Cardinal George on the HHS Mandate - Update (2/29)

Cardinal George writes that the Church is being forced to give up its mission in the world, in the areas of health care and education:

This year, the Catholic Church in the United States is being told she must “give up” her health care institutions, her universities and many of her social service organizations. This is not a voluntary sacrifice. It is the consequence of the already much discussed Department of Health and Human Services regulations now filed and promulgated for implementation beginning Aug. 1 of this year.

Why does a governmental administrative decision now mean the end of institutions that have been built up over several generations from small donations, often from immigrants, and through the services of religious women and men and others who wanted to be part of the church’s mission in healing and education? Catholic hospitals, universities and social services have an institutional conscience, a conscience shaped by Catholic moral and social teaching. The HHS regulations now before our society will make it impossible for Catholic institutions to follow their conscience.

Msgr. Pope seems rather to agree, and upholds the mission of the Church to evangelize by word and by action:

Yes, frankly we do have vigorous disagreement with secret (and not so secret), shameful practices. And we will not, in order to be popular or conformed to these times, distort or misrepresent the Word of God. Abortion is wrong. Fornication, adultery, and homosexual acts are wrong. Divorce, and chosen single parenthood, and so called gay “marriage” are wrong. Contraception, sterilization, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, wrong, wrong wrong.

But I cannot force you to obey me. Rather I commend myself to your conscience. And even if Scripture will not be acceptable to you, I will have recourse to Natural Law. I, indeed the whole Church, will continue to commend myself to your conscience. And even though the gospel is currently “out of season” (cf 2 Tim 4:2) and you laugh at me and call me names like intolerant, bigoted etc., I will continue to commend myself to your conscience.

As long as I live I will speak the truth in love. And however you choose to understand me I will continue to speak.

And not least, in Washington State, the conscience rights of pharmacists were recently upheld in court. Worth noting that this is not a religious decision per se, but a constitutional one.

Update (2/29) - Sebelius offers "dialogue" on the non-accommodating "accommodation" - but not with the bishops. Sr. Walsh of the USCCB has some cogent replies to this further deprivation of the most basic rights from the members of the Church, starting with this:

The current tensions over religious freedom come down to a simple fact: the First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion. That includes the right of Catholic and other religious institutions to define and carry out their ministry.

...and continuing with this:

The Administration’s intrusive decision about what does and does not constitute religious ministry should make every American pause. What falls after freedom of religion? Freedom of the press? Will Caesar tell you what you have to print or air?


...and ending, with copious irony (to which, unfortunately, this Administration seems as insensitive as it does to the Constitution), with this:

Certainly our government, wise as it is, can’t be expected (and shouldn’t purport) to know everything. It might well ease its burdens by leaving some things to the Almighty and rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

(Post #100:) The Catholic Church and the Good of Women

The question came up in formation class recently, apropos of the HHS mandate, how to show and defend the fact that the Catholic Church serves the good of women? We didn't have enough time to roll that ball around more fully, so here are some more thoughts and suggestions. [NB - I will continue to add some links to this post as I find good ones.]

First, what does the world teach us? Look at something like the HHS mandate. What picture of "women's health" and the "good of women" is presented here? The claim that all women must have access to contraceptive services, including sterilization and abortion, shows several underlying assumptions:

• sexuality, and more bluntly, sexual activity, is central to one's identity;
• the denial of the procreative aspect of sexuality is a denial of human purpose (and therefore an embrace of materialism and utilitarianism);
• the willingness to sacrifice another's profound good (i.e. the right to life, via abortifacient birth control) to one's own transient and purely emotional good (i.e. sexual pleasure) is promoted as a good (although it is the very antithesis of true charity);
  
• the "liberation" of women via self-centered, materialist, consequence-free sexual activity encourages individualism and social instability as a good, and therefore marriage, or at least marriage without no-fault divorce, as an opposing bad.
  

