Sister Mary Ann Walsh
Director of Media Relations, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
The bishops' Fortnight for Freedom is over, but the concern for religious liberty has only begun to be heard. The two-week launch got people listening and praying. Now where do those who want to stand up for religious freedom go?
The answer is everywhere because religious freedom is a worldwide concern. Read the newspapers and you see massacres in churches in Nigeria and Iraq. Look to neighboring Cuba and you see how religious freedom has been severely restricted under the Castro regime.
Look in the United States, where freedom of religion is guaranteed by the First Amendment's free exercise clause, and you see a sophisticated type of assault. It is unbloody, but far-reaching. Ironically, the assaults are not from some guerilla group or despot, but from the government. Foreign nations that look to the U.S. to protect their religious freedom have to shudder.
The assaults vary, but what they have in common is preventing religious bodies from operating according to their moral standards. For example, through the new Affordable Care Act most employers, including many religious ones, are compelled to provide free-of-charge to employees and their families contraception, female sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, even when they violate church teachings. Government, in a miserly gesture, says it will grant an exception to entities it defines as religious enough to merit protection of their religious liberty. That means the parish church is religious enough but not the church's hospitals, schools, colleges, soup kitchens and other social services. You may think the latter obviously are religious works but the government says they are not if you serve needy people other than your co-religionists.
Catholicism calls Catholics to help those in need.
Hard to live out the free exercise of your religion with this HHS mandate, the first of its kind in U.S. history. To add insult to injury, for centuries these church services have very effectively helped people who otherwise would have had to rely on government for such care. In fact, one out of six people in the U.S. who need hospital care get it at a Catholic hospital.
Catholic foster care and adoption services were forced to close in major metropolitan areas when Boston, San Francisco, the District of Columbia and the State of Illinois drove local Catholic Charities out of the business of providing adoption or foster care services. They did it by revoking their licenses, by ending their government contracts or both because those Charities refused to place children with same-sex couples or unmarried opposite-sex couples who cohabit. While the Catholic Church holds that a marriage is between a man and a woman and that children are best raised in a mother-father family unit, the government says if you hold that religious view, you have to give up a longstanding church ministry through which orphaned or otherwise needy children have been helped.
It's not just Catholics who are afflicted. New York City adopted a policy that barred the Bronx Household of Faith and other churches from renting public school property on weekends for worship services, even though nonreligious groups could rent the same schools for many other uses. Is prayer more threatening than hoops? A few days ago a federal court finally ended this discriminatory policy, though appeals may continue.
In its entire history, the University of California Hastings College of Law has denied student organization status to only one group, the Christian Legal Society, because it required its leaders to be Christian and to abstain from sexual activity outside of marriage. Does it threaten the public well-being to require a Christian organization to be led by a Christian?
A New Jersey judge recently found that a Methodist ministry violated state law when the ministry declined to allow two women to hold a "civil union" ceremony on its private property. Also recently, a civil rights complaint was filed against the Catholic Church in Hawaii by those wanting to use a chapel to hold a same-sex "marriage" ceremony. Is the country better for such in-your-face rejection of a church's teaching?
The religious freedom campaign has an uphill battle before it, but it is hard to imagine our nation won't be better for it. Not to mention those nations where people subjected to bloody religious battles barely have a prayer now.
Follow Sister Mary Ann Walsh on Twitter: www.twitter.com/USCCB
16 comments:
Once again, for all the truth in what she writes, the fact that she runs around in street clothes calling herself a nun is at the very root of the problem she is trying to address. She, and others like her, are willfully blind to this as they go merrily on their way saying a lot of nice things about the Church. Hey, Sister, it is about basics...you're missing the point.
I have to agree with Gene. For two generations of Catholics to enthusiastically abandon aspects of their Catholic identity, their not-of-this-world otherness--everything from the Habit to Latin to belief in the Real Presence and the Mass as a sacrifice--and then at the eleventh hour to start complaining about the government's stance on pelvic issues that most Catholics have long since embraced seems hypocritical, even laughable, at best. And I write these words as an orthodox Catholic.
