Counselor to Wife:

He promised to stop hitting you in the face. I don’t know why you are complaining about the stomach punches. This is a good compromise and you don’t want to make him mad.

[...] here to read the brilliant rest.  For the Jesuits of America, when it comes to choosing between the [...]

Good for you Catholic business owners to know that America considers defense of your religious consciences “press[ing] the religious liberty campaign too far.” They might, maybe, defend self-insured Catholic institutions, but individuals — feh.

I must admit to being stunned by the illogical on the liberal/progressives that is being offered with a straight face and (apparently) with all sincerity. To wit: Your refusal to pay for something that I want, amounts to you forbidding me to buy it for myself.

The assault on freedom of religion is blatant to anyone who has the courage to see and is not willfully refusing to see it.

However this would never have come to pass had not Congress and the President violated the Constitution by claiming that the Commerce Clause gives the government the power to require people to buy things in the first place.

“The American public is uncomfortable with an overt exercise of political muscle by the hierarchy.” I would agree with this statement IF it was a reference to our government and not the church.The state of Wyoming has legislation pending that would allow them to operate as an independent entity should the federal government collapse. Is this the canary in the mine?

I just love the contortions that LibCats have to go through to keep supporting the Obama Administration. It is amusing, to say the least.

But this is dangerous thinking when it comes to what the Constitution of the United States of America actually says about the limits of the federal government in religious matters.

That is the Bishops purview, not the governments.

With Catholics like America, who needs mainline Protestants?

“Official Catholic rights theory proposes that people should be willing to adjust their rights claims to one another.”

I believe, Christopher, what the gentleman in question thinks he means is by reference to the principle of subsidiarity.

However, the notion of competing rights only works if you assign the value of a right to the idea of access to contraceptives (whether it be free or not) or even, for us Pope-worshippers, the very idea of preventing conception in the first place by artificial means. And being led around by the nose by the Tyrant of the Seven Hills, some of us as a matter of fact do swallow the notion that artificial sterility (whether permanent or induced for a period of time) is not an actual human right with which we were endowed by our Creator. Shocking, I know!

As to the perils of (a) making contraception and access to same a right (b) enforced, not merely safeguarded, by the government of the state, some obscure prelate or some such by the title in religion of Paul VI issued a little-known documentto some insignificant churches way back in the mists of time:

“Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.”

Compulsory sterilisation and abortion programmes by the state? No, it could never happen!

“conscience”

“You keep using that word, I do no think it means what you think it means.”

It is not part of Catholic teaching on “rights” that contraceptives are part of health care (unless used for legit medical reasons other than birth control.

Nor is the “right” of health care along the same lines as the right to religious liberty. One is a natural, God given right with which we are endowed by virtue of being created by God. The other is viewed as a “civil” right being our Christian duty to provide(“our” being not necessarily the Government’s)by virtue of Christian charity.

Also the author forgets that religious liberty is not a provision but a condition of our personhood already “owned” by us which is to be preserved and protected by ourselves and others including government. The right to health care must be provided by another and to force someone to provide this is far different than a act of mercy grounded in charity.

Once again I am brought to mind of “What do they teach in school these days?”

I think you all know what’s going on there. It’s the age-old story. As long as the bishops are commenting on the issues that are important to the America editorial staff the right issues, we’re behind them 100%. But once they move on to those…other issues(you know the ones America means), they are exercising “political muscle” and contributing to the “national distemper.”

Indeed. When did you ever see a commenter invoke the sexual abuse crisis when a bishop advocated a liberal immigration policy?

Paula,

Schools teach what the goverment tells them to teach. Department of Education and all that. This country is raising generations of people who think like this author because this is what is being fed to our students. Private and independent schools have been able to resist some of this crap but sadly even they are not totally free of it.

@John Andersson -
Sadly, most so-called “Liberal Arts” institutions are the leaders in this kind of confused thinking that you mentioned in your post.

Of all places, you would think that Liberal Arts Colleges would see the inhernet danger. But you would be wrong to think that way. Academe drank the hemlock long ago and is still thrashing about in the death throes.

Letter to the editor: “Dear America, CATHOLIC FOREVER, DHIMMI NEVER!”

Spot on, Chris – well done.

FWIW, here’s Cardinal George of Chicago on the HHS mandate:

“The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state. The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience. The state is making itself into a church.”

All those wasted doctorates. The reform of the Jesuits cannot come one day too soon.

Allen–Not all of academia. I’m currently at a university whose president was up on Capitol Hill a couple weeks ago testifying against this nonsense, IIRC.

@ M. L. Martin –
Well good for him! But how many college and university presidents did not show up to testify against this nonsense? I very much doubt that Harvard or Yale were represented in the number of university presidents who testified against this nonsense.

As a longtime reader of AMERICA I was profoundly disappointed with their editorial. This time the Jesuits have been too “smart” by half. They’ve honored their intellectualism over what is true.

[...] gumshoe and can recognize the telltale sign of incipient (and insipid) Episcopalianism a mile off. Here he is, throwing a spotlight with his own inimitable verve on the alternative Magisteria crowd i… This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.← Realpolitik Decrees…A [...]

These bearers of Progressive Enlightenment to the “out of date and out of community contact” bishops have earned the loght to be called by their Latin name: Lucifers!

It is impossible to uphold what is right by compromising in such a way as to alos approve/permit/concede of what is evil, regardless of how trivial that evil may be. The end never jastifies the means.

And why should the Bishops, or any other citizen for that matter, ever accept any diminuition of what is guaranteed to them by the very Constitution. Indeed Freedom of Conscience goes beyond even the Constitution. It is a Natural Human Right.

And “But as Pope Benedict XVI wrote in “Deus Caritas Est,” the church does not seek to “impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to the faith.” does not translate into “however we should concede the right of everybody else to impose on those of us who share the faith, ways of thinking and modes of conduct not proper to the faith”.

Here is the freedom of religion of the future.