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Kevin ClarkeFebruary 14, 2012

More than 500 Catholic activists from diocesan peace and justice and Catholic Charities offices across the country in Washington this week for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering are on their way this afternoon to Capitol Hill. They will be highlighting the domestic and international policy concerns of the U.S. Catholic bishops in conversations with their home senators and house members. This time, in addition to what have become annual appeals to protect discretionary spending for unemployment benefits, foreign aid and other domestic and international discretionary spending that have become regular targets of budget hawks, the gathering’s impromptu activist army will be pushing back against what the bishop’s perceive as unconstitutional intrusion by the Obama administration on religious liberty. That conflict began in August after the release of an “interim” requirement from the Department of Health and Human Services for mandatory women’s preventive services included contraception coverage and offered a narrow conscience exemption for religious employers.

Last week President Obama tried to put the issue to rest with a “common sense accommodation” that he argues removes objecting employers from the equation, requiring insurers to offer contraception free of charge without additional premiums, referrals or plan offerings from employers. Objecting religious employers could offer health benefits which technically did not include contraception, but employees who wanted the services would be able to get them directly from the insuruer. One activist summed up the objection to the compromise: “He wants us to lie to our employers [about what is in the health plans], and he wants us to still pay for contraception.”

“The person who foots the bill is still the employer and other people paying through their premiums,” complained U.S.C.C.B. General Counsel Anthony Picarello. “The question before us remains: Can the government compel people to do something that violates their deeply held [religious] principles?

“The idea of forcing religious entities to provide [contraception] services that are widely available and inexpensive is the core absurdity.”

The “accommodation” offered by the president has now been soundly rejected by the U.S. bishops. Attending a consistory in Rome during which he will be elevated to Cardinal, New York Archbishop and U.S.C.C.B. President Timothy Dolan flatly rejected the proposal.

"We bishops are pastors, we're not politicians, and you can't compromise on principle," he said. "We're in the business of reconciliation, so it's not that we hold fast, that we're stubborn ideologues, no. But we don't see much sign of any compromise.”

"What [President Obama] offered was next to nothing. There's no change, for instance, in these terribly restrictive mandates and this grossly restrictive definition of what constitutes a religious entity," he said. "The principle wasn't touched at all."

Indeed U.S.C.C.B. General Counsel Anthony Picarello told the gathering’s participants as they prepped for their hill visits, that the language of the new Health and Human Services requirement for contraception services and the exemption it offered was published unaltered in the federal register on Feb. 13, retaining the narrow definition for conscience exemption which the bishops object to and a government authority in validating the religious identity of institutions which perform secular roles. “They stated an intention to issue more regulations” clarifying the mandate, Picarello said, but there is no guarantee such additional regulations will be added. “Something that makes us even less confident” in the outcome, Picarello said, is the administration’s desire to put off a final decision until after the “point of political accountability,” the November election.

"What happened on friday," Picarello said, "reshuffled the deck, but it did not change the hand that was dealt."

In American life, he said, the concept of religious liberty "as a mutual understanding has been presumed for too long. And now that it’s been put to the test, it appears many don’t understand it.

“We need a legislative fix; [it’s] the only clean solution to this,” he added.

That legislative fix is already in the works, and the Catholic activists deploying from the social ministry gathering were asked to urge their representatives in Congress to support the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, introduced by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb. The act amends the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) “to permit a health plan to decline coverage of specific items and services that are contrary to the religious beliefs of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan or the purchaser or beneficiary (in the case of individual coverage) without penalty” and “declares that such plans are still considered to: (1) be providing the essential health benefits package or preventive health services, (2) be a qualified health plan, and (3) have fulfilled other requirements under PPACA.”

Dolan said the legislation would produce an "ironclad law simply saying that no administrative decrees of the federal government can ever violate the conscience of a religious believer individually or religious institutions." The U.S.C.C.B.’s Kathy Saile, Director of Domestic Social Development, said the legislation would mean that religious institutions would not be susceptible to further regulatory intrusion on this matter.

