Posted on 02/07/2012 2:10:46 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The archbishop who oversees American Catholic military chaplains worldwide claims the U.S. Army violated his rights by stifling a pastoral letter condemning the Obama administration’s contraception mandate.
Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio stands “firm in the belief, based on legal precedent,” that the Army defied his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, according to a Feb. 3 statement from the military archdiocese.
U.S. Catholic military chaplains around the country were initially told to disobey their archbishop’s instruction to read a pastoral letter from the pulpit at all Sunday Masses on Jan. 28-29.
Although an agreement was eventually reached allowing the letter to be read, a key passage urging Catholics to avoid complying with the “unjust law” was removed.
On Jan. 20, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a new mandate that will soon require virtually all employers to purchase health insurance coverage that includes contraception, sterilization and drugs that cause abortion.
The announcement sparked protest around the country, as Catholic leaders and religious organizations argued that they were being coerced to violate their religious beliefs.
Although a religious exemption to the mandate exists, it does not apply to organizations that are willing to serve or employ members of other faiths. As the mandate stands, most Catholic schools, hospitals and charity organizations would be excluded from the exemption.
More than 150 Catholic bishops across the country have spoken out against the directive, saying that it violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. Several have called for civil disobedience in response to the new regulation.
On Jan. 26, Archbishop Broglio joined many of his fellow bishops around the country in issuing a pastoral letter on the mandate to be read from the pulpit at all Sunday Masses throughout the following weekend.
The pastoral letter argued that the mandate violated the religious freedom protected in the U.S. Constitution and called on Catholics to resist it.
However, according to the archdiocese’s statement, the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains sent out an e-mail instructing that the letter “not be read from the pulpit.”
The e-mail said that the letter could instead be mentioned in the Mass announcements and distributed at the back of the chapel, but that it had not been coordinated with the office and should not be read during Mass.
After a discussion between Archbishop Broglio and Secretary of the Army John McHugh, “it was agreed that it was a mistake to stop the reading” of the letter.
However, the line, “We cannot – we will not – comply with this unjust law” was removed from the letter by the archbishop at the prompting of Secretary McHugh, who believed that it “could potentially be misunderstood as a call to civil disobedience.”
According to the archdiocese, Archbishop Broglio believes the move violated both his rights and “those same rights of all military chaplains and their congregants.”
The archdiocese did not give any indication that it intends to pursue legal action over the incident. It said that it “did not receive any objections to the reading of Archbishop Broglio’s statement from the other branches of service.”
Do some reading about the military martyrs who gave up their lives rather than obey unjust orders.
Yes, indeed.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
Whatever is the honest, oath-affirming person to make of this?
“A few others”? Everyone knows about Bonhoeffer - no one seems to remember the priests at Mauthausen.
This "politics from the pulpit" twaddle is the kind of intellectual legerdemain used by radical statists to make us think that religion is making encroachments into the sphere of politics instead of politics making encroachments into the sphere of religion.
Make no mistake about it. Compromising on this issue would be the equivalent of "burning a pinch of incense to Caesar."
Most eloquent!
This response was very well put, and sums it up nicely in 2 sentences.
Leaders on the Right would be well advised to be as well-spoken as SoUV!
CA....
The answer is a very simple 'NO'.
Leaders of the Church are guilty of having a strong association with the radical left. Clinton speaking at Buffalo NY Canisuis College, the many insults to the faithful at Notre Dame, both Catholic Colleges. ND had an elder Priest arrested, on campus! the Bishop of Buffalo walked all over the protesting faithful, very weak response. I listen to my leftest Priest mock conservatives at least once a month. What did they think would happen? Where were the leaders of the Church 25 years ago? Churches are all but empty for the weekly scheduled Mass, and I blame the Bishops.
The present-day “SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE” you inquire about is — quite simply — a one-way street; always allowing government interference; never allowing church resistance. THAT is why “the usual suspects” have nothing to say in this hour.
As for any notion of keeping politics out of the pulpit; we would be in grave error if we failed to recall the “Black Regiment” of The American Revolution, and to emulate them in their steadfast commitment to liberty.
http://thenewamerican.com/history/american/1789
The Church IS being forced to provide birth control, and medications that are abortifacient, as part of the mandated insurance coverage for its employees in the US. Sadly, the Bishops brought this on themselves because they believed Obama last year when he told them that there would be religious exemptions in the legislation. There ARE religious exemptions, in that Obama didn't lie, but they are so narrowly written as to be useless to almost every religious organization in this country. They were so blinded by their desire for 'social justice' that they couldn't foresee his mendacity.
