February 3, 2012

Bishops urge Catholic voters to demand change in HHS regulations

Photo by Rick Musacchio

Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M., of Philadelphia delivers the homily during the instillation of Sister Mary Sarah Galbraith, O.P., as the new president of Aquinas College on Jan. 26. Archbishop Chaput is part of Aquinas’ new President’s Advisory Council. During his visit to Nashville, Archbishop Chaput spoke to the Tennessee Register about the need for the laity to raise vocal opposition to the new HHS regulations requiring employers to cover contraceptives and sterilizations.

From staff reports and Catholic News Service

It will be up to Catholic voters to convince the federal government to rescind a recent decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to go forward with new regulations requiring that all health insurance plans cover contraceptives and sterilization free of charge, said Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M., of Philadelphia.

“Bishops can’t tell politicians what to do, but Catholic voters can,” said Archbishop Chaput, who was in Nashville Jan. 26 to celebrate the Mass of installation for new Aquinas College President Sister Mary Sarah Galbraith, O.P.

Political leaders respond to pressure from citizens, he added, and Catholics ought to demand respect for religious values.

In the wake of the announcement of the new regulations, Archbishop Chaput and Nashville Bishop David Choby joined fellow bishops in urging Catholics in the pew to be more politically active. “Otherwise, if you sit back and be quiet, bad things happen,” Archbishop Chaput said.

In a letter to the people of the diocese, printed on page 3 of this edition of the Tennessee Register, Bishop Choby noted that American Catholics through history have demonstrated their commitment to their country and their civic duty in times of peace and war.

Now, it seems like “our affection and commitment to our country has received an indifferent response from those who currently govern us,” Bishop Choby said in the letter, noting that President Barack Obama had made personal assurances “that we as Catholics would not be put in a position to disregard or violate our consciences in the area of certain medical procedures.”

“If we are forced to provide for tubal ligations and abortifacient drugs, what is to keep the government from demanding that Catholic hospitals provide abortions?” wrote Bishop Choby, who also has asked that a letter about the issue be read at all Masses in the diocese the weekend of Feb. 4-5. “We are in the business to make people whole and well. Ours is not the business of attacking life. But to receive it and nurture it as a gift from God.”

Bishop Choby, who was in Rome for an ad limina visit when the announcement of the HHS regulations were made, joined the chorus of bishops across the country who are urging Catholics to contact their elected representatives and voice their objections to the new mandate.

“The bishops of the United States are unified in our opposition to this measure. However, our views will not receive a great deal of consideration in the public square. They will be dismissed as being “out of touch,” Bishop Choby said.

“I want to encourage your involvement in this issue. First, continue to pray for those elected to lead us. Second, study and read about the Church’s efforts to defend and promote the sanctity of life; and finally, take your rightful place in the political process by communicating to those at the national level your opposition to this particular consequence of the new health care initiative.”

On Jan. 20, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that the federal government would go forward with regulations that all health plans be required to cover all FDA-approved contraceptives, including some that can cause abortions, without co-pays or deductibles as part of preventive health care for women.

The only religious organizations exempt from the requirement would be those meeting four specific criteria; those that: have the inculcation of religious values as its purpose; primarily employ people who share its religious tenets; primarily serve people who share its religious tenets; and are a nonprofit organization under specific sections of the Internal Revenue Code.

When the regulations were first proposed last August, Catholic leaders and those of other faiths objected that the exemption for religious employers was written so narrowly that institutions such as hospitals, schools and social service agencies would not qualify.

Sebelius announced on Jan. 20 that there would be no change to the religious exemptions and nonprofit groups that do not provide contraceptive coverage because of their religious beliefs will get an additional year to adapt to the rule.

“The very principle of religious freedom, the first freedom in the Bill of rights, is at stake here,” Archbishop Chaput said. “That’s a lot to be at stake. Once it’s lost, you don’t get it back.”

Bishops react

Bishops across the country were quick to denounce the HHS announcement. One of the most strongly worded reactions came from Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh, in a column titled “To hell with you.”

Sebelius and the Obama administration “have said ‘To hell with you’ to the Catholic faithful of the United States,” Bishop Zubik wrote. “To hell with your religious beliefs. To hell with your religious liberty. To hell with your freedom of conscience. We’ll give you a year, they are saying, and then you have to knuckle under.”

He called on Catholics in the Pittsburgh Diocese to “do all possible to rescind” the contraceptive mandate by writing to President Obama, Sebelius and their members of Congress about this “unprecedented federal interference in the right of Catholics to serve their community without violating their fundamental moral beliefs.”

Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, Ill., enlisted the aid of St. Michael the Archangel in fighting “this unprecedented governmental assault upon the moral convictions of our faith.”

In a Jan. 24 letter to Peoria Catholics, he directed that the prayer of St. Michael be recited “for the freedom of the Catholic Church in America” during Sunday Masses at every parish, school, hospital, Newman center and religious house in the diocese.

The prayer reads in part: “Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil” and “cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits, who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.”

“I am honestly horrified that the nation I have always loved has come to this hateful and radical step in religious intolerance,” Bishop Jenky said in the letter.

“While it is primarily the laity who should take the leading role in political and legal action, as your bishop it is my clear responsibility to summon our local church into spiritual and temporal combat in defense of Catholic Christianity,” he added. “I strongly urge you not to be intimidated by extremist politicians or the malice of the cultural secularists arrayed against us.”

“We cannot – we will not – comply with this unjust law,” declared Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix in a Jan. 25 letter.

“Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God-given rights,” Bishop Olmsted said. “In generations past, the church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same.”

The Catholic bishops of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, said in a joint statement that they “cannot stand by silently” in light of what they called “an unprecedented and untenable abrogation of religious freedom in the United States.”

“This is part of a pattern in the United States that has degenerated from the recognition of religion as good and salutary in our society to religion being subjected to punitive discrimination,” said the statement signed by Bishops Kevin J. Farrell of Dallas and Kevin W. Vann of Fort Worth and Dallas Auxiliary Bishops J. Douglas Deshotel and Mark J. Seitz.

They urged the nearly 2 million Catholics in North Texas, along with “other people of good will,” to join them “by speaking out for the protection of conscience rights and religious liberty that are essential to the common good of our nation and in keeping with the basic human rights enshrined in our American way of life.”

Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans, who was in Rome for his “ad limina” visit to Pope Benedict XVI, said Jan. 26 that he had already sent a letter to members of Congress protesting the HHS decision and now expected the Catholic faithful to take action.

“This is a critical time and one that will call for us to engage in public dialogue,” he said. “We cannot stand by and allow this to move forward without speaking out.”

Archbishop Aymond said Catholics “must be able to live the message of Christ in the U.S. and follow our conscience.”

“We are not demanding that others live our Christian values, but we should have the right to do so,” he added.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal Jan. 25, Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the HHS decision rejected the “loud and strong appeals” by “hundreds of religious institutions and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens” since the comment period began last August.

He said it is naive to think that contraception and sterilization will be “free” under the HHS mandate.

“There is no free lunch, and you can be sure there’s no free abortion, sterilization or contraception,” he wrote. “There will be a source of funding: you.”

Speaking that evening at Fordham University in New York, the archbishop told reporters that Obama had called him the morning of Jan. 20 “to tell me the somber news” before the HHS decision was announced publicly.

He said he felt “terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed” and found it difficult to reconcile the decision with what the president had told him during a meeting in November – “that he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn’t want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard, particularly in the area of health care, education, works of charity and justice.”

 ‘God’s citizens first’

The new regulations and the narrow religious exemptions are examples of society’s growing indifference to religious values, said Archbishop Chaput during his visit to Nashville.

Society’s hostility to faith and religion comes “from a secularized people who don’t see the importance of respecting the moral values of other people if those values stand in the way of their goals,” said Archbishop Chaput.

Because the church did not work harder to combat indifference to religious values in society earlier, “now it’s come back to bite us in the face,” he said.

The regulations leave Catholic institutions with few options.

One option would be to stop offering health insurance as an employee benefit, Archbishop Chaput said. Catholic institutions presumably would increase employees’ pay so they could buy insurance on their own, he said, but that would mean their health insurance premiums would most likely be more expensive.

“Or we can stop helping people who aren’t Catholic but Catholics always take care of other people,” Archbishop Chaput said. “The church has to live in the broader world or else it’s not living its values.”

Catholic leaders might be forced to choose the option of civil disobedience, Archbishop Chaput said. Catholics are good citizens, he said, “but we’re God’s citizens first.”

The best outcome would be for public pressure to force the government to change the regulation, Archbishop Chaput said.

The argument in favor of the regulation is couched in terms of promoting women’s health, Archbishop Chaput noted. Fertility and childbirth are not diseases, but gifts from God “for the good of mankind,” he said.

The issue is not one of women’s rights, Archbishop Chaput said. The Catholic Church is a great supporter of women’s rights, he said, “but not at the point of giving up our basic values.”