BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE: THE PROBLEM WITH THE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ARGUMENT

Bishop Thomas Curry

As most of us know by now, the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom is being invoked by our Church leaders to challenge President Obama’s contraceptive mandate. What you probably haven’t heard is that we have no constitutional basis for doing so, and if brought before the court, we would lose such a challenge.

At least that is the opinion of Bishop Thomas Curry of Los Angeles, an historian and First Amendment scholar - an opinion of course that is completely out of step with Cardinal Dolan and the rest of the USCCB who have pinned their hopes for a wider exemption from the mandate on the basis that it violates religious freedom.

Curry opined in a recent speech given at Catholic University that the contraceptive mandate is NOT unconstitutional because it does not target a specific religion. The fact that Catholics feel targeted is simply due to the fact that the Catholic Church is the only major religion which prohibits deliberate contraceptive acts. But the Catholic Church would have no more First Amendment standing against the mandate than Jehovah Witnesses had against serving in the military during the days of a mandated draft.

As you may recall, JW’s and other conscientious objectors, while they could be exempted from military service, were not exempt from the penalty for not serving. Some were given alternative community tasks, others were assigned to non-combat duty, and still others, as in the famous Muhammed Ali case, were sentenced to prison. Under the mandate, Catholics are free to avoid the mandate by not purchasing health insurance, but they would still be liable for the penalty for not doing so as were conscientious objectors to the military draft.

Also, Catholic leaders seem to have forgotten that there is no blanket guarantee of religious liberty in America, and indeed, we may not want one. In 1878, the Supreme Court ruled that George Reynolds, a Mormon, did not have a First Amendment right to marry more than one wife, despite the dictates of his religion, and was sent to jail for doing so. The Catholic Church did not protest and today would still support the state’s right to penalize polygamists.

While the Mormon church has since changed its teaching on plural marriage, Islam has not. Islam teaches that a man can have up to four wives. Will we be expecting the U.S. bishops to demand religious liberty for American Muslims in that regard? Islam also teaches honor killings and the killing of converts to Christianity (though not all hold to it). Any calls for religious liberty here?

What about religious liberty for Wiccans and other neo-pagan religions? There is already a Wiccan shrine, built at taxpayer expense, on the grounds of the U.S. Air Force Academy, and a taxpayer funded witch ministry to see to the spiritual needs of Wiccan cadets. Do we....should we support religious liberty for the religious practices of witchcraft-related and other pagan religions? I think not, but this is where the religious liberty argument will take us, and I think that this is precisely where President Obama is allowing it - if not wanting it - to go (for the purposes of a much larger social engineering agenda).

Also Catholics seem to have forgotten that religious liberty, as an established doctrine, only dates back to Vatican II. Prior to that, Catholicism had gradually incorporated a pragmatic approach to religious tolerance, but the Church historically not only condemned and persecuted what it deemed to be heresy, it condemned and persecuted heretics as well.

It makes me wonder if Obama isn’t waiting for just the right moment to bring up the Inquisitions, the Crusades, and the decimation of native New World populations by (Spanish-Catholic) Conquistadors. And let’s not forget that for centuries Christianity did not condemn slavery but in fact commanded slaves to obey their masters. (Something that we will look into another time but has already been floated by media mongers.) I can hear Obama scoffing (with the god-like reverb that seems to accompany all his speeches): “Catholics? Religious liberty? Come on, give me a break!” - and then roars of approval and thunderous applause. Scary.

The truth about those things and how the Church actually intervened to tame the excesses of what were essentially state-sponsored ventures (at least in the case of the Inquisitions, the conquest of the New World, and slavery) won’t matter. Perception is everything, and the Church, still limping from its clergy sex abuse wound, will be blasted  out of the public arena by the Obamanites as Jew-burning, Indian-killing, Muslim-brutalizing, slavery-advocating, child-molesting, woman-subjugating, medieval pretenders to religious freedom. And we are marching right into this with signs held high!

The absolutely amazing thing  is that the USCCB’s cry for religious freedom is not even necessary. Obama, unintentionally perhaps, has already given the bishops all the exemption they need. Let’s review:

The mandate exempts religious employers and defines a religious employer as:  (1) has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose; (2) primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets; (3) primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets; and (4) is a non-profit organization under Internal Revenue Code...

Most Catholic organizations already qualify under the IRS code, so let’s look at the others. (1) What is keeping the bishops from simply stating that all of its institutions, its hospitals, schools, clinics, orphanages, etc., have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose”? Do we not exist first and foremost to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed?

Incredibly, one of the arguments proffered by the USCCB leadership has been that not even Jesus, since he cared for everyone, would qualify for the exemption. This amazing statement presupposes that Jesus’s primary purpose was to heal the sick, not save them! That we can even float this argument with any degree of seriousness from the official rostrum of the USCCB is an indication of just how far our commitment to social justice has gone to replace our duty to save souls.