So the picture of "women's health" being advanced here is implicitly one of women having very shallow, unstable, and (probably) short-term relationships with their own identity (sexual activity, or the constant potential of it anyway, before all else; placing an inordinate priority on "my pleasure now"); with other women (reduced to objects of materialist and utilitarian nature, good for me only for what I can get from them); and with men (reduced to objects of immediate sexual satisfaction). (Simply reverse these last two reductions in the case of homosexuality.)

One can see how true this is simply by looking at any of the main-stream media. What is the image of women presented? Advertising pictures of women are almost uniformly young, skinny, and beautiful of face and figure. They are explicitly objects of desire, meant to make us men associate one appetite with another, and therefore spend. (Interesting that we're still assumed to have most of the disposable income, just judging from this kind of advertizing.) Leading women characters on TV and in movies are less uniform, but still generally shown as strong, independent, and in control, precisely in terms of "liberated" sexual relations.

But if these relationships are thus hollow, then family relationships cannot be stable, trusting, self-giving, etc. And if family life is broken, then all other subsidiary or mediating institutions between the radically isolated individual and the State are likewise impotent.

In the case of relatively affluent and well-educated women, that radical isolation and exposure is masked. The opportunity for career advancement is better, with no (permanent) husband who might have a career conflicting with your own, no hiatus of employment for child care or maternity leave, less restriction from the "glass ceiling," etc. There's a great cost for these things, of course, since wealth and status aren't happiness. But for a much larger proportion of women, who are not nearly so upwardly mobile, or who are already in poverty, the self-centered and socially unstable lifestyle only exacerbates the problems of vulnerability. Hence the permanent and ever-expanding nature of the "welfare State," which rarely works to bring anyone out of poverty, and particularly badly and systematically fails single mothers.

What's ironic about all this is that this kind of social and economic dependency, this manner of supposedly lacking a separate personal identity, is supposed to be what feminism advocates against. The argument used to be that child-bearing and traditional marriage shackled women to men, reducing them to mere objects (in practice if not in fact or in law). Therefore they needed birth control and no-fault divorce, and an independent income, in order to be equal to men.

Here, however, in the HHS mandate (and elsewhere in politics and culture), one sees clearly how, in order to be consistent about this liberation from traditional authorities, feminism has trapped women in a new cycle of sexual objectification and vulnerability. Likewise, in order to be consistent about the equality of women, feminism has had to demonize both men and babies.

Unfortunately for this brand of feminism, there is a tremendous amount of good data to show that none of these things are truly good for women. Abortion and birth control increase the risk of breast cancer and cause very serious mental health issues. Hypersexualizing women, as in the media, makes them more likely to be victims of sexual harassment or assault and less likely to form good relationships, just as pornography does for men. Social instability, especially in marriage, makes women more vulnerable to poverty, emotional or physical victimization, and poor mental health; and makes the women's children less likely to finish high school or college, more likely to experiment with crime and drugs, and much less likely to be able to form stable social relationships in turn. And so forth. This whole picture of what is good for women actually harms women, sometimes very gravely, and also harms men, who also cannot become virtuous and self-giving husbands and fathers.

In contrast to all of this, the Catholic (and Biblical, in general) view of women's health and women's good starts at a much different point: baptism. From the fact that women are baptized exactly the same as men, and can therefore participate in the Christian life fully and equally as men, and can expect the same salvation, in all its aspects, both in this life and in the next, as men, comes the irreducible equality of women in the mind of the Church. (The question of women receiving Holy Orders is here set aside; since this is a Scriptural question, not a social one, it needs to dealt with separately.)

With equal dignity comes equal purpose. The Church has always taught that women are just as much "for salvation" as men. Ever time some ancient philosophy about the inferiority of women reappeared in the Church, it was criticized and equivocated into practical meaninglessness. For example, ancient Roman law held that women could not be "sui iuris," a free juridical person with full public rights; and various attempts to revive Roman law in the West tried to include this idea. But the practical reality of the fact of equal dignity forced all these attempts to make exceptions for things like widows inheriting from their husbands, women making bequests to churches, and women's judicial testimony being accepted in court. Make enough exceptions and the principle is void of effective meaning; this is precisely what happened, over and over.

