So a person might well ask, "What's causing the U.S. Catholic bishops to draw a line in the sand and dig in their heels HERE, and not at various other points where they could have resisted over the past 40 years?
I very good question. If I do say so myself. And I am pinging Black Elk in here to hear his opinion on the matter. I myself suspect that because this HHS mandate is NOT technically tax-funded, but is in fact an unfunded mandate to be paid for by employers via insurance, it crosses an obscure canonical or moral-ethical line which would make religious employers not just disgruntled-citizens-paying-their-taxes, but actual formal and material cooperators in a grave objective msoral evil.
I think a person can be excommuicated for formal and material cooperation.
Anyhow, it means that Bishops cannot obey this law without incurring excommunication.
In other words, they are being legally reqauired to commit an offense which terminates their communion with the Church.
And if they drop the insurance entirely, they are hit with crushing (truly crushing) penalties, fines. And if they do not pay the fines, it's off to prison they go.
They're finally at a place where there is no wiggle room. Where they cannot claim that this is only "remote material" cooperation (paying taxes). They can't finesse it.
Is that about it, Black Elk?
bookmarking & bttt
Reason 1: We had been used to having, as presidents of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, men who were, at best, weak leaders and, at worst, not very Catholic. People like Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk and Bishop Wilton Gregory. While an occasional strong Catholic like John Cardinal Krol would be elected once in a while, the weak were the rule.
Reason 2: We then came to two consecutive elections in which Francis Cardinal George of Chicago and Cardinal-designate Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York were elected as reasonably strong and committed Catholics of religiously conservative views. Dolan was elected in an upset in the first contested election in memory, was elected defeating the far more church liberal incumbent Vice President Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson (formerly a Bernardin protege in Chicago). The Dolan election seemed to be in the nature of a mandate from his fellow bishops to put a stop to the church liberal nonsense. Non-Catholic (and Catholics with a superficial approach to Catholicism but a more fervent commitment to somewhat secular political conservatism) conservatives may find Dolan's dedication to government spending on the poor and to defending the immigration (with or without "papers" from the nations south of the US) may find Catholic church conservatism strange but it is what it is and I tend to follow and obey as best I can.
Reason 3: Having received that "mandate" from his fellow bishops, Archbishop Dolan (holding also what amounts to the premier See in the US particularly known for political liaison and leadership with the wider society, Dolan communicated with Obama and his administration on Obamneycare and was effectively rebuffed on Catholic concerns as to abortion, "morning after" pills (pharmaceutical abortions designed to prevent implantation) and the ordinary "birth control" pill which functions not as a contraceptive but to agitate the uterus and make implantation therein of the already conceived human being very unlikely if not impossible. I am not sure but I also imagine that Obamneycare provides for elective sterilization as well.
Reason 4. As Mrs. Don-o points out, there is a difference between living in a society in which birth control (especially the abortifacient kind) and abortion are legal and living in a society in which paying for such forms of birth control and abortion are mandatory. The latter is a legal mandate to materially cooperate with the evils in question and therefore to participate in them. We have had lesser forms of such material cooperation and participation in such evils via abortions allowed for service personnel at taxpayer funded medical facilities or via welfare abortions or provision of abortifacients to welfare recipients in states where such is funded by state or county or municipal taxation. The Hyde Amendments prohibited federal funding for a long time and therefore, protected the USCCB from having to express condemnation nationally, leaving the question to diocesan bishops in states or subdivisions affected by state or local abortion funding.
Reason 5: We Catholics and our bishops have been seduced, to some extent (not you, Mrs. Don-o or many of your colleagues in the determined pro-life activities in which you engaged) by some idiot libertarian argument to the effect that, if we don't like abortion, don't get one. This was no more sensible than someone saying that if you don't want to engage in bank robbery, don't. We have an obligation to stop evil. Dawn is now breaking via Obamneycare and the sunlight reveals that when we give the babykillers an inch, they will demand a mile. We had to be smacked up side the head and we and the bishops have been.
Reason 6: Obamneycare, the administration's militant defense of it, as applied to the Roman Catholic Church, that the vile apostate "Catholic" Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius is Obama's chosen Goebbels on the issue, that every leftist interest group or union is given "waivers" from Obamneycare's requirements but the Catholic Church does not get such "waivers" (the waivers themselves being probably unconstitutional under the XIVth Amendment Equal Protection Clause as are certainly their issuance to friends and denials to enemies of the regime (that would be us as Catholics), means that the Obozo regime is determined to make an example of the Roman Catholic Church and its institutions (schools, hospitals, charities, etc.) and to punish Catholics for BEING Catholic and to require Catholics and their leaders under penalty of steep fines and incarceration to abandon the Faith. We shall not.
Reason 7: Although the bishops probably have not figured it out yet, it is time for Catholics to study the history of the Christeros in Mexico and also particularly Warren Carroll's The Last Crusade about General Francisco Franco's Cathiolic Falangist revolution against the elected government of the Spanish "Republicans" (i.e. Stalinist Communists of Spain) when the "Republicans" went a wee bit further and went on a rampage in which the army on the mainland under their direction invaded a cloistered convent of about 80 nuns and raped and murdered them, followed by the martyrdom of seminarians and priests who told the Reds that they each wanted to be first to be executed so that each might be first to heaven. By the end, Franco sent a lot of the Reds to the next life and crushed them altogether and replaced their regime.
Reason #8: What the bishops have apparently figured out is that Obamneycare for Catholics is a sort of greater equivalent of having a government program to force observant Jews to eat pork. Maccabees I and II in the Catholic canon of the Bible covers what happened when a government gets carried away in forcing in forcing people to violate their own religious obligations because the powers that be disagree with those obligations of their subjects. Obozo does not have to like the Catholic Faith or live according to it but the First Amendment Freedom of Worship prohibits him and anyone else from interfering with the practice of Catholicism.
If I can be of further help, feel free to ask.
Finally and quite separately, to Mariner: This Tenth Amendment business has superficial appeal even to Catholics since it is the embodiment of an ancient Catholic philosophical principal of subsidiarity. I understand that St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote eloquently on the subject of subsidiarity.
OTOH, if the long-ignored Tenth Amendment were to be rediscovered as a governing principle and put into effect fully tomorrow morning at 10 AM, are you prepared for the second coming of the French Revolution? No more federal: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or Departments of Edumakashun, Energy, Commerce, Labor, probably Veteran's Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Health & Human Services, also Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, National Labor Relations Board, Centers for Disease Control, Stafford Loans, National Defense Student Loans, Pell Grants, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum ad nauseam.
We are conservatives. ABRUPTLY abolishing all those agencies, departments, and programs and many, many more may sound good to libertarians or constitutional purists but not to me or a lot of other conservatives. This is one of the major problems with the simplistic Ron Paul view of "constitutionalism." A lot of those agencies may well need to be abolished. It may even be that the Tenth Amendment ought to be modified or even eventually enforced as is. We have spent about 180 years massacring and generally ignoring the Tenth. It won't be restored abruptly without massive bloodshed. Conservatives are natural born gradualists on domestic policy. The time to abolish functions suddenly is when they are being enacted not years later when people have learned to rely on them.