Pope Benedict XVI makes Archbishop Timothy Dolan a cardinal of the Catholic Church on Feb. 18, 2012 at Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Posted on 03/04/2012 12:44:57 PM PST by NYer
Pope Benedict XVI makes Archbishop Timothy Dolan a cardinal of the Catholic Church on Feb. 18, 2012 at Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
(CNSNews.com) - Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent a letter on Friday to all the Catholic bishops of the United States reasserting the conviction of the Catholic Church that it will not yield to the Obama administration’s command—issued in the form of a Health and Human Services regulation implementing the president’s health-care plan--that Catholics and Catholic institutions must violate the teachings of their faith by purchasing and providing health insurance plans that pay for sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients.
“We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans,” Cardinal Dolan wrote his brother bishops.
“We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it,” he said.
“Since January 20, when the final, restrictive HHS Rule was first announced,” Cardinal Dolan wrote, “we have become certain of two things: religious freedom is under attack, and we will not cease our struggle to protect it.”
Although the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops posted the cardinal’s letter on its website on Friday and issued a press release about it, neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times nor any other American newspaper that appears in the massive Lexis-Nexis database of news sources published a story about it in any of their Saturday editions. Nor, as of the early hours on Sunday, had any secular newspaper that shows up in a Google News search published a story about the letter.
Despite the silence from the establishment media, the cardinal’s defiant letter was in fact a major event in what has become the most significant confrontation over religious freedom in the history of the United States.
On Thursday, the Senate voted 51 to 48 to reject an amendment sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri that would have added “conscience protection” language to the Obamacare legislation, and thus protect employers from being forced to provide health insurance coverage for sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients if they have a moral or religious objection to these things.
If enacted, this amendment would nullify the HHS sterilization-contraception-abortifacient regulation insofar is it effects employers, but not insofar as it effects individuals who buy their own insurance and who would still be mandated under Obamacare to purchase insurance.
“And you now ask the obvious question,” wrote Dolan, “”What’s next?’”
Dolan first noted that the Obama administration’s regulation jeopardizes the church’s ability to carry out the ministries that he said have been entrusted to it by Jesus.
“As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our youth, and helping the poor,” said O’Connor. “Yet, precisely because we are pastors and shepherds, we recognize that each of the ministries entrusted to us by Jesus is now in jeopardy due to this bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church.”
Cardinal Dolan then said that the so-called “concession” President Obama had offered in February—that he would order insurance companies working with Catholic institutions to provide sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients to the workers at those institutions for free—did not solve the problem.
“For one, there was not even a nod to the deeper concerns about trespassing upon religious freedom, or of modifying the HHS’ attempt to define the how and who of our ministry,” wrote the cardinal.
“Two, since a big part of our ministries are ‘self-insured,’ we still ask how this protects us,” he wrote. “We’ll still have to pay and, in addition to that, we’ll still have to maintain in our policies practices which our Church has consistently taught are grave wrongs in which we cannot participate.
“And what about forcing individual believers to pay for what violates their religious freedom and conscience?” he wrote. “We can’t abandon the hard working person of faith who has a right to religious freedom.
“And three,” he said, “there was still no resolution about the handcuffs placed upon renowned Catholic charitable agencies, both national and international, and their exclusion from contracts just because they will not refer victims of human trafficking, immigrants and refugees, and the hungry of the world, for abortions, sterilization, or contraception.”
The cardinal revealed that President Obama had invited the bishops to work with the White House to “work out the wrinkles” on his proposed accommodation. But that effort failed to make progress as the White House showed no flexibility on the core issue.
“At a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff, our staff members asked directly whether the broader concerns of religious freedom—that is, revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption—are all off the table,” wrote the cardinal. “They were informed that they are. So much for ‘working out the wrinkles.’”
The cardinal said that the bishops would continue to seek a legislative remedy to the administration’s attack on religious liberty and would also pursue protection of religious liberty through the federal courts.
“Perhaps the courts offer the most light,” he said, pointing to the Supreme Court’s recent 9-0 decision against the Obama administration in the Hosanna-Tabor case in which the administration tried to tell a Lutheran church who its ministers would be.
“Given this climate, we have to prepare for tough times,” the cardinal wrote.
He closed the letter by noting to his brother bishops that religious freedom now faces a threat not from a foreign enemy but from within the United States.
“Brothers, we know so very well that religious freedom is our heritage, our legacy and our firm belief, both as loyal Catholics and Americans,” he wrote. “There have been many threats to religious freedom over the decades and years, but these often came from without. This one sadly comes from within. As our ancestors did with previous threats, we will tirelessly defend the timeless and enduring truth of religious freedom.” Read the entirety of Cardinal Timothy Dolan's letter by clicking here.