Also because of this equal baptismal dignity, the Church has always strongly defended the unique gift of maternity for women. The Church's recognition of the sacramentality of marriage protects women's health and women's rights, against all the negative outcomes described above, and against the dehumanizing possessiveness of polygamous cultures also. And marriage must be freely entered into to be valid; coerced marriage of women, common in every other ancient culture, found no home in Christianity. Further, the Church has always held (or attempted to hold, at least) the socially powerful to a special obligation to protect widows and orphans. She invented the very idea of "civilian" and "non-combatant," mostly in order to protect women and children from the side-effects of war. Every one of our social categories today of "vulnerable" people stems from this Christian idea of special defense for widows and orphans.

Nor has the Church ever reduced women only to the role of wife and mother. In addition to married life, women have always had both institutional and non-institutional forms of religious life open to them. Indeed, the oldest form of religious life in the Church is that of "consecrated virginity," in which a woman (whether never married or widowed, whether young or old) publicly declares her intention to live "spiritually." The Church grants her protection to such women, who otherwise live in the world (but not of the world) in perfectly ordinary ways - with their families (often several women from an extended family lived this way together), or singly, owning property, conducting business, and giving a much-respected model of Christian charity to all. Abbesses of monastic houses could be extremely powerful women. Some monastic houses were "double," with one cloister for men and one for women; about half the time, the abbess rather than the abbot was in overall charge of the double house.

By defending baptismal dignity, the stability of marriage, the rights of religious women of all kinds, and the rights of widows and orphans, as well as practical property and judicial rights for women, the ancient and medieval Catholic Church laid a very firm foundation for women's authentic flourishing in the modern world. And in the new social circumstances of modernity, the same core wisdom is being used to articulate a much healthier vision of women's good, for example in Mulieris Dignitatem and the Theology of the Body. This vision does not reduce women to a sexual object, but asserts their full potential for conformity to Christ; does not offer shallow and transitory relationships, but asserts the profound joy and completion found differently in both marriage and friendship; does not expose women more to the vulnerability of radical isolation, but builds up strong and stable subsidiary networks, starting with the family; does not increasingly impoverish and make more dependent, but enriches, both spiritually and materially, by pointing to Christ's great freedom for charity.

Ecclesiology - Who's in charge here, anyway??

Church-State relations have always been a bit testy. I think the apologists were mostly correct: God may have permitted states to form, "because of the hardness of our heart," but basically that power or authority is going to be used badly, as often as not. Part of the mission of the Church is to curtail that abuse, to "Christianize" the state. In a very schematic way, we can think about it in four phases:

1. Early Church, "Age of Martyrs" - characterized by a Church trying to distinguish itself clearly (in its intellectual, social, moral, and liturgical life) from everything around it (Judaism, Paganism(s), Heresies).

2. Constantinian Church - After Constantine's conversion, he intervened (or interfered) in Church matters, including disputed ownership of dioceses, public policy favoring Christians and churches (taxes, wills, etc), and theology - up to and including the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Constantine called himself "bishop for external affairs" and applied the old prerogatives of the pagan "Pontifex Maximus" to the Church. Since we're being schematic, we can say that this arrangement lasted in the East more or less until 1453.

3. Medieval Church - Pope Gelasius I offered the so-called "two-swords" theory, dividing civil and ecclesiastical power. Since we're being schematic, we can say that in the Early Middle Ages, the Church authority was independent of the state's, but generally weaker. Kings, dukes, and counts had a lot of say in Church affairs, even to choosing (or at least approving) key Church appointments. In the High and Later Middle Ages (after the Investiture Controversy), the Church's authority was independent of the state's, but generally stronger. The Church has a lot of say in political affairs, even to choosing or approving kings, marriages, and successions. Positively, it was felt that the Church, being morally free in Christ, could morally direct the use of the state's coercive power (police, law systems, justiciary); while lacking that power itself would be a check on human weakness. The state, by cooperating with the Church in this way, could be more the instrument of divine rule God had intended it to be; while not choosing the end of its own coercive power would be a check on human weakness.

