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Benedict XVI (Photo: catholicism, flickr)
Written by Frances Kissling for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
See all our coverage of the Birth Control Mandate 2011 here.
This article was amended at 2:22 pm Friday, November 25th to add a missing paragraph and missing words in three sentences.
When it comes to contraception Catholics have stopped listening to popes, bishops and other institutional leaders. It seems the only person left listening is President Obama. Obama however lacks the theological training –and it would seem the scholarly advice –needed to figuring out if the bishops and various hospitals, universities and social service agencies clamoring for a “religious exemption” from new federal regulations really need them in order to be good Catholics. The regulations require insurance plans offered by employers to cover contraception without a co-pay, although they exempt churches and other specifically religious institutions from the requirement.
The President seems unaware of the fact that Catholic disagreement with the ban on birth control goes far beyond the average Catholic lay-person. Some bishops, many priests, religious orders, theologians and church-related groups have publicly and privately disagreed with blanket prohibition of contraception. All of them, individuals and institutions, are free to follow their conscience on contraception and there is ample evidence that many of the very groups asking for an exemption from the new federal regulations have not followed church regulations religiously. Some within the organizations may agree with the ban, but not all, and none are required to do so.
Of course, it would take courage for organizations such as the Catholic Health Association (which is now siding with the Bishops publicly in their fight to broaden exemptions) or Catholic Charities to publicly buck the U.S. bishops and just follow the law and give their employees health insurance that makes it possible to avoid pregnancies they cannot afford or do not want; but after all, being a Catholic is all about courage and helping the poor and marginalized. A fair number of employees of Catholic institutions are low-income workers, struggling to get by on a minimum wage. We Catholics are taught to follow our conscience rather than the positions of the Catholic church, even if it means getting kicked out of the church. If Obama’s current religious advisors don’t know that, all he has to do is call one of the most trusted of Catholic theologians, Fr. Richard McBrien of Notre Dame. McBrien will repeat what he has said in his widely used text Catholicism:
If, after appropriate study, reflection and prayer, a person is convinced that his or her conscience is correct, in spite of a conflict with the moral teachings of the church, they not only may but must follow the dictates of their conscience rather than the teachings of the church.”
Centuries earlier Thomas Aquinas said the same thing. Yet, the Catholic-affiliated institutions asking for a religious exemption insist that corporations, like persons have a conscience.
There is every indication that the conscience of these institutions tells them the church prohibition on contraception is wrong. Survey data and the behavior of these institutions evidence widespread disagreement with the official, but not infallible prohibition. Modest due diligence on the part of the administration before it grants a broader exemption is called for. They would discover that it is not only ordinary Catholics who believe birth control results in responsible parenthood and healthier relationships (98 percent of sexually-active Catholic women have used methods of birth control prohibited by the Vatican,) but also bishops conferences, priests and theologians world wide. He’d also find numerous examples of “Catholic” agencies that have disregarded the prohibition and are providing or have provided contraception, including contraceptive sterilization.
That foundation of dissent from the 1968 Encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which dashed Catholic hope of a new openness on sex and reproduction was found in the statement of the Vatican spokesperson, Msgr.F. Lambruschini who assured reporters that it as not infallible, a statement not contradicted by the Vatican. He then disturbed many of the world’s bishops by claiming the encyclical required “the assent of the faithful.”
That demand for assent to a non-infallible teaching opened a floodgate of commentary by Bishops’ Conferences around the world, hedging their bets on the encyclical and expressing sympathy with Catholics who decided not to follow it. The Canadian bishops wrote:
In accordance with the accepted principles of moral theology… persons who have tried sincerely but without success to pursue a line of conduct in keeping with the given directives, may be safely assured that whoever honestly choses that course which sees right to him does so in good conscience.
The Dutch bishops were more forthright. All nine met and issued a statement which said they “consider that the encyclical’s total rejection of contraceptive methods is not convincing on the basis of the arguments put forward.” If the Dutch bishops did not find the Catholic prohibition on birth control convincing who is the President to de facto affirm a Catholic doctrine by providing some Catholics with an exemption from public policy mandates supported by popular, scientific and medical opinion?
The granting of an exemption from regulations that are in the best interest of public health and enhance the lives especially of women should never be a political act, but rather a careful, factual appraisal of an urgent and clear religious claim.
