The Catholic Church will not cave in and be made to provide artificial contraception for those Catholics and others who work for the Church under insurance policies that the Church provides for health care.
However, we recognize that some Catholics and most others who are not Catholic have no moral qualms in using artificial birth control or sterilization or abortifacients.
The Church cannot enable these immoral choices for Catholics who know how seriously wrong it is to use these, then knowing how wrong it is, plan and use these with full consent of the will. For the Church to do so, (provide the means by which one could go condemn themselves to eternal hell) would be complicity in such a immoral choice, an accomplice if you will.
However, the government and Barack Obama could avoid this constitutional crisis that he is creating by simply using tax payer monies and allocating to any Pharmacy in the country the ability to give out to those who are prescribed them, these artificial forms of contraception free of charge as well as paying clinics and hospitals directly from tax payer funds to make free sterilization and other "preventive" health care options. While the Church would abhor that the taxes Catholics pay could be used for these purposes, at least it is the government doing it and not making the Church do it through insurance policies the Church herself provides.
All of us have to pay taxes and we can't tell the government how to use these taxes except through lobbying and the vote. Isn't this the most sane solution to this horrible debacle President Obama is causing? Your comments!
Now what I would like to see under universal health care is preventative care for eyes and ears and free eye and ear exams and glasses, contacts, corrective surgery, hearing aids and corrective surgery for implants that help in hearing. Is this covered under Obamacare????????
9 comments:
Universal health care is a code word for socialism. It is highly debatable whether health care is a right under the US Constitution, and it amounts to another government freebie that will be abused by the unproductive and marginal elements of society. The cost, in money and quality care, will be paid by the law abiding, productive, loyal citizens of the country, who will use it the least. This is utterly and incredibly stupid for a nation to do and expect to survive long term. It is an economic and social disaster worse than welfare (of which it is actually more of the same). We have got to stop allowing our culture and our nation to be defined by its dregs, its unproductive and lawless elements. And, they need to take that French statue out there and ship it back. We've paid our debt to the "storm-tossed, huddled masses yearning for our resources...."
Yesterday I saw a news show whereon two people 'debated' this specific situation. THe person from the Left laughingly mocked the Church, saying he was 'sorry to let everyone know that people have sex all the time; 98% of Catholic women use birth control, and that the Church will eventually change its position on this as it does that sort of thing through out history." Other statements were to the effect that the majority of Catholics don't, and won't, support the Bishops on this. This is merely a Right Wing campaign in the media. I actually agree with most of that.
The test for the Bishops has not yet started. They must correct the heading of the Church, even if it is ever so slight, and watch as millions leave. It will be terrifying. But those millions are 'here' and do not know why. When they see what they have made of their world many, maybe even most, will return with their eyes open. It makes me consider even more why 'many' is not 'all'. The Bishops will feel that they are alone, or in such small company that they have failed Christ as shepherd. We can tell them otherwise, but they will feel it. There will be three against two, and two against three. This is when leadership will count for everything. God bless our Bishops; every last man.
rcg
P--that may be your political view to which you have a right, but it is not supported entirely by Catholic teaching and the fact that the American Bishops have clearly supported "Life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of priding that healthcare."
What I don't want to do is politicize legitimate dissent from political points of view and thus compromise the fact that what President Obama is doing is forcing the Church to redefine her teachings and missions by a mandate to provide artificial contraception but now in a stealth-like fashion.He's not going to bomb the Church with his stealth insurance policy and call that an accommodation.
I am constantly struck by how relevant the Mass readings often are. Today's readings talked about leprosy, of course as an allegory for sin. Moses cast out the 'leper' to protect society. Christ healed the leper and returned him to society. Correct me if I am wrong here: Christ did not tell the unhealed leper it was OK to rejoin society because He felt sorry for him. He did not tell anyone else to do that. The leper was healed when he recognised Christ for who He was, not for show, nor without reason.
Fr. outside of individual examples, I am unaware that health care is denied anyone in this country. While Pin's statement is stark, it is not far wrong: people are simply enduring the results of choices they have made. I also believe this is a dangerous capitulation to materialism the American Bishops made, hopefully in ignorance. I would much rather live a short and meaningful life than one extend by either moments or millennia in the hope that I will eventually contribute something to this world besides taxes and left over organs. It seems to buy into the idea that money determines someone's worth and misrepresents Charity as an indulgence.
My point is that sort of position is exactly what a person like me, or President Obama, does to manipulate opponents into positions by their own best intentions.
rcg
The (mis)use of tax dollars to fund "services" contrary to the fundamental teachings of the Church, and as a means of sidestepping the Church's 1st Amendment objections in no way relieves us of guilt. Just as the taking of tax dollars to fund welfare does not relieve any of us to the obligation to charity, using our tax monies--which the Feds continue to insist are collected on a "voluntary" basis--not only brings no relief, it makes us all complicit in the sins in question.
To my way of thinking, the issue is one of foreknowledge. Had we invincible ignorance of how the tax monies would be used, we might be free from the sin involved. But the only way to be invincibly ignorant of this issue, in the face of so much coverage in the media is to be entirely disconnected from society and from the Church.
The "accommodation" appears to me to oblige us all to civil disobedience, with the sole alternative being the commission of grave sins.
"Now what I would like to see under universal health care is preventative care for eyes and ears and free eye and ear exams and glasses, contacts, corrective surgery, hearing aids and corrective surgery for implants that help in hearing."
AMEN, FATHER!!!
What a travesty to pay for killing children but NOT helping the elderly with vision and hearing loss...
The Church may advocate that access to Universal Healthcare is a positive good, and a thing it supports, I can not accept the idea that the Church believes that means Socialized Medicine (or any other Socialized Program) which takes, or coerces, from one party to give to another, in the name of the common good. That is not a good at all, but Tyranny Plan and simple. God wills us all to be charitable, like he wills us to be free of sin and love our neighbors, but when has he ever coerced that? For charity to be charity (or any virtue to be virteous) it must by it's very nature be of one's free will.
Once again, there is an uncomfortable tension between the Church's desire to advocate for the masses and Her teaching against communism and socialism in the Catechism. As I have said before,the Church being European in origin and culture is, in my opinion, a little too comfortable with socialist and collectivist utopian schemes. After all, what is Europe but one huge collectivist conglomeration with but minor quantitative degrees of variation in the menu. You can have socialism over-medium with ham, or hard boiled with bacon...
I'm an over easy with Sausage kinda guy Pin, can I get that in Europe? Or has the Socialist collective ruled over easy to be too risky to serve?
LOL
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