The controversy promises to be a political football for the balance of the election season and has proved to be a source of contention within the church. After initially siding with the bishops against the administration, Sister Carol Keehan, CEO and President of the Catholic Health Association found herself again at odds with the U.S.C.C.B. over an Obama administration initiative. She welcomed the “compromise” offered by the president on Feb. 10, praising "a resolution ... that protects the religious liberty and conscience rights of Catholic institutions.”

Dolan said he e-mailed Keehan the same day to tell her that he was "disappointed that she had acted unilaterally, not in concert with the bishops.

"She's in a bind," Dolan said. "When she's talking to [H.H.S. Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius and the president of the United States, in some ways, these are people who are signing the checks for a good chunk of stuff that goes on in Catholic hospitals. It's tough for her to stand firm. Understandably, she's trying to make sure that anything possible, any compromise possible, that would allow the magnificent work of Catholic health care to continue, she's probably going to be innately more open to than we would."

The president’s accommodation was also welcomed by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Catholic lobby Network. Liberal Catholics who supported the bishops initially now seem uneasy by what they perceive to be efforts by the bishops to "move the goalposts" and extend the religious liberty argument beyond the parameters of religious institutional employers to include individual employer and even employee objectors on conscience grounds. Some suspect a concerted effort to put Obama in a no-win situation on contraception that could contribute to another no-win condition come November.

The president has said that he can go no further on the matter, while at the same time noting that he intended to continue consulting religious leaders about implementation. The election season is still young, however. A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Feb. 8-12 finds the American public closely divided over the H.H.S. policy. Among the approximately six-in-10 Americans (62 percent) who have heard about the rule, 48 percent support an exemption to the rule for religious institutions if they object to the use of contraceptives, and 44 percent say they should be required to cover contraceptives like other employers.

Perhaps of most concern to the administration are swing voting Catholics, 55 percent of Catholics “who have heard at least a little about the issue,” favor giving religious institutions an exemption, while 39 percent oppose exemptions. White evangelical Protestants, by an even larger margin—68 percent to 22 percent—favor giving religious institutions an exemption. White mainline Protestants are divided (44 percent favor an exemption, 46 percent are opposed). Pew reports: “By contrast, a majority, 55 percent, of the religiously unaffiliated who have heard about the issue say religious institutions that object to the use of contraceptives should be required to cover them like other institutions, while 39 percent favor giving an exemption to these institutions.”

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
Marie Rehbein
12 years 1 month ago
No one is required to use birth control, Joe.  No one.  The coverage can exist and no one needs to use a penny's worth of it. 

ed gleason
12 years 1 month ago
That 500 Catholic peace and justice people are going to traipse up to Capitol Hill to push for BC health care exemptions is sad. Jobs now are tough.. but they should ask for unemployment insurance extensions instead and then seek other employment. Their eight to ten dependent children will surely find food... Oops  
Eugene Pagano
12 years 1 month ago
Consider David Gibson's examination: "Analysis: Bishops’ contraception objections fail their church's own moral reasoning."  http://www.religionnews.com/culture/social-issues/are-bishops-ignoring-their-own-moral-theology
Louann Kensinger
12 years 1 month ago
"Remote material cooperation" in post #13 sounds to me like money laundering.  This is what Obama's recent "compromise" comes down to.  He really doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.  He just doesn't get it.  To a faithful Catholic, Obama's "compromise" is too much like the other politician who famously washed his hands of the blood of the innocent.

Catholic universities and hospitals serve people of all faiths because that is what Jesus commands.  We do not impose our beliefs on others.  Women are free to go out and purchase their own contraceptives.  They are cheaper than cosmetics.  If a woman can't afford contraception, maybe she should abstain until she can. This is what it means to be responsible and mature.
12 years 1 month ago
"Ikensinger, you are proposing that poor married couples abstain from sex until finances improve?  Suppose they have a sick child that demands a lot of financial resources, do they abstain until the child passes away?"

Marie,

Catholics believe that the marital embrace should always be open to life.  If having a child is absolutely unacceptable then Catholics believe that a married couple should abstain.  I am sure the Jesuits here at America Magazine accept this teaching too.  They just don't like talking about it.  The Catholic Faith does require courage.
Marie Rehbein
12 years 1 month ago
Eugene #8, above, refers us to a website.  There I found this:

"Under traditional Catholic thinking, Catholic employers whose insurance companies provide contraceptive coverage to employees at no cost to the employee or the institution, and without the institution's involvement, are engaged in what is called 'remote material cooperation' - a perfectly legitimate way for a Catholic individual or organization to function in a sinful world."