Cosign.
The Catholic Church's recently made-up "social doctrine", as interpreted by the US Bishops, has been relentlessly in favor of expanding State power and overreach whenever "the poor" are involved, or Latino illegals. Including support for Obamacare. Now they find that the Beast they have been feeding has hungers larger than they imagined and it turns its ravenous eyes on them. Your Graces have helped to make the bed you now do not want to lie in.
Well, I must confess some secret joy in seeing the USCCB chickens come home to roost...however, that is a momentary and selfish joy. Disgust is the more appropriate response.
give me a break, Gene formery pin
What kind of "break," Anonymous?
You may be right in the above comments that Sister and the Bishops are missing the bigger picture regarding Roman Catholicism. But is that a reason to be defeatist? I wonder if there isn’t an even bigger picture.
By and large Roman Catholics are latecomers to this country (according to Wikipedia 1.6% of the population at the time of the Revolution). America may be “a Christian nation” at heart, but originally it was, and still is, predominantly a Protestant nation. I don’t believe the First Amendment free exercise protections were adopted to protect Catholics in particular (although they were certainly adopted to protect Catholics also), but to protect everyone.
Isn’t it important, therefore, that free exercise rights under the First Amendment be strongly defended as a matter of constitutional principle, whoever is asserting those rights? The beneficiaries include Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. Admittedly, Catholics are the largest single denomination today, but shouldn’t each denomination or religious group defend not only its own rights under the First Amendment, but support defense of everyone’s? By defending rights for all, don’t we also defend them for ourselves? (I do agree, though, that one important way to defend these rights, for ourselves and for others, is to be visibly “otherworldly.”)
Please understand, I am making a constitutional and legal point about the importance of religious freedom and defending that freedom. The “pre-Vatican II religious liberty” versus “Vatican II religious liberty” point is a different point, although it is certainly related. And in that regard, I have a question: Is it possible, in the particular context of the United States, for the Roman Catholic Church to enjoy robust First Amendment protections if She is not willing to recognize religious liberty for all (within the appropriate constitutional limits, of course)?
Anon 2, The Catholic Church did not establish the playing field here. The Federal Government did. The Church lives and works within those parameters, but she cannot allow herself to be defined by them. The questions you raise are political questions and though the Church,of necessity, must sometimes respond to political exigencies, she cannot allow them to become priorities.
For example, if "religious liberty" means supporting heretical sects or failing to condemn false teaching, then the Church cannot advocate for that kind of "liberty." Our political structure (i.e. Constitution) does not allow for the Church to actively suppress those false teachers (unfortunately), but She should still be clear and unequivocal in her condemnation of them and her refusal to actively or passively encourage them in any way. Now, as an entity within this Enlightenment political framework, the Church has to put up with certain things. The legal right of others to attack the Church...I guess this would be both free speech and freedom of religion...and subvert the Faith while leading many to Hell is a Constitutionally protected right. However, the government does not want the freedom to condemn heresy and false teaching to extend to the Church.
So, no, the Church in principle cannot be made congruent with egalitarian political philosophies. "Freedom of speech" in this country includes the right to portray publically the crassest forms of pornography and human degradation, it includes the right for the media to falsely propagandize and tailor "news" to a political agenda, it allows for comedians and pundits on TV to scream vulgarity, scorn the Faith, and promote abortion and homosexuality, free sex, and other abominations. The Church cannot support that kind of "free speech."
"Freedom of religion" means that we should allow Muslims and others who hate the Church to build mosques right next door and attempt to suppress the Church herself while teaching false religion publicly. It is absurd to ask the Church to condone these things...yet, she must and does go along because She respects these humanistic and egalitarian initiatives far better than the secular powers and principalities who generated them. So, Anon 2, trying to fit the Church inside a political structure...any political structure...is like putting a square peg in a round hole. Christ said it best when he gave us the "koan" about rendering to Caesar. Paul made it much clearer later in Ephesians 6. The legal analysis is nice, but the Church transcends those boundaries.That is what I was getting at when I asked Millie a while back if he thought the "justice" Amos was talking about was the same "justice" that was passed out down at the Bibb County courthouse or up on the Supreme Court. It ain't...
