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| Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, US Conf of Catholic Bishops |
Writings for the
Huffington Post, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, Media Director for the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has questioned why Amish Anabaptists are
exempt from US President Obama's Healthcare Reform Directive and the
Catholics are not.
What is going on?
In an election year already proven
one of the most scandal-ridden and bloody ever, Sr. Mary is merely the latest conservative
Vatican paladin to complain about the church’s lack of status in American
society. She should try being Mennonite
or Amish.
Truthfully, like the
Anabaptists, the Roman Catholic Church has come a long way from the days of
being merely tolerated or even feared to
being recognized as a full-fledged pillar of American society. Just fifty years ago, people were alarmed at
the thought of a Catholic president. So
where has the new martyrs’ complex come from?
Problematically, this complex
can also come across a bit mean.
Sr. Mary closes her essay
with a bite, “A Catholic might take
personally the Administration's dissing their beliefs. Lucky the Amish … have
their basic constitutional rights respected. If only we objected to health
insurance generally, we might be able to enjoy the same protection. Seems odd
that the Administration is more inflexible on contraception than on services
that actually treat disease,” (Walsh, ibid). [I
thought condoms helped prevent unwanted pregnancies and diseases?]
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| New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan |
In the last few months, the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops has been busy.
Former President, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, Sr. Mary’s old boss, compared local LGBT festival
organizers to the KKK for attempting to curb drinking by starting the parade
earlier – potentially conflicting with the morning mass. New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Sr. Mary’s new boss, has proclaimed a new social
crusade – exemption from allowing employees of Catholic charities to enroll in
public healthcare systems that cover contraception and the Pill. Though not a bishop, Catholic values
Republican presidential hopeful Rick
Santorum has denounced the evils of public education. All of these issues are seen as public infringements
on Catholic culture.
“What has the government got against the Catholic Church? Has it
forgotten the contributions the church has made to the poor and needy for
centuries?” Sr. Mary muses (Walsh, ibid).
Probably not. As far as I know, the people of the USA are
deeply grateful for the contributions of Roman Catholics to American healthcare
and social services – just as they are grateful to the contributions from
Amish, Lutheran, Evangelical, Jewish, Baptist and Muslim citizens as well.
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| Chicago's Cardinal Francis George |
Sr. Mary is actually trying
to compare apples to oranges. The Amish
exemption is based on their internal religious organization and on respecting
the personal beliefs of individual Amish, not on extending the reach and scope
of the Amish “Church”'s power or ideology. Importantly, the
Amish maintain a proven internal, communal commitment to health care. They are not exempted per se as much as they never
opted in.
Where Sr. Mary does not
appreciate the Obama Administration’s criteria of serving the groups internal
membership, hiring within the group and linking services directly to the
maintenance of group beliefs, those criteria in fact describe the Amish exclusion (Walsh,
ibid).
Truly appreciative of
contributions by religious groups to the greater society, the American public
has at the same time agreed from the beginning on the separation between church and
state. The Amishers’ criteria are not
arbitrary but have been negotiated over 238 years.
If the Santorum campaign’s
direction is any clue, Sr. Mary probably understands this. Santorum’s solution – that the separation
between church and state should be compromised.
“You hear so much about separation of church and state. I’m for separation of church
and state. The state has no business telling what the church to do,”
(ABC News, see below). Is he demanding a new priviligium for the Catholics?
What is at stake is the
Catholic control over non-Catholic employees, non-Catholic recipients of
Catholic Charities (often utilizing substantial tax payer subsidies and public
grants) and the students of Roman Catholic schools and universities. In other words, does the Catholic Church have
the right to use public subsidies and tax deductions to force others to comply
with their ideology? For the most part,
the US tradition is that one has to choose between public financing and private
religion – even for the Amish.
Sr Mary seemingly supports this deduction,
“Catholic social service agencies,
including adoption and foster care agencies, parish food banks and soup
kitchens, meet human concerns. Services depend on need, not creed. Church
sponsorship means the services have a little extra, be they volunteers from
parishes, financial donations through diocesan appeals, or the dedication that
comes from working for God as well as paycheck,” (Walsh, ibid).
The concern is with the little extra – the little extra provided
by American taxpayers to help fund and support those services. Or, the little
extra in the form of indoctrination or additional rules with which one has
to comply in order to receive those service.
These little extras are what
require effective government oversight.