As for (2) employing or (3) serving people who share our religious tenets we can simply say “we don’t know” and shift the burden of proof to the government. A religious employer can no more determine the level of adherence in the heart of an employee or patient to its church’s religious tenets than could a priest determine the level of adherence to Catholic religious tenets in the hearts of those who regularly attend Sunday Mass. And the government would have no means of doing so either.

In fact, this is Bishop Curry’s point. After stating that the imposition of the contraceptive mandate is not in itself unconstitutional, Curry points out that the language of the exemption in which Obama attempts to define what constitutes a religious employer is the part of the mandate that IS unconstitutional. For not only does the President NOT have the authority to define what constitutes a religious employer, he neither has the authority to measure whether or not, or to what degree, a person employed or served by a religious institution subscribes to its religious tenets.

Imagine the conundrum. A non-Catholic patient in a Catholic hospital responds to his government interrogator:  “Yes, I believe in the Trinity, that Jesus Christ is God, that he died for my sins and opened the gates of heaven, and that he established his Church on earth. It could be the Catholic Church. I’m not sure yet. I’m looking into it.” Or imagine a Catholic working at a Catholic university saying “Yes, I believe in the Catholic Church as the true Church but I don’t go along with the Church’s teaching on divorce and birth control.”

In short, the exemption is impossible to police and the USCCB, in barking about religious freedom, is simply barking up the wrong tree. But to change course and exploit the exemption the bishops would have to say that the primary purpose of every Catholic institution is to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ and that while they would like to be able to determine the level of adherence to that Gospel by the people they employ and serve, they have no means of doing so.

By merely stating so, Obama and his contraceptive-sterility-mad matron (Sibelius) could not touch the Church. However, the fact that it appears that we have either not thought of this, or there is in fact a reluctance to claim our institutions and our work for Jesus Christ, is evidence that our Church may have bigger problems than Obama.

*****

That said, regardless of how the Church fairs in its stand-off over the exemption, the rest of us who are not directly in the employ of the Church, are already being forced to fund, through our insurance premiums, the evil that our Church condemns.

For the rest of us, our only hope is for the individual (not the contraceptive) mandate to be declared unconstitutional (the case is being heard as of this writing), and barring that, the election of a president and a congress who are committed to the repeal of the whole Obamacare monstrosity - for it contains many other such death-driven surprises.

Meanwhile, let us hope that our own Archdiocese will claim that all of its institutions have “the inculcation of its religious values as its purpose” and in so doing avoid having to fund the evil our Church rejects. The rest of us will just have to look out for ourselves. But we can at least make sure that the congressional candidate of our choosing this November is committed to the death of this whole evil edict. We shall see.

THUS SPAKE KARL MARX

A few days ago I came across a challenging post by an old friend on Facebook claiming a woman’s right to free birth control. I engaged the issue with her for a bit and ended up in the middle of a female comment-ambush from her other friends (if you know how Facebook works). My only support came from a guy who clicked “like” on one of my comments and then disappeared.

Defending the Church’s teaching on contraception can be a lonely venture given that the Church herself is alone amongst other Christian religions in this regard, and within the Church, opposition and rejection of the doctrine is so endemic that the faithful remnant who adhere to it are regularly forced to creatively respond to ridicule, e.g. “Don’t you know what causes that?” (A common slur, albeit usually friendly, whenever it is learned that one has more than two or three children, or you are expecting...“Again!”)

Perhaps Exhibit A of just how leprous this issue is, is the current insistence that the opposition to the Obama mandate is not about contraception but about religious liberty and rights of conscience. Hmmm. Perhaps this is why the episcopal roar sounds no louder than a squeak to the otherwise-occupied Obama. The fact is that the only thing that makes this an issue of religious liberty, is not THAT the government is telling us what to do, but WHAT the government is telling us to do.

Churches are forced to obey civil mandates all the time on such things as building, safety, and health regulations. We don’t complain that our religious liberty is being violated because our church is forced to comply with these things, so why are we complaining about the contraceptive mandate? Answer:  Because either through payment for health insurance or the fine that would be levied in the absence of insurance IT FORCES US TO MATERIALLY PARTICIPATE IN AN INTRINSICALLY EVIL ACT!

No, not just something morally objectionable, morally problematic, or against our beliefs - milquetoast terms which have been used to characterize the dilemma. No, the term is “intrinsic evil”. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2370: "...every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil...”

The only thing that justifies our complaint against Obama’s assault on religious liberty is the objective fact that contraceptive acts are intrinsically evil and not just intrinsically evil for Catholics, but intrinsically evil for everyone. The Catholic Church possesses the fullness of truth and if the Catholic Church teaches that an act is intrinsically evil then it is always evil for all people in all times and all places, period. And we need to say so.

