US Catholic Bishops Misuse Religious Freedom Argument

Today across the United States Catholic priests are reading letters from their bishops urging the faithful to take action  against the January 20th ruling by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the department under the leadership of Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, herself a Catholic. The ruling will require "virtually all employers, including Catholic hospitals and educational institutions, to provide health insurance that includes surgical sterilization and prescriptive contraceptives without charging the employees a co-pay or deductible." (Toledo Blade,1/29/2012).

Listening to the bishops and their spokesmen, one would think the HHS ruling was an attack on religious freedom and an attempt to influence the church and its members. It is neither. The Vatican and its bishops can continue believing that "the pill," vasectomies, tubal ligations, and condoms are immoral, and they can continue to preach this belief which more than 90% of US Catholics  and many priests do not share. All the HHS ruling requires is that all employees be provided access to reproductive health care opportunities. The individual employee, Catholic or non-Catholic, based on his/her own conscience can decide to use or not use medical contraceptives, have a vasectomy or a tubal ligation. The  Church can continue to foster its belief, but it is up to the individual employee to make his/her own health care decisions. The Church should not be "the decider" of its employees' health care decisions.

Sister Christine Schenk of Cleveland, a Sister of St. Joseph, said,  "I have a real, serious trouble with the church leaders who make decisions without any immediate experience of the consequences of the decisions that they are now making that will be impacted on every Catholic employee and every non-Catholic employee at every Catholic Institution." (TB,1/29/12)

Let's face it; the Catholic Bishops in this country, after the tragedy of clerical pedophilia and the Vatican's questionable financial deals, have adopted a bunker mentality. Everywhere they see enemies who are out to get them, and they are going to hunker down and fight back. Although the issue of contraception is for the most part a non-issue, they are going to scream as vociferously as possible that their religious freedom is under attack. That's not the issue; the issue is their power and control.

The bishops want Catholic institutions to be exempt from providing the same comprehensive health care as other employers. How many exemptions in the name of religious freedom are we going to tolerate?  If a religion is opposed to circumcision, should that religion be able exclude circumcision from their employees' health care policy? If an employer, because of religious belief, is opposed to the use of surgery, should he be  permitted to exclude surgery from his employees' insurance policy?

UT law professor emeritus, Howard Friedman, raised another issue that could result from the slippery slide of exemptions. He asked, "What about the religions that believe in faith healing? Are you going to make them pay for health care?" (TB,1/29/12)

The bottom line, I think, is that the Church should stick to theology and scripture and not be in the business of  denying  employees' access to birth control pills. Really, the whole discussion appears quite silly. I guess that is why the bishops are trying to make it a religious freedom issue -- that carries more gravitas than arguing about paying for condoms and birth control pills.

Unfortunately, the Catholic Church is often a victim of its own history. We all remember the mental gymnastics involved when the Church had to confront the science of  Galileo and Copernicus, the evolutionary discoveries of Charles Darwin, and the conflicts between science and the Bible. The Church, perhaps because of its long history, becomes attached to long-held teachings and then wraps the veil of dogma around them. Such has been the case with St. Thomas Aquinas' mental construct of a  "natural law." Outside of a few monks in a few far-flung monasteries, does anyone accept "natural law" as a reality? However, since for all of these years the Church has pinned its objection to contraception on Thomas' "natural law" theory, they cannot bring themselves to admit they may have been wrong. And now the U.S. Catholic Bishops are trying to make contraception an issue of religious freedom--perhaps, like astute politicians, trying to change the topic from contraception itself.

Hopefully the mission of the Catholic Church in the United States is about more important issues than Latinizing  liturgical language and arguments about paying for condoms and birth control pills. One has to wonder what the Man from Nazareth would have thought about all of this.

P.S. The Obama administration based its ruling on the advice of the Institute of Medicine,  an independent group of doctors and researchers. The Institute provided a list of preventative services that women needed to stay healthy. Some of the data used by the Institute can be found in the NYT, page A3, 1/30/2012. The Obama administration is to be congratulated for standing up to the pressure of Roman Catholic bishops and social conservatives and choosing to support women's  access to reproductive health care.