I have been trying – for the sake of my dissertation, spiritual equanimity, and marriage – to ignore what I see as false outrage over the recent Health & Human Services mandate that Catholic hospitals and similar religiously affiliated employers provide their employees with the same access to contraception as secular employers are required to do. Yesterday, however, I was contacted by a reporter at CatholicVote.org with an interview request regarding my 2009 support of Kathleen Sebelius’ candidacy for Secretary of HHS, and the whole controversy suddenly became more personal.
Before responding, you see, I did a quick glance at CatholicVote.org’s website (the lead banner announces “CatholicVote.org endorses Rick Santorum for President!”), and in the process discovered that they’ve been having quite a field day with the “mandate.” Amongst other things, they’re keeping track of how many bishops have spoken out against it (169 as of Feb. 6, it seems), and they’ve listed my name (along with 25 others who signed the same letter as I did) asking if we will “disown” our support of “that rabidly pro-abortion woman” [read: Kathleen Sebelius] or “take Catholic off [our] names,” calling that the “only honorable choice” for us. The author of that post – Matt Bowman – goes on to say, “This is not political anymore. It never really was.”
Naturally, this got me thinking again about the “mandate” and the “war on Catholics” that it (supposedly) represents, and so it feels like finally the time for me to write something up about it all. Actually, what I have to say is rather simple, and perhaps not particularly new. It’s just this:
Has the meaning of Catholic faith and tradition come to be so impoverished that prohibiting artificial contraception (for Catholics and non-Catholics alike) is now its defining feature? (Even same-sex marriage is more consistently framed as anti-family rather than specifically anti-Catholic, after all.)
To frame this policy decision – requiring religiously-affiliated employers whose work is not exclusively religious, like hospitals and schools, to include contraception coverage in their health insurance – as fundamentally anti-Catholic implies that opposition to artificial contraception is so defining of Catholic identity that to disagree with it is to be anti-Catholic. That’s what all this talk of a “war on Catholics” is saying, as if subsidizing contraception in health insurance plans for employees (like married evangelicals) whose consciences do not prohibit birth control is somehow a direct assault on the very meaning of Catholic faith, tradition, and identity.
But seriously, if Catholics (or non-Catholics) who work in Catholic hospitals or schools out of a commitment to other elements of Catholic identity and tradition – like caring for the poor, or teaching the underprivileged, or comforting the aged – are able to have access to contraception equal to their counterparts in secular institutions, is their Catholic identity and religious freedom really undermined? Surely opposing artificial contraception is irrelevant to the day-to-day work of teaching elementary school kids math and reading, or providing hospice care to the elderly, or giving emergency care to burn victims. Are the Catholic institutions they work for really undermined by having these qualified workers follow their own consciences with regard to birth control?
Besides, it’s no secret that, before he published Humanae Vitae in 1968 (the encyclical that upheld the Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception), Paul VI’s advisory committee of theologians, bishops, and laypeople overwhelmingly urged him to overturn that prohibition on artificial birth control. It’s also well-documented that few Catholics today follow this particular church teaching, and that in fact contraception usage by Catholics and non-Catholics in the U.S. is pretty much indistinguishable. In other words, opposition to artificial birth control is effectively a footnote to the Catholic identity of most Catholics – if even that.
In short, there is no “war on Catholics” going on, however timely such language may be during election season. This outrage has very little to do with the realities of either Catholic identity or religious freedom – but as political rhetoric, it certainly is inspiring. What’s not inspiring is how widespread this unnecessary and artificial outrage has become, at least in the talking points of some Catholics on both the left (including Sr. Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association, castigated by conservatives in 2010 for her support of “ObamaCare”) as well as the usual suspects on right.
In other words: you’re wrong, CatholicVote.org. This outrage is, indeed, quintessentially political.
UPDATE: My response to the aforementioned CatholicVote.org interview has been posted in this article (at the bottom).
Kari, You said it so perfectly all I can do is add my assent to your point of view. Well maybe a word or two more.
It is a political tempest the Catholic bishops are brewing not a religious one. There has been no stripping away of the right of any Catholic to follow Church teaching on artificial contraception and the mere availability of birth control coverage does not constitute endorsement of its use.
That the useage of artificial contraception is indistinguishable between faith groups speaks very loudly about the view of ecclesiastical authority by the majority of American Catholics. The flexing of epicopal muscle has been increasingly less effective in the Catholic Church since the child sex abuse scandals erupted. It seems like the bishops are taking a stand for the sake of simply doing so… to say we are still in the game, don’t count us out yet.