It's interesting that other religious organziations are beginning to speak out in support of the Catholic Church on this issue, because they know that if the Church goes down on this, there is no protection for THEM, either.
I'm glad the Bishops have spoken so forcefully about this, but it's up to individual Catholics to actually DO something, by making sure Obama is not re-elected in November. And we need to make sure that enough conservative lawmakers are put into Congress to overturn the entire Obamacare structure, and get the US government OUT of the healthcare bidness.
Your argument was tried, unsuccessfully, at Nuremburg.
You need to learn actual history.
ping
>>>”I’d love to see them try to silence say Islam in this manner.”<<<
They couldn’t possibly! Next they’d fear major attacks... shoe-bombers, soup-bombers, all yelling “allah akbar” all the way to the white hut, in which case Obi would’ve to put on his turban & long robe and bend over for a deeper bow to the Saudi King, not to mention those shite mullahs in Iran... all in all it’d be chaotic... But then, all will be rationalized by telling us: that was ‘radical islam’, don’t we know moderates are different?!
On a more serious note, I do agree with your entire comment.
My guess is that the practicing Catholics on Obama’s short list of advisers told him that because most Catholics, even fairly conservative Catholics, use birth control in their own families, he could get away with this without a huge uproar from Catholic voters no matter what the bishops might say. Perhaps Obama even got advice that he could use this as a “wedge issue” to prove that the Catholic leadership doesn't speak for the membership.
If so, he's going to find out the hard way that while the General Synod of the United Church of Christ (Rev. Wright's denomination) may speak “to, not for” its member churches, that most emphatically is **NOT** the case with the Roman Catholic Church.
There are lots of Catholics who have no intention of having families of a dozen kids, but who will get very angry at the idea that the president of the United States is trying to force their church to spend money on things the bishops have declared to be sin.
I am quite frankly shocked and extremely happy to see the severity of the bishops’ response to this. I never expected to see this kind of language coming out of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and I don't think we would have seen it a generation ago when the older bishops had a culture of avoiding offense and many younger bishops were sympathetic to or openly supportive of liberalizing trends in politics and sometimes in doctrinal matters as well.
President Obama needs to win key states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Florida. All have large Roman Catholic populations. He certainly isn't helping his chances with things like this, and he's causing a lot of evangelical Protestants — myself included — to say that it's time for us to make common cause with Catholics (i.e., Gingrich or Santorum) whose church is seeing its rights trampled on. It is only a very small step from forcing Catholic institutions to pay for insurance that covers birth control to forcing evangelical Protestant institutions to pay for insurance that covers abortions, and if the Supreme Court were ever to agree that is acceptable, it would be only a small step in theory (though granted, a huge step in practice) to start punishing churches which “discriminate” against homosexuals or otherwise implement tenets of their faith which are politically unpopular. That legal precedent was set long ago with the Bob Jones University interracial dating issue, and while I have zero tolerance for the old BJU stance on interracial dating (I have an interracial marriage myself) the BJU precedent was bad law and could easily be used to discriminate against other religious institutions.
“....is political politics and policy should left up to our civilian political leaders.”
The operative assumption underlying all politics and law is someone’s idea of morality. Just as the removal of incandescent light bulbs proceeds apace because policy-makers see them as wasteful (morally bad) so the unleashing of wolves out West is viewed by certain people as a moral good.
Here in America our foundational unalienable right is life. From this right proceed our other rights. This right is not from man but from man’s Creator, hence it is unalienable.
If in the name of a manmade moral good man can take away the right to life at one end (the unborn) then he can take it away at the other end, the elderly. Having deprived these two groups of life man can deprive those in the middle area of life.
If some men can ‘morally’ deprive others of the right to life then they can ‘morally’ (politically) require all people, including Christians to promote the taking of life.
And if in the name of this spurious morality men can deprive other people of their right to life then they can seize their property and redistribute it to others. They can throw our borders open, condemn as morally bad such things as SUVs, gas grills, gas lawn mowers, incandescent light bulbs, etc.
All politics, all decisions pertaining to war, all laws are at bottom about someone’s idea of right and wrong.
Although a religious exemption to the mandate exists, it does not apply to organizations that are willing to serve or employ members of other faiths. As the mandate stands, most Catholic schools, hospitals and charity organizations would be excluded from the exemption.
I am aware that there were many Christians both Catholic and Protestant that were persecuted, but by FAR, most of the Churches that were established were PASSIVE in their resistance to National Socialism.
I don’t think I need to learn a d*mn thing. I have a MASTERS in History.
I don’t think I need to learn a d*mn thing. I have a MASTERS in History.
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