4. Since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) - The Reformation and its aftermath dramatically changed the relationship of Church and State. States in the 16th century completed the subordination of the nobility, and the extension of the powers of royal (i.e. central) government over all associated territories (formerly duchies, counties, etc). They successfully monopolized for that royal or central government the use of coercive force. The Church was now the only non-physical limit to the power of the king, or later of Parliament or Prime Minister or President. But the Church itself was both damaged and discredited in the Reformation and what followed, so it couldn't really perform that function well. The coercive power of the state was uncoupled from the Church's direction, mostly so that the competing churches couldn't use it against each other, as in the Wars of Religion and 30 Years War. The State became morally self-regulating in its use of coercion. Hence the creation of the modern "rights of man" language, that tries to set clear limits on how the state can use its unrivaled power. But since the 19th century and industrialization, that tradition has been breaking down in practice. Fascism and Communism have the same roots as we do, and in each case the State devoured itself. Liberalism (representative democracy regulating a common, relatively free market) has all the same risks.

Since the 19th century, meanwhile, the Church has been rebuilding its moral vigor. Ecumenism is overcoming the partisan divisions of the past, and the common moral vision of our Christian heritage is more easily articulated. A document like Gaudium et Spes clearly shows the desire of a united front of Christians committed to being a moral force in the world, and a check on the otherwise autonomous (unchecked) civil power which now dominates it. The pro-life battleground is the obvious place this is playing out most confrontationally. Marriage issues are quickly becoming another. Christians can - must - choose between this reinvigorated prophetic Christianity (magisterial Catholics, most Evangelicals, most Orthodox, a few other Protestants) and the limpid sold-out squooshiness of decaying hippy progressive Christianity (cafeteria Catholics, mainstream Protestants).

This makes it clear that the Church's future is with the New Evangelization. Spineless liberal Christianity, which has abandoned dogma and Tradition, rejected Revelation, and explained away every miracle of salvation history, has nothing at all with which to play its proper role in limiting the immoral abuse of the state's growing power. In accepting as "spilled milk" fornication, adultery, abortion, and homosexuality - issues, notice, where the state uses "rights" language, not to raise the moral bar, but to lower it forcibly - liberal Christianity has already capitulated to the state's modern ambition. It is without force, without hope, and without energy.

In contrast, the prophetic Christianity of the New Evangelization, both Catholic and non-Catholic, alone has the intellectual and moral capacity to curtail the modern state. In opposing fornication, adultery, abortion, and homosexuality, it correctly identifies the wedge issues through which the self-regulating state is inexorably attempting to expand its use of authority. To the extent that the Church achieves some success in resisting these social changes, it forces the state not to change the meaning of "rights" language, and to be accountable for its use of power. It therefore re-establishes the proper relationship of moral power between it and the state.

Finally, no matter how much things have changed since Pope Gelasius I at the end of the 5th century, three concrete principles still apply and must be observed by all parties:

1. The state has no power over the Church's sacramental life. This inviolable principle is dangerously at play in current marriage politics. "Tyranny" is not too strong a word for the state legistlating sacramental life. We, as clerics, have to be willing to stand on this principle and take the scorn of the sick world, like the martyrs before us - most especially on those critical wedge issues where the state tries to make inroads where it really doesn't belong.

2. The Church isn't better at politics that the politicians. Obvious, one would think, but useful to remind ourselves that our mission is souls, not politics. To be truly prophetic, one must be apolitical. Pope Benedict said some interesting things last week in Germany about the Church embracing its modern poverty (no Papal States, no great reserves of wealth like the medieval Church had, dependent on the charity of the people for its operating resources) precisely for this prophetic end.

3. Every good law is supported by the universal moral law, what Catholics call "natural law." This is the right relation between Church and state. The Church has both the right and the obligation to explain both the natural law and the divine law, revealed in Scripture; and to expect that the State will listen to this wisdom. The State simply cannot be its own moral voice; it needs the Church to teach it the natural law, and to point to the revealed law, over and over again.