Catholic religious leaders made that appraisal and found Humanae Vitae wanting. French, German, British, Belgian, and other bishops, while cautious not to openly challenge the teaching itself, issued statements that stressed the right of Catholics to follow their conscience. U.S. bishops, as always eager to demonstrate their loyalty to Rome, towed the line. American priests and theologians were far less constrained. Some theologians and priests immediately issued a Statement of Conscience which rejected Humanae Vitae. The authors felt so strongly that they published the statement in the Washington Post, leading DC Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle to punish about 40 of its signers who reported to him. The courage shown by those theologians and priest would be welcome among the leaders of today’s high-powered Catholic charities.
Among the signers was a revered DC Jesuit, Horace McKenna. Fr. McKenna was a passionate advocate of the poor who eventually founded DC’s SOME (So Others Might Eat). Based on his experience of hearing the confessions of DC’s poorest Catholics, he made it clear to Cardinal O’Boyle that he would tell them in confession that they were not bound to follow the prohibition. In short order, the Cardinal stripped him the right of hearing confessions.
In order to avoid punishment and conflict, most dissent on contraception by Catholic agencies is quiet. Catholic social services agencies treating migrant workers have had contracts with Planned Parenthood to provide contraception for their clients; Catholic hospitals allow doctors who have offices on their premises to prescribe birth control, some mergers between Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals accommodate family planning – and historically even found a way to provide contraceptive sterilization. Some deals fly under the radar and survive; others are squashed.
The bishops and cardinals have not changed. Unfortunately, there are few Horace McKenna’s left who will stand up for the poor against the tired efforts of bishops to demand public policy that confirms to their narrow view of what it means to be Catholic. If Horace McKenna were president of Catholic University or ran Catholic Charities instead of Larry Snyder, he’d be lobbying the bishops to provide birth control for poor women and migrant workers rather than fighting for the right to deny janitors, colleges students and health care aids insurance for contraception. He certainly would not be supporting the bishops, who, in the face of an Amnesty International report on the immorally high rate of maternal death in the United States and the increasing poverty of women and children coldly claimed that pregnancy was not a disease and contraception not preventive medicine.
Today’s bishops are a cold-hearted, power hungry lot. Not a Raymond Hunthausen among them. In 1986, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle was charged by the Vatican with allowing sterilizations to be provided in the diocese’s hospitals – as well as lack of firmness on altar girls and gays. He was, for a time, denied the right to run his diocese; Bishops Donald Wuerl was appointed as “co-adjutor” of the diocese to ensure orthodoxy. Wuerl has risen to the rank of Cardinal and presides over one of the poorest of diocese, Washington DC. In the church today, only orthodoxy is rewarded.
The heavy hand of the Vatican also came down on the Sisters of Mercy. In 1980 after a five year study the sisters, who ran the then largest public hospital system in the United States decided that good medical care included providing post partum contraceptive sterilization when women requested it. To deny them would subject the women to a second medical risk if they were sterilized at a later date. The Vatican got wind of the possible change in policy and threatened to put the whole community in “receivership” and take over their hospitals, schools and everything else if they did not change their mind and prohibit sterilization. The sisters capitulated, fearing greater harm to their patients if the Vatican were in charge.
Can the Obama administration decide which action was more “Catholic,” the Vatican’s power grab, or the Sisters desire to provide women with the safest medical care? Can or should the state get itself in a position of closely scrutinizing the validity of religious and moral claims for an exemption from public policy decisions. We have just such a process in place for deciding whether a request to be exempt from military service and the state decides on a case by case basis if the claim is genuine or motivated by fear, laziness, or other less than honorable reasons. If we are to grant broad exemptions to religious institutions, should not a similar process be used?
Best Obama stay out of the internal theological disagreements Catholics have about reproductive health. Best he focus on implementing the long standing policy consensus that family planning is essential to women’s health and empowerment and contributes to the social and economic well being of all. The religious exemption the HHS has drafted which exempts organizations that have the inculcation of religion as their purpose and that employ and serve primarily members of their own faith respects unambiguous religious institutions. Combined with the conscience protection offered to individuals it is more than adequate protection of religious liberty.
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These groups are asking you to join them in telling the White House not to capitulate to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and throw women under the bus on contraceptive coverage:
Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health
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23 Comments
Oh yeah? I know someone who says otherwise http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqsd0WNl8u0
not to make light of a very serious subject, I just couldn’t resist.
Under the circustances, i cannot imagine who in their right mind would not actually promote birth control. I mean, anyone at this time who thinks any form of birth control is bad, is actually PROMOTING POPLULATION GROWTH. Yeah? Tell you what… by the time we come anywhere close to global flooding, year round oven temperatures or lack of oxygen, we will be drowning in people.
Whew. I had not realized that so many bishops worldwide had come out against the Vatican’s stated position on birth control.