The question will be, is this a move that will prove to strengthen or further weaken the American Catholic episcopate?
Posted by Mike Fazzini | February 7, 2012, 2:59 pmCompletely on target, Mike. Well said. I agree.
Posted by Kari J. Tremeryn | February 7, 2012, 3:28 pmVery interesting writing with great points brought up as well. I am not one who considers myself very religious. Although several of my family members are practicing Catholics or Protestants, I was brought up in a family with a variety of views on religion and was allowed by my parents to have any view I chose as my own. Perhaps it is interesting that one thing that has always drove me away from religion has been the religious rhetoric and the use of it in politics and by those in positions of power.
I look forward to reading up on your previous posts!
http://theliarsden.wordpress.com
Posted by The Liars' Den | February 22, 2012, 4:03 pmI doubt my dissenting comments will see the light of day. Nevertheless, I have a few rhetorical points to be made.
You are likely, and perhaps rightly so, angry for being singled out publicly with others, and having your commitment to your faith called into question (hence your rationalization that the faith does not boil down to contraception: however true this is (certainly the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, and salvation from death and sin are the central non-negotiables), in our historical circumstances, unlike at Nicaea in 325, they are not the issues being called into question, at this time. In 1517 Martin Luther called for a hearing on indulgences, the treasury of merit, raising money for the construction of St. Peter’s, etc. In our great – & grandparent’s day, in the U. S., it was whether Catholics worshiped Mary or the Pope, and whether they were second class citizens in relation to the WASP establishment and the Nativist/Know Nothings and the KKK persecutions of Catholics. In the last century it has been issues relating to home and family: the nature of family, sexuality and marriage, divorce, and yes, contraception (since 1920, touted by Margaret Sanger and her foundation Planned Parenthood because of her affinity for racial eugenics (she was targeting the black community and “mental defectives” and congratulated German Nazi doctors for their “advances” in eugenics). I concede that it was not legal and widely available until 1968, but it was at the Anglican Conference at Lambeth in 1930 that the first Protestant denomination gave the OK to contraception (hence the Catholic papal response Casti Conubii in 1930). Since then every Protestant denomination has caved in. The sole Christian exception…the Catholic Church stands alone again on the issues of the day (in the first century in Rome, families would leave children out in the wild exposed to the elements for wild animals to consume as “birth control”, or to hide affairs from spouses, etc. It was the Catholics who would rescue these helpless children and take them in. Hell, even pagans found abortifacients deplorable, medicine not sophisticated enough to have developed “contraceptives” until the 1920′s (remember the Hippocratic Oath (“…shall not dispense a medication that causes an abortion” – no wonder its no longer said at medical school graduations). The bishops are making a stand not because contraception constitutes THE central issue of the Faith, but because it is the issue that is cynically being deployed by the current administration to attempt to divide the parishioners of the lone holdout on this particular issue from their bishops. For these politicians believe that 90% of Catholic laity are using some form of contraception anyway and want to cynically divorce, as I said, the laity from the bishops for their political gain at the polls. Despite your personal outrage at being singled out by the moderator of an internet site that is ardently behind the bishops in their stand on this issue, and personally called to task for being a Catholic who supported the appointment of Kathleen Sebelius (who I am willing to concede you may not have known was a zealous proponent of abortion and contraception prior to her appointment). Your “moral outrage” seems contrived, and as you say, personal. But since you moderate a site yourself, you seek to draw us into your personal problem, and whip up public sentiment to soothe your self justified moral outrage.
As for me, I stand with the Catholic bishops, and hence, the Catholic Faith.
Posted by Michael | June 2, 2012, 5:02 pmMichael, I appreciate your reasoned and temperate tone with regard to a subject, about which, you may feel passionate. I have an opposing view on the matter, for better or worse.
This line really jumped out at me:
“The bishops are making a stand not because contraception constitutes THE central issue of the Faith, but because it is the issue that is cynically being deployed by the current administration to attempt to divide the parishioners of the lone holdout on this particular issue from their bishops.”
I agree there may be cynicism involved here but not on the part of the administration. The premise you put forward paints an administration that would choose to attack a religious organization for the purpose of political gain. I suppose that is possible but to believe that seems a bit cynical to me.
Why is it not possible that the administration is putting forward a plan that seeks to provide all women with equal access to care? That the Church operates in the public domain for healthcare, education, and public welfare services of many worthwhile and admirable types and, as such, employs thousands of women who may or may not be Catholic the question of equal access to care is not a made up one but a real one.
