Cardinal Dolan thought he heard Barack Obama pledge respect for the Catholic Church's rights of conscience. Then came the contraception coverage mandate.
By JAMES TARANTO
New York
The president of the U.S. Conference
of Bishops is careful to show due respect for the president of the
United States. "I was deeply honored that he would call me and discuss
these things with me," says the newly elevated Cardinal Timothy Dolan,
archbishop of New York. But when Archbishop Dolan tells me his account
of their discussions of the ObamaCare birth-control mandate, Barack
Obama sounds imperious and deceitful to me.
Mr. Obama knew that the mandate would
pose difficulties for the Catholic Church, so he invited Archbishop
Dolan to the Oval Office last November, shortly before the bishops'
General Assembly in Baltimore. At the end of their 45-minute discussion,
the archbishop summed up what he understood as the president's message:
"I said, 'I've heard you say, first of
all, that you have immense regard for the work of the Catholic Church
in the United States in health care, education and charity. . . . I have
heard you say that you are not going to let the administration do
anything to impede that work and . . . that you take the protection of
the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness. . . .
Does that
accurately sum up our conversation?' [Mr. Obama] said, 'You bet it
does.'"
The archbishop asked for permission to
relay the message to the other bishops. "You don't have my permission,
you've got my request," the president replied.
"So you can imagine the chagrin,"
Archbishop Dolan continues, "when he called me at the end of January to
say that the mandates remain in place and that there would be no
substantive change, and that the only thing that he could offer me was
that we would have until August. . . . I said, 'Mr. President, I
appreciate the call. Are you saying now that we have until August to
introduce to you continual concerns that might trigger a substantive
mitigation in these mandates?' He said, 'No, the mandates remain. We're
more or less giving you this time to find out how you're going to be
able to comply.' I said, 'Well, sir, we don't need the [extra time]. I
can tell you now we're unable to comply.'"
The administration went ahead and
announced the mandate. A public backlash ensued, and the archbishop got
another call from the president on Feb. 10. "He said, 'You will be happy
to hear religious institutions do not have to pay for this, that the
burden will be on insurers.'" Archbishop Dolan asked if the president
was seeking his input and was told the modified policy was a fait
accompli. The call came at 9:30 a.m. The president announced the
purported accommodation at 12:15 p.m.
Sister Carol
Keehan of the pro-ObamaCare Catholic Health Association immediately
pronounced herself satisfied with the change, and the bishops felt
pressure to say something. "We wanted to avoid two headlines. Headline 1
was 'Bishops Celebrate . . . Accommodations.' . . . The other headline
we wanted to avoid is 'Bishops Obstinate.'" They rushed out a
"circumspect" statement, which Archbishop Dolan sums up as follows: "We
welcome this initiative, we look forward to studying it, we hope that
it's a decent first step, but we still have very weighty questions."
Within hours, "it dawned on us that
there's not much here, and that's when we put out the more substantive
[statement] by the end of the day, saying, 'Whoa, now we've had time to
hear what was said at the announcement and to read the substance of it,
and this just doesn't do it.'"
Having rushed to conciliate, they got the "Bishops Obstinate" headlines anyway.
Archbishop
Dolan explains that the "accommodation" solves nothing, since most
church-affiliated organizations either are self-insured or purchase
coverage from Catholic insurance companies like Christian Brothers
Investment Services and Catholic Mutual Group, which also see the
mandate as "morally toxic." He argues that the mandate also infringes on
the religious liberty of nonministerial organizations like the Knights
of Columbus and Catholic-oriented businesses such as publishing houses,
not to mention individuals, Catholic or not, who conscientiously object.
"We've grown hoarse saying this is not
about contraception, this is about religious freedom," he says. What
rankles him the most is the government's narrow definition of a
religious institution. Your local Catholic parish, for instance, is
exempt from the birth-control mandate. Not exempt are institutions such
as hospitals, grade schools, universities and soup kitchens that employ
or serve significant numbers of people from other faiths and whose main
purpose is something other than proselytization.
"We find it completely unswallowable,
both as Catholics and mostly as Americans, that a bureau of the American
government would take it upon itself to define 'ministry,'" Archbishop
Dolan says. "We would find that to be—we've used the words 'radical,'
'unprecedented' and 'dramatically intrusive.'"
It also amounts to penalizing the
church for not discriminating in its good works: "We don't ask people
for their baptismal certificate, nor do we ask people for their U.S.
passport, before we can serve them, OK? . . . We don't serve people
because they're Catholic, we serve them because we are, and it's a moral imperative for us to do so."
To be sure, not all Catholics see it
that way. Archbishop Dolan makes an argument—which he prefaces with the
admission that "I find this a little uncomfortable"—that federal
intrusion bolsters those who are more selfishly inclined: "Some
Catholics . . . are now saying, 'Fine, we'll get out of all that. It's
dragging us down anyway. Rather than be supporting 50 Catholic schools
in the inner city where most of the kids are not Catholic, and using a
big chunk of diocesan money to do that, we'll just use it for the
schools that have all Catholics, and it'll serve us a lot better.' . . .
