Last night, Sister Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, which represents 600 hospitals and 1,400 other health-care facilities, announced that CHA would comply with the rules, or “accommodation,” that the Department of Health and Human Services has drawn up for employers who object to providing insurance plans that cover contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization. HHS designed an accommodation last year and revised it on June 28. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the so-called HHS mandate, as Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the USCCB, reiterated in a statement on July 3, during the Fortnight for Freedom, a period during which the bishops drew attention to the importance of religious liberty and specifically to the HHS mandate and its conflict with the institutional conscience of the Church.

Expect some hay to be made of this split between CHA and the USCCB. CHA was an early supporter of Obamacare; President Obama gave Keehan a pen he used to sign the Affordable Care Act. Last year, after HHS unveiled the first draft of its accommodation for religiously affiliated nonprofit employers, Keehan was quick to signal her approval. She later demurred and since then has been hovering in a state of public noncommitment, until last night. Some will interpret her back-and-forth to mean that she was thinking and rethinking and generally being thoughtful, but now that she has landed where she has, it has the feel of a conclusion that was scripted into this political drama from the beginning.

Granted, her argument that HHS’s accommodation provides sufficient distance between a CHA-affiliated facility and its employees who buy birth control through their insurance is not unreasonable. Neither, though, is the argument that the HHS accommodation requires Catholic employers to be a gateway to insurance coverage for items to which the Church is philosophically opposed.

Which side do you take, CHA’s or the USCCB’s? The answer probably depends on whether you share the Church’s view of contraception. If you do you probably agree with the USCCB and find the gateway argument cogent. If you don’t but want to feel broad-minded, conceding perhaps that HHS was wrong not to recognize a moral distinction between contraceptives and abortifacients, you might applaud HHS for making a gesture toward employers with scruples and think that in accepting that gesture CHA was only doing the rational thing.

By itself, the HHS accommodation won’t diminish the Catholic character of Catholic hospitals, but CHA’s acceptance of it sends a message about the willingness of the Church to negotiate with Caesar or, some would say, to compromise with him. Catholic higher education turned a similar corner half a century ago, when Catholic colleges and universities agreed to finesse their Catholic identity in exchange for federal funding. James Burtchaell tells that story in The Dying of the Light.