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Twenty-Third Sunday of the Year
4 September 2011
Dear Friends in Christ,
The Dictatorship of Relativism is a phrase often used by Pope Benedict XVI to describe the soft tyranny now taking hold in all of the democracies of the West — a tyranny no less hateful and aggressive than the hard tyranny of jackboots and prison cells, but a tyranny embraced and enforced, paradoxically, in the name of tolerance. When moral relativism is made a legal absolute even by a legal and democratic process, then basic human rights will be violated by the state in the name of tolerance, usually starting with the natural human right to religious freedom. We have seen this in recent years in Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and the District of Columbia where the Catholic Church was forced out of coordinating the adoption of children because we believe that the good of children is better served when they are reared by a mother and a father who are bound together for life in marriage rather than by any two random domestic partners who happen to want a child. We have also seen this in the supreme arrogance of several state courts and legislatures which have attempted to redefine the natural human communion of spouses we call marriage. And now a new front has opened in the struggle against the dictatorship of relativism. The Obama Administration is attempting to deprive Catholic health care workers (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) and Catholic heath care institutions (hospitals, clinics, etc.) and Catholic employers of several kinds (colleges, schools, social service providers, etc) of the conscience clauses which have heretofore allowed us to refuse participation in practices and procedures which Catholics are bound by faith to consider immoral and contrary to the dignity of the human person. Bishop Guglielmone described the new threat in a letter this week to all the priests of the diocese:
“On 1 August 2011 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) approved the final regulations for group health plans and health insurance coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) mandating coverage of surgical sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives (even those that cause chemical abortion) as part of ‘preventive care service for women.’ Through insurance premiums and our taxes, we will be forced to support treatment that considers fertility and pregnancy as a disease not as gifts from God. Currently, there is no meaningful conscience protection for Catholic institutions to be exempt from this new mandate because we hire and serve people from other faith communities, not just Catholics, so that the ‘religious exemption’ now in place excludes us. Without the exemption, Catholic institutions would be forced to cover treatments that oppose the teachings of the Catholic Church and harm women and the common good. We must encourage our Catholic community to call and write their elected representatives in Congress, to support the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (H.R. 1179, S. 1467) that would provide true conscience protection. To quickly locate an elected official or for talking points, please visit www.nchla.org.”
Father Newman