoning and the smug assurances of the age. We've got some good priests and bishops still, but much of the Church in America seems to be administered by the same types of over-cautious, over-lawyered, secular softies than run the public school system and social services bureaucracies. Catholics for Free Choice, the bishops who couldn't put their foot down on child molestation or liberation theology, and these wussies who can't bring themselves to pick up a phone and call their lawyers and get rolling, are all part of the same problem, the secular modernist rot that is destroying our institutions in the U.S. The Church isn't immune to that rot despite the nice incense and nostalgia over mean Irish priests and harsh nuns.
I heard that letter read from the pulpit this weekend and thought two things: (1) this isn't going to stop the dummies from their continued embrace of the Party of Abortion and Euthanasia, because that Party makes nice noises about helping people, and that's enough to convince the dummies to keep voting for them; (2) Nice letter, glad they're opposed to the regulation, but in this society, the second sentence of that letter should have read, "we've discussed this with legal counsel and by mid-week you will no doubt be hearing news stories about the lawsuit we bishops have filed to overturn this regulation, and to protect your religious freedom and vindicate your God-given rights as protected in the First Amendment, because this regulation interferes with the duty Christ charged us with: to feed the poor, shelter the homeless, to minister to the sick."
Alas. This won't end well. The bishops have brought a butter knife to a gunfight.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI strongly agree, the Church must affirmatively refuse to comply with this unconstitutional mandate. And while they are at it, they should keep running bake sales with homemade pies, health department be darned. Many of us in the pews would be happy to stand with Church leaders in civil disobedience.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuseno one on earth, michael walsh included, has more experience and history of dealing with totalitarian secular powers.
simply because the bishop's first steps in opposing this abominable war on catholics were not the steps walsh would have taken does not make walsh right and the bishops wrong, much as walsh might disagree.
i suspect whatever strategy is employed, unity will be the determining factor in the strategy's success.
michael walsh has opinions like most everyone else. he does not have the authority of leadership in the catholic church.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseExcept it's not true that the bishops are knuckling under. They are already closing hospitals; more will come.
Our bishop here in NC is livid about this---and I've never seen the man livid. There is very real outrage in the clerical ranks; you are going to be seeing and hearing a lot more about this.
Remember---conservatives aren't the only ones hoping the Supreme Court wipes this abomination away in June.
Things do not move swiftly in the Church because each bishop has very real influence within his own diocese but no bishop is a dictator. Exhortating the faithful during Mass on a political subject is a fairly rare occurrence---for the bishops to be on the same page regarding this is a big deal and it is going to be a huge problem for the Administration.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI agree. Every Catholic bishop and priest should stand outside hospitals and explain that they can no longer give care to the poor because the evil government is forcing them to pay for their employees birth control.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Exhortating the faithful during Mass on a political subject is a fairly rare occurrence---for the bishops to be on the same page regarding this is a big deal and it is going to be a huge problem for the Administration."
Exactly. This *never* happens. I've never heard a really explicit political position advocated at Mass, until this weekend when the bishops' statements were read in over half the parishes in the US. Unbelievable. Not only that but the Church doesn't do things quickly, they like to think about it for a hundred years or so. This was an almost immediate response to the ruling.
President Obama actually managed to get the bishops to act in concert, quickly, and they're not going to stop as the election draws near. Well done, Sir.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"“The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” snorted the former seminarian, Communist mass murderer, and leftist icon Stalin. Guess we’re about to find out."
Mike, now we can see why your nickname is "Chuckles." Think about this: the Church survived 300 years of intermittent Roman persecution, 12 years of Nazi persecution, and over 70 years of Soviet persecution.