"I find that, by the way, to be rather
un-Catholic," he continues. "I don't know what that would say to the
gospel mandate to be 'light to the world' and 'salt of the earth.' It's
part of our religion to be right out there in the forefront, right there
in the nitty-gritty."
An insular attitude, Archbishop Dolan
suggests, plays into the hands of ideologues who favor an
ever-more-powerful secular government: "I get this all the time: I would
have some people say, 'Cardinal Dolan, you need to go to Albany and
say, "If we don't get state aid by September, I'm going to close all my
schools."' I say to them, 'You don't think there'd be somersaults up and
down the corridors?'"
Another story comes from the nation's
capital: "The Archdiocese of Washington, in a very courteous way, went
to the City Council and said, 'We just want to be upfront with you. If
this goes through that we have to place children up for adoption with
same-sex couples, we'll have to get out of the adoption enterprise,
which everybody admits we probably do better than anybody else.' And one
of the City Council members said, 'Good. We've been trying to get you
out of it forever. And besides, we're paying you to do it. So get out!'"
What about the argument that vast
numbers of Catholics ignore the church's teachings about sexuality?
Doesn't the church have a problem conveying its moral principles to its
own flock?
"Do we ever!" the archbishop replies with a hearty laugh.
"I'm not afraid to admit that we have an internal catechetical
challenge—a towering one—in convincing our own people of the moral
beauty and coherence of what we teach. That's a biggie."
For this he faults the church
leadership. "We have gotten gun-shy . . . in speaking with any amount of
cogency on chastity and sexual morality." He dates this diffidence to
"the mid- and late '60s, when the whole world seemed to be caving in,
and where Catholics in general got the impression that what the Second
Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should be chums
with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become more
and more like everybody else."
The "flash point," the archbishop
says, was "Humanae Vitae," Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical reasserting
the church's teachings on sex, marriage and reproduction, including its
opposition to artificial contraception. It "brought such a tsunami of
dissent, departure, disapproval of the church, that I think most of
us—and I'm using the first-person plural intentionally, including
myself—kind of subconsciously said, 'Whoa. We'd better never talk about
that, because it's just too hot to handle.' We forfeited the chance to
be a coherent moral voice when it comes to one of the more burning
issues of the day."
Without my having raised the subject,
he adds that the church's sex-abuse scandal "intensified our laryngitis
over speaking about issues of chastity and sexual morality, because we
almost thought, 'I'll blush if I do. . . . After what some priests and
some bishops, albeit a tiny minority, have done, how will I have any
credibility in speaking on that?'"
Yet the archbishop says he sees a
hunger, especially among young adults, for a more authoritative church
voice on sexuality. "They will be quick to say, 'By the way, we want you
to know that we might not be able to obey it. . . . But we want to hear
it. And in justice, you as our pastors need to tell us, and you need to
challenge us.'"
As we talk about sex, Archbishop Dolan
makes a point of reiterating that his central objection to the
ObamaCare mandate is that it violates religious liberty. In their views
on that subject, and their role in politics more generally, American
Catholics have in fact become "more like everybody else." When John F.
Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he found it necessary to reassure
Protestants that, in the archbishop's paraphrase, "my Catholic faith
will not inspire my decisions in the White House."
"That's worrisome," Archbishop Dolan
says. "That's a severe cleavage between one's moral convictions and the
judgments one is called upon to make. . . . It's bothersome to us as
Catholics, because that's the kind of apologia that we expect of no
other religion." But times have changed. Today devout Catholic Rick
Santorum is running on the promise that his faith will inform his
decisions—and his greatest support comes from evangelical Protestants.
The archbishop sees a parallel irony
in his dispute with Mr. Obama: "This is a strange turn of the table,
that here a Catholic cardinal is defending religious freedom, the great
proposition of the American republic, and the president of the United
States seems to be saying that this is a less-than-important issue."
Religious freedom has received a more
sympathetic hearing at the U.S. Supreme Court—which, coincidentally, has
had a Catholic majority since 2006. In January, in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC,
the court ruled unanimously in favor of an evangelical Lutheran
church's right to classify teachers as ministers and therefore not
subject to federal employment law. Archbishop Dolan sums up the
decision: "Nowhere, no how, no way can the federal government seek to
intrude upon the internal identity of a religion in defining its
ministers."
But whether the government has the authority to define a ministry—excluding, as the ObamaCare mandate does, church-affiliated institutions like hospitals and schools—is a separate legal question, one that may be resolved in litigation over the birth-control mandate.
It's possible that the Supreme Court
or a new president will render the issue moot. After our interview, the
archbishop has a question for me: If the high court rules against
ObamaCare, will that be the end of the birth-control mandate? Probably
not, I tell him—though such an outcome seems much likelier now than it
did early in the week when we met. The justices could end up striking a
blow for religious liberty without the question even having reached
their docket.
Mr. Taranto, a member of the Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
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