The bishops still refuse to admit that, ironically, they have created this problem themselves. Until they PUBLICLY exert their authority and declare that these people are not legitimate teachers in the Church, silence them, and PUBLICLY excommunicate them until they repent, there is absolutely nothing to keep Obama or anybody else from claiming that the dissidents are legitimate representatives of the Catholic Church and its teachings.
Obama is simply skipping over the bishops because he sees that they have virtually no real authority in the Church, something that is entirely their own fault for having failed for so many years to exercise it. And his gamble is paying off.
It would be very easy for Obama to set up his own version of the Catholic Church, the "American Catholic Church," or some such thing, and I have thought all along that this was really his objective. The new improved American Catholic Church will get to keep all the property, of course, and will still continue running the schools and hospitals...for the US government.
The Catholic Church dealt with the Medicis hundreds of years ago and the White House pimp thinks that he knows better than the RED HAT.
The pimp is as stupid as he is arrogant. Hard to believe that so many Catholics voted for him. I didn't.
But, truth be known, I seriously doubt that I will vote for Bishop Romney, god-to-be of a distant planet. The absurdity of THAT particular belief is as unbelievable as the arrogance and stupidity of the Commander-in-Thief-of religious freedom.
I googled Catholic Hospitals in Chicago and there are dozens of them along with assisted living homes and other services.
They handle millions of patients a year, many with reduced or no payments and if they were to shut down, there would be real, not imaginary, health care crisis in Chicago.
It is the same in any major city as most of the original big city hospitals were Catholic {or Christian} hospitals.
The mooselimb hospital services are hard to find.
The Catholic Nuns are the reason that there are so many Catholic hospitals.
A hundred and fifty years ago, thousands of Nun/Nurses were the core for running inexpensive health care facilities.
Think about Nun/teachers/nurses and you begin to see why obama has really stepped on his crank with this religious intrusion.
obama was OK until the Bishops turned their guns on him, he now has a fight he didn't need and can't win, because he had the Catholic vote in '08, and now he's going to have to fight to break even.
That picture turns my stomach.
Let us pray that Cardinal Dolan will stay strong.He has an army of Catholics and non-Catholics at his side.
They (CC) just need to tell that socialist race pimp to put his head up his split and stay out of their business.
Challenge this fool head on, in public, expose him for all the rest of the world to see.
I think the next step should be a very large civil disobedience, the last step before open civil war against the federal government.
Civil disobedience - the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government - was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his book ‘Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government)’ in 1849.
Thoreau compared the government to a machine: when the machine was producing injustice, it was the duty of conscientious citizens to be “a counter friction” (i.e. resistance) “to stop the machine.”
Thoreau asserts that because governments are typically more harmful than helpful, they therefore cannot be justified. Democracy is no cure for this, as majorities simply by virtue of being majorities do not also gain the virtues of wisdom and justice. The judgment of an individual’s conscience is not necessarily inferior to the decisions of a political body or majority, and so “it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right... Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
I refuse to obey an unjust law, I refuse to buy insurance, I refuse to pay the fine for not buying it. If all the religious institutions REFUSE to obey to Obama’s diktats, what he can do? Send the Army to coerce the Cardinals? Throw them in prison?