Stalin had a good run, as these things go for paranoid dictators. However, he's now just another slowly decomposing cadaver...and the Church is still around. There's a lesson to be learned from this, don't you think?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn terms of how many divisions the Pope has in the fight against birth control - don't we already know that in this country, he has very few? Don't studies show that almost all American Catholics use birth control? When the people in the pews have long since made up their minds that the bishops' feelings about birth control are either wrong or simply irrelevant to their lives, I don't see it likely that there is going to be a huge groundswell of support for this fight.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou can thank your NRO colleagues for Obamneycare. Have a nice cruise; hope enough people attend to fill a john boat.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat disturbs me is that this issue is being framed as an attack only on Catholics and Catholic institutions. All of us as Christians are being attacked, and religious leaders in every denomination and faith should be calling for action. This is huge---it isn't enough to sigh and say "There he goes again." It isn't enough to express outrage, and while prayer is essential, our leaders should be calling us to put feet to our faith, telling us how to do it, and then leading by example.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat disturbs me is that this issue is being framed as an attack only on Catholics and Catholic institutions. All of us as Christians are being attacked, and religious leaders in every denomination and faith should be calling for action. This is huge---it isn't enough to sigh and say "There he goes again." It isn't enough to express outrage, and while prayer is essential, our leaders should be calling us to put feet to our faith, telling us how to do it, and then leading by example.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePlease don't trouble Mr. Walsh with facts, Teflon. He's off on one of his rants again, and he can't be bothered to deal with the truth.
For that matter, he can't even be bothered with simple self-consistency. The entire post reads as though it had been written by a desperate undergraduate who pounded it out in the last few moments before class; every claim contradicts some other claim, and his quotations don't support the point he is trying to make.
Start with what Walsh's comments on what he calls the "operative text" of the bishops' letter. "Not a word," he claims, "about engaging in widespread civil disobedience by refusing to acknowledge the law’s legitimacy...by citing the long leftist tradition of conscientious objection and telling the government to shove it." The bishops didn't mention this, he claims--and then, bizarrely, he goes on to prove that they did:
"We cannot [wrote the bishops] — we will not — comply with this unjust law."
It doesn't get much plainer than that, but Walsh doesn't understand it. He doesn't understand that this statement contradicts the claim he just made. He doesn't understand that to call a law "unjust" is to question its legitimacy. He doesn't understand that refusing to comply with such a law is, by definition, a form of civil disobedience. He doesn't know how to interpret a straightforward piece of writing and describe it honestly and accurately.
Oh, and contrary to Walsh's implication, the letter does call for widespread action on the part of Catholics. "In generations past," it says, "the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same."
Walsh doesn't understand this either. For some reason, he cites it as evidence that the bishops "already accept[] their chains as a fait accompli." He ridicules the bishops for this stance, even though a few sentences previously, he himself claimed that "people of faith are already being made second-class citizens." The errors and contradictions are so dense that it's difficult to untangle them, but let me see if I can summarize it: Walsh claims that people of faith are being treated as second-class citizens, then ridicules the bishops for taking that stance, even though the paragraph he quoted manifestly shows that they didn't.
There is more nonsense here. He misinterprets the case of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whose 1963 case was about freedom from forced adherence to religious practice. He criticizes the use of "anti-Obama" to mean "anti-Obama-administration." He doesn't understand that "Obama" in this case is just a synecdoche for the administration--even though he uses Obama's name in exactly the same way when he mentions "Obamacare."
Thus the post is a mess. It reads as if it had been banged out by a desperate undergraduate in the last few minutes before class; it's as though he wrote each new sentence without ever looking back to see what he said in the sentence just past. I think it's time to recognize that Mr. Walsh can't contribute to National Review in any useful way, and that he should be dismissed from their service as soon as possible. At the very least, maybe his superiors at National Review--or in the Catholic Church--can give him the order to withdraw his post and stave off further embarrassment. This is an important issue--too important to be sullied by Mr. Walsh's intemperate trash.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI believe Mr Walsh's point was that paying the fine that Obamacare requires (when they stop providing health care) isn't really civil disobedience in the spirit of the leftists. If they wanted civil disobedience, they would refuse to pay the fine and refuse to comply with any other order in conjunction with this unconstitutionality. And, they would sing kumbayah in their jail cells when that moment comes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThanks for writing this, Michael. We should all be screaming bloody murder about the outrageous things the Obama administration is doing. Government control over private health care plans is just generally bad; this is one horrible specific example.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNote to "Lorraine" - if you're going to hang someone because you find "..his post is a mess" - you might want to pay a bit more attention to your own writing. As in your fine display of verbal Tourette's, where your diatribe begins and ends with the same strange riff on "...desperate undergraduates..."; perhaps such sloppiness is inevitable, when moved to rage by such straightforward observations as Mr. Walsh offers.