Addendum, The US Constitution and Federal Government treat the Church as just another political entity within a context of many such entities. The government weighs the demands and needs of the Church on the same scale as she weighs those of any other entity. The Church, however, when thinking in a proper theological/NT framework, views human institutions and governments as existing within the realm of a sinful world that is "passing away." Salvation history, for the Church, trumps the history we read about in books and in the newspapers. The Church cannot ultimately, eschatologically take human governments and constitutions seriously. We often forget or ignore this truth because it seems so radical and "un-hip." But, if I read my New Testament correctly (not to mention the OT prophets), this is a hard truth we should ponder. This is why the Church in "Christendom" ( a much maligned concept)and at Her best tried to influence monarchs and shape nation-states. Yes, she over-reached and made errors, but I prefer Her errors to those of secular governments.
Anon2 and Gene: My own thoughts are still in flux over this one. On the one hand, I see Gene's point. Consider the religion clauses as a girdle; the Church is forced into it, in practice, in this society, but it is an artificial constraint that doesn't accurately reflect the true contours of what the Church believes about religious liberty. I think that the hierarchy, like the current Bishop of Savannah, not only commit a grave error but are actively misleading (either intentionally or negligently) when they appeal to the religion clauses as if those clauses are a reflection of natural law and Catholic doctrine. We're Catholics who happen to be American, not Americans who happen to be Catholic. (And along these lines I'm very leery of the concept of fundamental rights, which is a concept promoted by secular constitutionalists as a means of inventing a body of non-Christian pseudo-natural law/rights such as the right to kill unborn children.) But if the government is going to impose these rules upon us, I see no problem with asserting our rights under these rules, with the express proviso that we're working with what we've got.
On the other hand, one of the earliest understandings of free expression (and by extension, I think, free exercise), which was put forth by that great Protestant Milton, had as a premise that there _is_ such a thing as objective truth and that free expression is a means of cutting through falsehood to reach that truth. Contrast that to the predominant idea today, which is relativism, the notion that everyone has his own truth, and you see that we're talking about two very different things. We have nothing to fear from the criticisms of false doctrine if ours are true.
There's also the equitable clean hands principle, and this worries me more than anything else. How can the bishop appeal so strongly to the First Amendment if the Church's goal, ultimately, is to repeal that amendment in favor of a more Catholic statement of the law? That's just plain dishonest, and reeks of tactics I have decried in every revolutionary/authoritarian group I can think of that's refused to play by the rules. Couple that with the fact that I can't think of a Catholic regime anywhere in history that hasn't behaved badly and abused its power at some point, and you leave me very disturbed. If we go down that road we may well become the evil we behold in others.
My own view, then, is that the Catholic doctrine on this point is an ideal that has never been attained, and in light of fallen humanity cannot be safely attained in this world, if history is any guide. Since to strive to achieve it would lead to great evils, working within the existing framework is acceptable in the eyes of the Church. But the Church still shouldn't be confusing the issue by holding out the First Amendment to be the ultimate standard.
Anon5, you've hit the nail on the head with your entire post, particularly the last statement that the Catholic teaching on religious tolerance is an ideal that has never been attained. I could not agree more with your assessment of the bishops using the First Amendment as a shield to protect our freedom to practice the one true religion. I hope that they are making that argument in the framework of American politics, but like you, I fear they are not. They appear to have bought into the "religious liberty is a fundamental right" line of thinking, which as I have pointed out before is not Catholic teaching.