This might be interesting to some readers:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636458/

It contains the following:
"Catholic-owned institutions and their employees must adhere to medical practice guidelines contained in the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” (hereafter called “the directives”) written by the Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops."
and
"One recent opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association described how a patient was transferred from a religiously owned to a nonsectarian hospital for labor induction to facilitate spontaneous abortion because the religious hospital would not allow the procedure until after she became septic."


If you ask me, the correct confrontation should be between the government and the bishops over who sets the standard for best medical practices and who has to follow them, not over who gets to have contraceptive coverage in their insurance plans. The US government should refuse to do business with Catholic hospitals. 

Catholic hospitals (and universities) were established to prevent Catholic immigrants from assimilating into the dominant Protestant culture.  Nowadays apparently, Catholic hospitals (and universities) are intended to be a route by which Catholic doctrine is imposed upon the non-Catholic population.
Marie Rehbein
12 years 1 month ago
Ikensinger, you are proposing that poor married couples abstain from sex until finances improve?  Suppose they have a sick child that demands a lot of financial resources, do they abstain until the child passes away?
Jim McCrea
12 years 1 month ago
Let's hope they are not being as offensive as are many who post here regularly.
Jim McCrea
12 years 1 month ago
"Why have the Jeuits issued a statement that is at odds w/ Bishop Dolan?"

Why haven't there been a lot more thinking, mature adults who are issuing statements at odds with "Bishop" Dolan?

I'll admit that many of those who do think as adults are abandoning ship in droves these days, but there must be a few left who have conciences and personal integrity which have not been overwhelmed by a misguided, misconstrued, false sense of loyalty to an organizatikon that doesn't deserve any of it.
Vince Killoran
12 years 1 month ago
"My guess"-but why guess David?  Do you "guess" about all the Catholic organizations that don't rubber stamp the USCCB position?  Do they too suffer from "thinking highly of themselves"?
Marie Rehbein
12 years 1 month ago
yawn
12 years 1 month ago
Say it aint so Kevin!  After four years of Jesuit education, instructing me in logical thinking and now the Jesuits have come to this?  Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities supports this so called accomodation?

I think that the economist Greg Mankiw sums up the irrational argument that this is an accomodation:  http://www.gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2012/02/semantics-at-highest-level.html

''A. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance that covers birth control.

B. An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance.  The health insurance company is required to cover birth control.

I can understand someone endorsing both A and B, and I can understand someone rejecting both A and B.  But I cannot understand someone rejecting A and embracing B, because they are effectively the same policy. ''
ed gleason
12 years 1 month ago
USCCB Attorney Picarello wants Catholic owned Taco Bell Franchises to exempt from health insurance mandates [even though they have no health insurance.] This was said on PBS no less.. Disbarment is the only sensible solution.  
12 years 1 month ago
Maria,

I agree 100%.  But no one should be forced to pay for someone else's birth control.  Birth control is a lifestyle choice.  I am opposed to making this lifestyle choice illegal but I am opposed to forcing people to pay for another person's lifestyle choice.
David Pasinski
12 years 1 month ago
Joe

I'm sure there may be many more prescription, treatment,  and "life-style choices" as you call them that your policy is paying for that you might not approve of.
 
The trials of insurance and un-socialized medicine! 
12 years 1 month ago
David,

There is a moral difference concerning me paying extra for a policy where I don't use the services (and don't even know about all of the services) and me paying for someone else's policy where they do use the services and I do understand those services that are provided.

Ed,

Should there only be conscience protection for those in organized religion?  Should an atheist be able to claim that they are a consciencious objector for military service?
Craig McKee
12 years 1 month ago
And of course, all 500 of these ACTIVISTS shall be bearing cashier's checks payable to the IRS to return every dime of taxpayer dollars that any of their affiliated agencies receive from the Federal, state or local government, correct? OR shall they be delivering their completely filled out affadavits declaring that their now clearly political and NON-RELIGIOUS activity no longer qualifies their agencies for a tax exemption?

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