Walsh is suspicious because the bishops have given him ample reason that they will cave or refuse to engage. Where after all, was the new media darling, His (soon to be) Eminence Timothy Dolan, while Andrew Cuomo was cutting every legislative corner and twisting any arm to ram gay marriage through the NYS legislature? Was he fiercely opposing this travesty as a warrior of God? No..Archbishop Dolan was busy, at a Catholic bishops conference. No matter that the moral underpinning of human society and a bulwark of the church was being rewritten - there were meetings to attend, where polite, nonconsequential disapproval of secular overreach could be massaged into a final, readily ignored press release.
But you go on living in your happy place, Lorraine. Right up to the point where publicly identifying yourself as Catholic will have the same effect on your life as flying a Confederate flag outside your home.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou're quite right--I made a careless copy-and-paste error. I didn't catch it before I posted, and this place doesn't have an edit function. Mea culpa.
My error doesn't change the fact that Walsh can't get his story straight. He says that the bishops didn't say X, but they did. He claims that Y is foolish, but endorses it himself. These aren't simple observations on his part; they're confabulations at best.
This sort of nonsense is troubling because this is a serious and important issue, and it isn't well served by Walsh's brand of vitriol. If he would just pay attention to what he is actually saying, instead of focusing on being as bombastic as possible, he might actually convince someone. So if he really means to argue, as you seem to, that the bishops aren't men of their word, then he should say that and cite the gay-marriage case as evidence. We can disagree over the extent to which "the moral underpinning of human society...was being rewritten," but that's a side issue; it's relevant to know that the bishops could have taken stronger action but didn't. I don't think Walsh is as deficient in reading comprehension as he seems, so I don't think this is beyond him. It's just unfortunate that he didn't bother doing it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGiven the Catholic Church's history of condemning the practice of abortion while enthusiastically giving full-throated political support to the "social justice" agenda of the pro-abortion Left as 50 million babies are killed, the Obama administration can hardly be blamed for discounting the seriousness with which the Church holds its own theology. If I were an Obama administration lawyer I would argue that these new provisions are consistent with the Church's teachings as actually practiced by the Church as opposed to the words with which it describes them. Actions always speak louder than words.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe church was in trouble when priests mentioned economic justice and healthcare for the poor back during the months prior to Obamas election. Obama bumper stickers adorned many a car in the lots on Sunday. During the healthcare debate in congress,Nuns defied the church and bishops by saying that what the congress and Obama offered would never require Catholics to sacrifice conscience for comfort and security. Caesar offered bread and blankets for the poor, if the clerics and laity wouldn't be so suspicious and trust him. They wanted to believe that Caesar wouldn't throw them to the lions. "Justice" became more valuable than prudence. Pelosi, Biden, Cuomo, Notre Dames' Monsignor, and a host of others betray their own supposed beliefs. The church does nothing for their public flouting of the church's teachings. Now the church, the American bishops, expect the 'rank and file' Catholics to defy Caesar and fight for the church. If the church doesn't fight against the "famous" Catholics for their blatant, public repudiation and legislative evil then maybe it's a church not worth fighting for. The bargain has been made with the devil, now all he wants is your soul.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs a Catholic, I'm struck by the irony of The Church complaining about regulations that stem from a bill (Obamacare) that Catholic Bishops favored with two exceptions: federal funding of abortions and insufficient protections for religious freedom. I believe the Pope calls universal healthcare an "inalienable right"...which as we all know in today's lingo means it must be run by the State because rights only exist if they are run by the government.
Had the Stupak Amendment passed, and provisions for religious freedom been included, the bill would have passed with strong support from Catholic Bishops...individual mandate, IPAB, and all.
I always find it grotesquely humorous when a giant bureaucracy (the Catholic Church) tells everyone that we need another giant bureaucracy (universal healthcare), and then complains when a third giant bureaucracy (the United States Government) doesn't implement universal healthcare the way the first giant bureaucracy desired.
If you demand universal healthcare, which by-definition turns individual's lives into the property of the federal government, then you get all the consequences that come with it.
I agree with the general theme of this post, however, in that massive, large-scale civil disobedience is coming, and it is not going to be pretty. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi cannot throw 50,000,000 people in jail for refusing to comply with their anti-constitutional law.
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