To that extent, I think that you and Gene are saying basically the same thing (which is an excellent and important point that no one is focusing on - and which prompted me to write my long summary of actual Catholic teaching on religious tolerance recently): our freedom to practice the Catholic religion comes from God himself, who has delivered to us our beautiful religion with its hierarchy and its doctrine. The US Government does not recognize that our religion is the only true religion, they are as Gene pointed out, trying to make us all equal under the law. [Isn't that always the tendency of the US Government - we can't make anyone better, so let's make everyone equally "low"]. Anyway, we should work within that framework to let everyone know that the Catholic religion is True to the exclusion of any other - that is the opportunity the bishops are missing in their mental gymnastics to work within the framework of American Constitutional Law.
As for Anon2, I get your point about working within the existing system to protect religious liberty rights for all in order to protect them for ourselves. I think that is a dangerous slippery slope because the fastest growing "religion" is no religion at all and that "religion" is "infringed upon" by our practice of our religion. I can just anticipate the secularists turning our arguments against us a few years down the line (as they are already attempting to do with the way they frame this HHS debate). We simply must forthrightly and boldly proclaim that our religion is the only true religion - I think we all know where that will lead and we have to pray that God gives us the grace to face the "lions".
What a great discussion! Thank you Gene, Anon 5, and Marc, for giving us (me especially) a lot to think about.
Let’s shift the focus. Sister seems very concerned, too, about religious freedom in other countries. Is she talking about just Catholics? Can the Church secure religious freedom for itself in these other countries while opposing it for others? This is a starker form of the same point we have been discussing about the United States.
P.S. There may be no fundamental disagreement here. From Her own perspective, the Church can, and should, maintain that Catholicism is the one true religion. Of course, as I have discussed before, some others will make the same claim for theirs.
As I understand the heart of the matter, religious freedom under the law means the freedom to engage in that argument to compete for souls. As Anon 5 suggests by invoking Milton, if we are in God’s hands (and I believe we agree that we are), then the Truth must, I repeat must, win out. That is a matter of faith (trust). Isn’t the real danger from those who would destroy our freedom to engage in the conversation by, for example, making Catholics betray their Faith, not from those who also claim to have the Truth (or that there is no Truth).
Anon2,
Your idea about fighting for freedom in other countries raises an important point. If the goal is to convince others to give you the right to proselytize, and those others don't accept the truth or legitimacy of your tradition (I'm thinking Saudi Arabia for instance), and your reason for claiming the right to religious freedom is based in the tenets of your faith, then there's no reason for them to accept the authority and thus the legitimacy of your claim. (Is that circular, bootstrapping, or question-begging? Help me with the proper labels here--"You have to accept my right to practice my faith because my faith gives me that right.")
The only way that the world will admit the legitimacy of our claim to practice our faith is if we find common ground with the world, such as giving everyone else the same right. That legitimacy is important if those who don't share your belief system control the mechanisms of government or society that can effectively shut you down. Of course, absent that you get martyrdom, which after all is the seed of the Church. So Maybe we should do what I think Marc's argument leads to and simply become intransigent? practice our faith without recourse to the First Amendment and let the cards fall where they may?
Anon2 - My guess is that any sister talking about "religious freedom" today is talking about an American Constitutional-style religious freedom and not a Catholic doctrine-style religious tolerance.
I don't think the situation in other countries for Catholic religious tolerance is any starker than in America. I think you're getting at the idea of places where it is prohibited to practice the Catholic religion (in an Islamic state, for example). I'm not an expert on the Church's teaching in this regard, but it seems to me the answer is in the Acts of the Apostles - we continue to practice the Faith and to spread the Good News. If we ever get a goodly number of people to convert, then we are in a situation where we may have to consider the Church's teaching on religious tolerance.
Remember to that America (except Maryland) was partly founded on anti-Catholicism, so this is nothing new for us. (History scholars can correct me). The excellent point is that we are staring down the barrel of not being able to talk about religion - whether ours or anyone else's. I agree, that is a huge problem. In that connection, I see nothing wrong with joining forces with others to fight against an oppressive government (I don't mean a literal fight - I mean standing up for our rights under the American Constitution). So, I don't think that goes against Church teaching - but we cannot while doing so give the impression that everyone should have the right to practice falsity. And that presents a delicate problem for the bishops.
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