If we don’t believe that then we might as well turn in our missalettes and head down the street to the First Church of What’s Happening Now where if we don’t like what Pastor Billy Joe Jim Bob is preachin’ we can fire him and hire Pastor Feelgood and contracept in peace. (Forgive my brief flight into metaphor.)

Intrinsic evil is a 10 on the 1 to 10 scale of evil. Not even homosexual acts rate a 10 as the Catechism categorizes those as only “intrinsically disordered” (CCC 2357), presumably a notch or two below a 10. Intrinsic evil puts any act that intentionally renders procreation impossible in the same category as procured abortion: always and everywhere GRAVE SIN and under no circumstance can be ever justified. With such clear teaching, one wonders how so many Catholics seem to either not know about it or not care.

Ironically, the very issues the bishops are arguing with Obama about, religious freedom and conscience rights, are the very concepts many Catholics use (albeit mistakenly) to justify their disregard for the very doctrine the bishops appear to be desirous of protecting: many Catholics simply feel that as matter of “freedom of conscience” and “religious liberty”, they are free to make up their own minds about birth control. In fact, some of us are even told to do so (as I was).

How this errant idea of conscience came to dominate the modern Catholic mind is a question we seriously need to engage given its ubiquity and the institutionalized debauchery (as predicted by Paul VI) it has wrought, not to mention the mockery it makes of the marriage vow and the consequent desecration of sacramental family life! We once again have to ask: “How did we get here?”

Father John O’Malley gives us a clue in “What Happened at Vatican II” wherein he recounts the titanic struggle at the Council over the unleashing of the idea of religious liberty, something actually previously condemned by the Church.  

Many bishops warned that despite the caveat noting that religious liberty, as put forth in the document Dignitas Humanae, applied ONLY to religious immunity from governmental coercion, the very notion of religious freedom, untethered from its very narrow traditional moorings, would lead to the privatization of conscience where one would perceive a license to pick and choose one’s doctrines and eventually one’s church, or even no church at all. Sound familiar?

So while the document’s authors attempted to take great care in not letting the noble idea of religious liberty devolve into personal license, and while its defenders continue to sincerely insist that the idea of religious liberty as put forth by the Council brooked no rupture with the past, we simply have what we have: Catholics who see no problem with abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, and a take it or leave it attitude about the sacraments, all of whom yet believe they are going straight to heaven because Jesus loves them “just the way they are.”

From the moment Dignitas Humanae was propagated, a defense of the document was needed. Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have all attempted to show that the misapplication of religious liberty was due to a problem with its interpretation, not the teaching itself.

Benedict XVI, seeing clearly the rent in the church, both in the consequent abdication of moral teaching and the split with certain traditionalists (SSPX) with whom he is attempting to reconcile, has admitted that there is “some kind of discontinuity” in the religious liberty of Vatican II versus the religious liberty of Pius IX, but believes that the key to continuity lies in the application of the the proper hermeneutic. And of course he is correct. But meanwhile, we have a problem. A big one. And Obama has socked us right between the hermeneutic.

So what now? We are at the precipice of where forty plus years of an errant and mostly-tolerated idea of religious liberty has brought us. To win this one the bishops need their troops, but the troops are depleted, ironically by the very thing they are trying to protect: religious liberty. Religious liberty, or more correctly, the perceived idea of it, has led to both a radical depletion in family size and a mass exodus from the one, true Church. The pews are more than half empty, and the few who are left have probably never heard the words “intrinsic evil”, at least not in the same sentence with birth control.

A loss for our church leadership on this one is more than just the loss of a religious exemption. It will be a malignant manifestation of the very thing Dignitias Humanae was supposed to prevent: coercion of religion by the state. And once the state can coerce religion, then history shows that the tyrannical repression of religious people themselves is only a few short steps away.

Make no mistake, the crippling of church, and the Catholic Church in particular, is always the first step towards totalitarianism. Thus spake Karl Marx: “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.” And we have already seen how that has worked out.

In a recent interview with Vatican Radio, Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin said of the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty: “If they can do it to Catholics, they can do it to anybody.” Morlino’s warning was reminiscent of the famous statement attributed to Martin Niemoller about the unchallenged Nazi rise to power, which is here, paraphrased:

First they came for the Catholicsand I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Catholic.Then the came for the (next target group)and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a (member of said target group)Then they came for the (next target group)and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a (member of said target group)Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak out for me.

Don’t think it can happen in America? Then consider the ominous prediction of the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, in response to the growing viciousness against the Catholic Church in America: “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

Depending on what happens in November of 2012, it may not even take that long.