Catholic ping!
Wow. He’s actually triggering the enemies foreign and domestic clause.
Godspeed!
I am so proud of Cardinal Dolan. You see - he’s from flyover country - West of the Hudson and East of Kaleefornica. Yep - we ARE clinging to our Bibles and our guns. You Betcha.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
It’s not about where he’s from, it’s about who he worships.
The arrogance and ignorance of the ‘secular’ obama marxist regime started this confrontation against the Catholic Church and The American People. Obama doesn’t care about religious freedom. The ‘constitutional’ professor obviously doesn’t even know about one of the central concepts that started this Great American Experiment hundreds of years ago.
I suspect there are freepers who could, off the top of their heads write a fact based vanity on the subject.
As Paul Weyrich used to say, we need 50,000 new active recruits to the cause.
One down, 49,999 to go.
Cardinal O’Connor in the 1980′s, when Mayor Ed Koch passed Executive Order 50 that would have forced the Catholic Church to hire homosexuals in all of our institutions. From Wiki:
O’Connor actively opposed Executive Order 50, a mayoral order issued in 1980 by Mayor Ed Koch, which required all City contractors, including religious entities, to provide services on a non-discriminatory basis with respect to race, creed, age, sex, handicap, as well as “sexual orientation or affectational preference”.[25] After the Salvation Army received a warning from the City that its contracts for child care services would be canceled for refusing to comply with the executive order’s provisions regarding sexual orientation,[26] the Archdiocese of New York and Agudath Israel, an Orthodox Jewish organization, threatened to cancel their contracts with the City if forced to comply.[26] O’Connor maintained that the executive order would cause the Church to appear to condone homosexual practices and lifestyle.[27][27] Writing in Catholic New York in January 1985, O’Connor characterized the order as “an exceedingly dangerous precedent [that would] invite unacceptable governmental intrusion into and excessive entanglement with the Church’s conducting of its own internal affairs.” Drawing the traditional Catholic distinction between homosexual “inclinations” and “behavior”, he stated that “we do not believe that homosexual behavior … should be elevated to a protected category.”[28]
The Church won its case in court, but O’Connor was willing to close our schools and child care agencies if we lost, forcing a city just inching back from bankruptcy to pick up the cost.
The above excerpt is from a thread I posted yesterday ...
The HHS Mandate: Cardinal George and the Bishops Are Fighting the Last War (Excellent Analysis)
Hope the rest of the Churches - Catholic and Protestant - stand by their beliefs.
I got the following earlier today, and found it a great political sermon:
(About 12 minutes long)
The Churches brought this on themselves, by not standing up to those who willfully defied the teachings yet were allowed to remain in good standing. The few times a priest refused communion were roundly denounced to where they backed down. May this cause an awakening!
Frederic Bastiat foretold this very scenario:
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Cardinal Dolan’s own “Here I stand” moment. The hand of God at work, as history unfolds before our very eyes. Do I hear the sound of something being nailed to front door of the White House?
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The Bishops Chickens Coming Home to Roost.
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Oh, but, Cardinal Dolan, you are "promoting the works of mercy" when you stand up against a worldly tyranny which asserts an unconstitutional right to violate and control the minds and consciences of millions of believers--a right which the People have never granted to their elected representatives.
"Until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon them collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives [the executive, judiciary, or legislature]; in a departure from it prior to such an act." - Alexander Hamilton
Further, Cardinal Dolan, by your stand for liberty, you are teaching the children about their unalienable, Creator-endowed right, in America, to pursue happiness according the disciplines of their faith and consciences.
Some people say that it's all about money. But, it really is more than that. It's one Democrat president and his gang of godless who want those pesky Catholics to GIVE UP the faith of our fathers. They want us to roll over and say "uncle."
The American RED HAT will fight the good fight on our behalf. My money is on the RED HAT.
Nice!
“How many divisions does the Pope have?” - Joseph Stalin
I believe Obummer is about to find out the same way his fellow socialists have in recent years.
Man, I MISS Paul Weyrich. A mighty man of God.
Gives him plenty of room for the next step.
Remove 200K hospital beds, suddenly the Catholic church becomes the bad guy in public opinion.. He then gets to fully implement the death panels.
If you are over 65 and critically ill you won't get medical care. Canadian style waits of 6 months or more for elective procedures.
Expect China style period police. After all intimate physical searches have become common place with the TSA. It's just one further step. Can't have too many babies being born with limited hospital delivery services.
It's a small step with them from free ability to contracept to duty to contracept. Same applies to abortion.
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