Thanks a lot for marshaling all this information.
Is it niggling of me to suspect that part of what’s driving the U.S. bishops’ opposition is simply not wanting to pay for employees’ contraception without copays?
Rec’d
Doesn’t it strike you as a bit strange that a group of people who have never had children, never been a parent, are telling millions of other people if they are “allowed” to prevent pregnancy, and then kicking them out of their cult if they disagree ?
Time to call it what it is: a membership drive. More pregnancies, more Catholics, more cash, more power.
John Lennon: “Imagine there’s no religion” – that’s the solution, brothers and sisters.
I think the Bishops have been discussing with Obama the last but withheld slide from Father Guido Sarducci’s Slide Show.
Oh yes, my favorite Roman Catholic clergyman, Father Sarducci.
In the midst of his seemingly innocent discussions of and observations on the Catholic Church in particular and religion in general he rarely misses the essential truth.
Catholicism and ultimately all ‘god’ centered religions demand unquestioning allegiance to a series of absurdities foisted on the minds of man by a miscreant group of ancient men armed with the collective mythologies of human history.
And the fulcrum of their demand for faith when reason and reality relegate them and their corrupted manuscripts to the insane asylum of human enlightenment is:
The holy book must be absolutely correct because it says it is, and ‘god’ wrote it because on the pain of eternal damnation we the true spokesman for ‘god’ say ‘he’ did.
So who are the truly deluded and contemptible?
The con artists profiting from the selling of the elixir of eternal life or the suckers who blindly find contentment in the absurd?
You hate all religion. Fine. That’s your right.
BUT
You don’t get to misrepresent it, or its history, or what other people believe.
Respect others, if you want them to respect you.
There’d still be people starting religious wars. Because religions are about belief that one way is better than another, not about God as such.
Beware of leering old men in long flowing dresses and Gucci soft leather flats. If the guys aren’t famous comedians in drag, then they are probably out to do you harm in one way or another.
As a retired Catholic I think the church’s stance on birth control is not just mired in fear/hatred of women (and their sexual power) or in sex itself but also in economics. The Catholic Church is losing followers, esp. in the U.S. That’s why it is so much in the forefront of pro-illegal immigration from Latin American countries. Simple truth: it needs the parishoners. Now, with the economic malaise and increased government immigration control efforts, the previous growth base is diminishing. Ergo, got put the onus on current Catholics to churn out more kiddies.
It doesn’t seem like a religious matter to me at all. If the law requires all insurers to provide a product w/o copays, that’s the regulation of commerce.
If certain hospitals, clinics, etc. receive public funding and serve the public, then abide by the public rules.
I detest religious bodies inserting themselves into gov’t in order to influence law for everyone; especially on behalf of discrimination against a specific group. What is it with churches and women’s bodies? Creepy perversity.
Tax the churches. They’ve breached their separate place in society.
Anything for a buck.
What if there’s something to this transformation stuff,
mistakes here and there providing gradients.
Suppose we’ve been overworking it like an SAT question.
Suppose it’s Lamarckian.
(means: thousands of messenger RNA’s altering by virtue
of daily experience, variously paranoid or positive, altering
our very DNA in such manner that it is then multi-generationsl
(just recently proved (SURPRISE!) a fact, Jack.))
Suppose a conveyed understanding.
part of much other technological whence understood
Then, the unwanted child is the least likely to have any such
thing as a soul that can be saved.
However, I don’t take the question lightly and am comfortable with
the current U.S. compromise on the subject.
As to “it’s a fact Jack,” it’s a steal from Bill Murray / “Stripes.”
I’m guessing Bill O’Reilly’s (approximate, from memory, not self-verified:)
“loofah” gag comes from John Larroquette / “Stripes,” and if so, I won’t here venture a guess about it, except that I just liked my grab for emphasis and being positive.
Reviewing what I’ve done, let’s see:
Lamarckian: on point.
“that’s a fact Jack:” being honest where from
loofah: same source I’m guessing. Was it used / re-used?
What if there’s something to this transformation stuff,
mistakes here and there providing gradients.
Suppose we’ve been overworking it like an SAT question.
Suppose it’s Lamarckian.
(means: thousands of messenger RNA’s altering by virtue
of daily experience, variously paranoid or positive, altering
our very DNA in such manner that it is then multi-generationsl
(just recently proved (SURPRISE!) a fact, Jack.))
Suppose a conveyed understanding.
part of much other technological once understood if it’s for real
Then, the unwanted child is the least likely to have any such
thing as a soul that can be saved.
