You have probably already heard of the Obama Administration’s latest outrage — just one of many — against religious freedom in this country. The Department of Health and Human Services, in its latest formulation of the new requirements for health-care insurance offered by employers, has announced that there will be no religious exemption for those who find it immoral to provide insurance for contraception, sterilization or abortifacient drugs — that is, of course, all Catholic employers.
HHS Kathleen Sebelius did thoughtfully mention that the employers will have a whole year to comply, or, as Cardinal-designate Dolan has put it, to “learn to violate our consciences.” (Sebelius, is, by the way, Catholic).
More than 60% of all the bishops who are heads of dioceses in the U.S. have weighed in against this violation of the right to practice our religion unimpeded, and have urged people to write to the Presdient, HHS and their Senators and Congressional representatives. At least one bill to kill this mandate is already in the works.
There is much more excellent coverage at www.americanpapist.com., including a full list of bishops’ statements.
One thing everyone can easily do — petition the White House here The petition already has almost 7,000 signatures - it needs 25,000 to get noticed for government action.
The administration would apparently just really love for this to go away until after the election. We must not let them!
I have a few more thoughts on the wider implications of this particular mandate, but they will have to wait until tomorrow or the next day.
Update - Feb 8: 1:30 a.m. The petition has gone over the top! Latest total 26,351. Still almost 3 weeks to go. I hope it hits 100,000!
I knew I needed to do something to get back into regular blogging, and this is news I can’t not report: Our archbishop has just been named a cardinal!
At the end of his celebration of Mass for the Feast of the Epiphany, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he will be elevating 22 cardinals in a concistory on February 18. Among them is Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York! Abp. Dolan accepted in his usual folksy and humble fashion.
And just a bit more:
It’s delightful news, but really no surprise. The Archbishop of New York is always traditionally a cardinal, but Dolan hasn’t been made one in his almost three years in New York because he predecessor, Edward Cardinal Egan, is still under 80, the age at which cardinal usually “retires,” at least in the sense of losing his voting rights in a conclave. It’s not thought good to have two cardinals with voting rights from the same diocese. Abp. Dolan is rising to the rank of cardinal just a little before Egan’s 80th birthday in April, so Pope Benedict raised him the minute he was able to do so. Cardinal Dolan will now have the chance to advise the Pope in one or more of the Vatican’s congregrations and will almost certainly vote in the conclave to elect Pope Benedict’s successor.
Just another piece of Catholic history being made.
This story has been building for some time. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has targeted New York City’s Crisis Pregnancy Centers for unfair harassment. Saying that the centers lie to women and try to trick the into thinking they are abortion centers, they have proposed a law requiring the centers to post a long list of disclaimers saying that they do not provide abortion or contraceptives, and stating whether or not a physician is on the premises, on the front of their buildings, in their offices and in all their ads. If they don’t, they face shutting down of the centers, stiff fines and even imprisonment. Of course, Planned Parenthood and other other abortion centers are not required to publish any disclaimers at all.
No woman who has been treated at a CPC in New York City has ever filed a complaint or a lawsuit against the single Crisis Pregnancy center there. The only people complaining are the abortionists, who find the centers are eating into their business. The attack on the centers is part of a national effort by pro-abortion forces to attack pregnancy care centers; laws similar to the one in New York have been proposed in several states and actually enacted in Maryland.
This is not an especially good time for abortion providers to make their move. In the last few days, the city has been up in arms over the just-published data from the New York City Department of Vital Statistics on the numbers of abortion in the city in the last decade. In 2005, the year in which the numbers are lowest, New York had over 117,000 abortions, meaning that 41% of pregnancies in the city ended in abortion. For black women, it was 60% of all pregnancies. The numbers for the remaining years are all higher.
Most Planned Parenthood and other abortion centers are in minority neighborhoods.
Pro-lifers, especially African-Americans, are raising cries about black genocide. This is little surprise in regard to Planned Parenthood, whose founder, Margaret Sanger, was an ardent supporters of eugenics, a popular movement in the 30’s and 40’s, which suggested fewer children should be born to the “unfit,” including non-white races.
On Wednesday, Archbishop Dolan of New York said: “This is the first time in my happy 21 months as a New Yorker that I am embarrassed to be one. This New York community, which prides itself on its gritty sensitivity to those in need, is tragically letting down the tiniest most fragile and vulnerable, the little baby in the womb. We’ve got to do more than shiver over these chilling statistics. I invite all to come together to make abortion rare.”
A coalition has been formed to fight this law, and a petition to stop the law from passing has been set up. People not only in New York but around the country are signing.
Anyone who cares about crisis pregnancy centers needs to sign the petition, and attend the rally on Monday January 10 at 7 p.m. at the Manhattan Bible Church, where Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, and other pro-life leaders will be speaking.
See the ongoing coverage on Dr. Gerard Nadal’s blog, especially his hard-hitting interview with black pastor Clenard Childress, featured in the documentary Maafa 21, and how Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, and the eugenics movement have sought to reduce or wipe out the black race since their beginning. Here is the trailer for this excellent documentary
Update: January 11, 2011. The rally last night was fabulous. Many black pastors spoke, as well as activitists from all over, including Dr. Gerard Nadal (who I met for the first time last night, after knowing him online for months) and Chris Slattery, the great defenders of pregnancy care centers in New York. I was only able to take a quick cell phone video of Alveda King’s speech.
Well, that not exactly what they are playing (”Holy God we Praise Thy Name” perhaps?) but that is what many are feeling. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York is the new President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a post he won in a surprise upset victory over its outgoing vice-president, Gerald Kicanas of Tucson. Since the former vice-president has almost invariably been elected president, this is indeed a surprise, perhaps even a change in the way the bishops will be doing things.
Kicanas had been receiving bad press in the last couple of weeks especially, because of his promotion to ordination of a seminarian who turned out to be a molester. Then there was his “liberal” reputation. He broke with many of the other bishops who criticized Notre Dame for giving an award to our pro-abortion president. So there were things to criticize. One good thing about Kicanas: he really showed up a reporter who tried to implicate the future Pope Benedict in the sex abuse scandal (I blogged about that here).
Did the bad publicity contribute to Kicanas’ loss? Is there a more “conservative” wind blowing for the bishops? Some commentators on the left want to make it seem as though this is a change toward de-emphasizing social justice issues like immigration in favor of ones “conservatives” supposedly favor, like abortion. Both Dolan and the new vice-president, Abp. Kurtz of Louisville KY, rejected this idea in their press conference.
Dolan will hold the presidency for the next three years, and I expect it will be a lively three years.
Oh and one more good reason to rejoice at a Dolan victory. His intellectual gifts as a Church historian and his spirituality are matched by his speaking ability. Here he speaks of Dorothy Day and while musing on her life, points out where most other “peace and justice Catholics” go wrong.
My archbishop, Timothy Dolan, has recently been soaking up the sun in L.A. — and telling it like it is at the L.A. Catholic Prayer Breakfast. A marvelous discussion of the present state of the Church.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history."
Pope Benedict XVI to the German Parliament, Sept 22, 2011.