The Church is not being asked to do anything different than any other group with regard to providing comprehensive healthcare coverage for women. The administration has even gone out of its way to broker a deal to have the insurers be the ones to provide contraceptive coverage and not the insureds to make it a more palatable process for the Church but it is still no deal for the Bishops.
There are over 2,000 different religious denominations in the US. It seems fairly impossible to me to live together in the melting pot of America and meet the particular standards of each religious group while still honoring a life of shared community. For me this is not a matter of an attack for political gain as you intimate but the claiming of special privilege by the Church that has not been given to any other group and that restricts the choices that their employees have vis-a-vis any other organization.
Additionally, to say that Kathleen Sebelius is “a zealous proponent of abortion and contraception” is just not true… at least as it pertains to abortion. I know no one who is a zealous proponent of abortion. I only know people who acknowledge that there are conditions and circumstances where abortion may not be the worst alternative among those available.
I also know people who acknowledge that regardless of whether abortions are legislated to be legal or illegal they will occur. If that is the case, better in a doctor’s office than with coat hangers in a back alley. That is way different than being a zealous proponent of abortion.
Everyone who feels differently than you or the Church about this matter is not as morally bankrupt as you might believe. The caving of the Protestant denominations to the idea of birth control that you refer to might just as easily be prophetic. Scorn them if you must but I suggest it all depends on where you stand to look.
Posted by Mike Fazzini | June 2, 2012, 9:52 pmNot to play devil’s advocate, but I’m having some trouble seeing why it’s logical that the Catholic Church should should change its views on artificial contraceptives just to follow suit with the majority. I think a good analogy (bear with me here) might be plagiarism in academia–if numerous polls stated that the majority of college students see no ethical or moral problem with appropriating others’ information without proper attribution, should universities change their policies on plagiarism? One could argue that relaxing or discarding such standards of academic rigor might damage scholarship, but not all cultures hold these standards (which are highly patterned on Western ideals of personal property and ownership), and it’s possible to have highly competitive scholarship, invention, and scientific discovery in more communal or statist models.
To get back to the contraceptive issue–let’s change professors and administrators to priests and bishops. The Church’s stance against contraceptives, while unfortunately couched by the media solely in terms of backwardness and restriction, is actually based on deeply held beliefs in the sacredness of the body–an incarnational view of materiality that is indeed central, rather than tangential, to the Catholic faith. This relates also to a view of the unity rather than duality of mind and body (humans have the ability to make moral choices that can order their drives and desires–they are not slaves to their instinctual drives, they do not require mechanization to stand in for interior regulation). While it may be that this view is held by bishops and priests far more than by the laity–much in the way that academics, not students, may be the only ones who care much about plagiarism–should this view be discarded? I would say that the rhetorical usefulness of the Church’s very vocal opposition to the contraceptive mandate in healthcare is in bringing this view to the public–especially to Catholics who are unaware of the underpinnings of their faith.
Posted by Alison Levin | March 19, 2013, 9:08 pmAlison, thanks for your comment. The analogy you make between the Catholic hierarchy and university professors and administrators is interesting but is not responding to the argument I made in this piece. I argued that to call it on a “war on Catholics” for the Obama administration to attempt to guarantee that the workers of most employers, including Catholic hospitals and schools, have access to contraception through their health insurance is to define Catholic identity primarily by the prohibition on artificial contraception. In so arguing I do NOT say anything about who should determine official Catholic teachings, or whether the fact that most Catholics ignore the prohibition on artificial contraception (and that papal advisors encouraged Paul VI to change it) is a reason to change the teaching.
Obviously some people would say that Catholics who ignore the prohibition on artificial contraception are not truly Catholic; however, the “war on Catholics” language surrounding the so-called contraception mandate does not specify that only 2% of Catholic women count as Catholics under this definition (according to the data from the Guttmacher Institute I cited in the above post). “War on the 2% of ‘real’ Catholics” doesn’t have the same panache. Thus I think it’s worth pointing out that the rhetoric is manipulative.
I agree with you, however, that Catholic authorities who are committed to the prohibition of contraception could use the mandate as an opportunity to explain their commitment and its theological and anthropological underpinnings, and perhaps some have. In fact, I think that would have been a better use of their time and resources than fighting the mandate; after all, just because employees have access to artificial contraception does not mean that those employees must choose to use it.
Posted by Kari J. Tremeryn | March 20, 2013, 10:30 am