However, I don’t take the question lightly and am comfortable with
the current U.S. compromise on the subject.
As to “it’s a fact Jack,” it’s a steal from Bill Murray / “Stripes.”
I’m guessing Bill O’Reilly’s (approximate, from memory, not self-verified:)
“loofah” gag comes from John Larroquette / “Stripes,” and if so, I won’t here venture a guess about it, except that I just liked my grab for emphasis and being positive.
Reviewing what I’ve done, let’s see:
Lamarckian: on point.
“that’s a fact Jack:” being honest where from
loofah: same source I’m guessing. WAS IT used / re-used? IF yes,
sensibly?
The only form of birth control that seems acceptable to the Catholic Church would be sodomizing little boys…what a bunch of damned hypocrites. Clearly no priest or bishop would consider intercourse with an adult, consenting woman to be useful for anything but procreation. We see where they find their pleasures.
In Lamarck’s time, DNA was not even imagined, much less RNA and their roles in evolutionary biology.There is some interesting new work suggesting a somewhat Lamarckian phenomena, but my understanding is that it is viral influences (since they spontaneously mutate and replicate)on messanger RNA, that is what you’re referring to. Lamarck advocated for Spontaneous Generation, a theory that has been thoroughly de-bunked for over 100 years.Children in junior high school bio labs do the banana in a jar experiment to disprove Lamarck to this day. I don’t mean to be picky, just trying to explain that references to Lamarck have only a tangential reference to modern scientific thought. Sorry.
Considering the enormous number of human beings the Roman Catholic Church has directly or indirectly slaughtered during its 1,800 year reign of terror, and considering the abject, unending slaughter of human life by all other religions in the name of ‘god’, if anything, I was quite kind to not chastise our primitive minded religious excuses for human beings with whips and scorpions.
By the way, regarding my misrepresentation of religious, vacuous minds and their blood soaked history, their tales are hidden in books. Open many lately?
And for what it is worth, I extend absolutely no respect to religious mental cretins, and would label their ‘respect’ for any product of the Enlightenment to be a slur against the name of humanity.
Or have you forgotten that the Roman Catholic Church in the name of ‘god’ burned human beings alive for daring to think.
Religion is the opiate of the masses and the scourge of human enlightenment.
Once again, it’s in the books.
This is an excellent, informative essay. The subtleties of Catholic moral theology are especially hard for non-Catholics to appreciate given the politicized, pseudo-religious positions adopted by the Church’s current leadership. The primacy of conscience was central to my catechetical training 50 years ago and it has been enough to silence every conscientious priest with whom I have had to argue this issue since.
That said, I doubt that Mr. Obama has any more concern for what Catholics think or for what our faith teaches than the Vatican does. He will decide based on the same, bizarre, Beltway-blinkered calculus that has ruled all of his decisions to date: what influence will it buy him with which moneyed, perceived power-base…and the electorate be damned.
Moreover, I feel strongly that matters of Catholic morality should NOT be the deciding factor in a purely secular, political/economic decision like insurance regulation. At least since the time of St. Augustine, Catholic thought has recognized the difference between the personal, faith- and conscience-based choices that I make for myself and for which I am to be judged by Heaven and the purely secular, societal decisions that have to be based upon what is best for the greatest number using knowledge that is available to everyone, believers and non-believers alike. When Catholics have a moral position on some secular action, we have to make our case in secular terms, not religious ones.
The current Catholic hierarchy, however, choose to willfully blur of the line between secular and sacred because it is politically expedient. This is particularly galling when one remembers that separation of Church and State is arguably the defining feature of Catholicism and the entire basis of Papal authority. The western, Catholic Church broke from the eastern, Orthodox Churches because it would not recognize the Roman/Byzantine Emperors’ claimed authority over doctrine. Similarly, during the Reformation, the Catholic (“Universal”) Church rejected the Protestant model of authority: national and local churches governed by secular authorities. The Catholic Church is not supposed to be political. It is supposed to be in the world, but not of the world.
It’s Monsignor Guido Sarducci! :)
Good one. Even my wife said it was disgusting. I think it’s appropriate for the discussion.
Religious freedom is letting the Catholic church decide government policy?
How in the hell can anybody walk into a Roman Catholic Church now that it’s obvious the whole institution from the ground up protected child molesters.
That Pope guy, the guy who The Church claims is infallible, shielded child molesters from prosecution.
Repeat… the Pope protected child molesters. How can anybody walk through the front door of a Catholic Church once you realize that?
Why is anyone listening to anyone in leadership of the Catholic Church anymore? They’re either child molesters or protected them.