Back to Cardinal Francis
George and his worry about the gay KKK.
Cardinal George’s problems with the annual gay PRIDE festival pale
beside his problems failing to effectively manage relations between the state
of Illinois and Catholic Charities’ child adoption services. As Dolan’s predecessor as head of the US
Conference of Catholic Bishops, George, Walsh and Dolan form a continuum of
power.
George’s beef with the state of Illinois is
that the Church wants to handle adoption services for the state, but only want
to consider heterosexual married couples for adoption placement. Problematically, the Illinois church’s intent
is contra the laws and civil liberties of the Illinois state. Rather than consider adoption placement with
gay and lesbian couples, the church shut down all adoption services and gave up
is license to the state. Even when
providing a state service, the Roman Catholic Church in Illinois would not
tolerate state intervention or oversight into those services. If controversial aspects of Catholic doctrine
are not unquestioningly adopted, George would rather stop feeding the poor and assisting
the needy. What is the real priority?
An unasked question is if the
state did not intervene would these same adoption services begin perhaps
prioritizing adoptions to Catholic families over non-Catholics? How far would George go?
If the Catholic Church can
exempt itself from dealing with gays and lesbians in a state-run program, then
should not Bob Jones University be allowed to return to teaching against
inter-racial couples? Fair is fair. Internal is internal.
Many Catholic laypersons have
quietly questioned why the church has taken such a tough and public stance over
the matter of contraception – a prohibition that Catholic law student Sandra Fluke of Georgetown University,
in Washington, DC, recently indicated was apparently openly ignored at her Catholic
school. She was ridiculed across the
nation, most notably by radio host Rush
Limbaugh, for her support of President Obama’s directive.
As a fellow alumni of
Georgetown, I also recall many students cynically observing that for a Roman
Catholic school that was strongly anti-abortion, yet tolerant of one of the
nation’s most notorious hook-up cultures, there were surprisingly few
pregnancies on campus.
Is it also likely that the US Conference of
Catholic Bishops is actually seeking precedents by which to preserve its own
largely discredited internal privileges and a means by which it might not only
prevent itself from losing more church treasure and property to damaging external
lawsuits regarding incidents it would prefer to maintain as “private” and
“internal” matters? Is Sr. Mary alluding
that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is perhaps less concerned about
condoms and more concerned about avoiding having more Cardinals and Bishops
humiliated in front of Grand Juries and an increasingly hostile press over
internal policies?
How different in fact is this
new attitude of no-compromise from church principals, and claims of special
privilege and the ability to discriminate from those principles against which
the original early Anabaptists rebelled, eventually helping to spread the doctrine of
separation of church and state in order to prevent such scandals in the future?
The desire for undue power
and the need for self-preservation are significant motivators.
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| Philadelpia's Cardinal Justin Rigali |
In 2002, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law stepped down as
Archbishop of Boston over allegations that he used Church privilege and internal resources to help avoid public
scrutiny of growing child sex-abuse scandals and to help suspect priests find
new appointments – not for just a few years, but for decades. Investigations into Cardinal Law’s actions
soon spread to other influential members of the US Conference of Catholic
Bishops. Possibly avoiding further
questions and legal complications, Law controversially left the United States
and was internally reassigned to
Rome’s Santa Maria di Maggiore.
Just last year (2011), a
Grand Jury in Philadelphia, Penn., found that yet another archdiocese, after
having been investigated in 2005, still failed to provide adequate internal oversight over its priests or
to protect the well-being of minors with internal Catholic policies. Cardinal Justin
Rigali has been roundly criticized for this failing and for attempting to
keep reports of child molestation covered up internally.
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| Cardinal Barnard Law, Boston & Rome |
In 2012, Cardinal George felt compelled to
reassure potential contributors to the Catholic Fund Drive that none of the
funds raised would be used to cover legal expenses or settlements incurred by
church scandals. Are these the little extras to which Sr. Mary refers?
Sr. Mary – might it not also
be true that that if the US Conference of Catholic Bishops were less political
and a bit more flexible on contraception, and more open to cooperating with the
state, that the they might now have more credibility, having less to hide? Injecting a bit of the state’s public
objectivity into the internal oversight of the church not only provides a fall
guy for the church to blame less popular internal changes, but, as an auditor,
the state could serve as a seal of approval and best practices, reassuring more
jittery Catholics that their house is truly in order. Forget about the Amish – they have their own
concerns.
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