Catholic Social Thought and the HHS Mandate

By Francis J. Beckwith

FRIDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2012

As almost everyone on earth now knows, Professor Obama has offered his “compromise” to the HHS regulations that require that all employers, including most religious employers, that provide health insurance to their employees must include coverage of contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients free of charge.  It was a faux compromise. The insurance company, not the employer, must inform the employee that these options exist, while the insurance company is required to provide these services “free of charge.” But, as one group of scholars stated, “it does not matter who explains the terms of the policy purchased by the religiously affiliated or observant employer. What matters is what services the policy covers.” And because there’s no free lunch, the insurance company’s cost undoubtedly will be passed on to the employer. Nothing of substance has changed. The religious employer whose conscience forbids him to materially cooperate with acts he believes are intrinsically evil must purchase employees health insurance that includes services it believes are intrinsically evil. Nevertheless, several individuals and groups have applauded this “compromise.” Washington Post writer E. J. Dionne, for instance, wrote a thoughtful column in support of the president. The Catholic Health Associationinitially praised the President, but now seems to be backpedaling a bit, whileCatholics United offers unwavering support. Although each claims to be committed to Catholic Social Thought (CST), when one reads the relevant encyclicals, what emerges is not a theological brief for the HHS mandate and its faux compromise, but rather, something quite hostile to it.          Pope Paul VI In Humanae Vitae (1968), for instance, Pope Paul VI asks the “rulers of nations” not to “tolerate any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God.” Consequently, if the Church teaches that the state ought not to voluntarily introduce these practices to the wider public, it stands to reason that it is far worse for the state to coerce a Catholic employer or Church organization to introduce these practices to its employees. If, however, a Catholic or Catholic organization were to acquiesce in this state coercion, it would not only be materially cooperating with evil, but it would cause scandal, for it would by its actions be teaching that it rejects Humanae Vitae’s command that “careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law.” Catholics United is correct that Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), is “generally regarded as the inaugural document of the Catholic social tradition.” But the HHS mandate that Catholics United supports is inconsistent with the principles found in that encyclical. In order to appreciate this, consider this question: Do religious-based organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, and Catholic-owned businesses, have the right under the HHS mandate either to sign an agreement with an insurance company or self-insure so that the policies they offer to their employees do not include contraception, abortion, sterilization, etc.? The answer is “no” (except for narrowly defined “houses of worship”). HHS is in effect coercing the Church and some of its members to use their assets for the purpose of introducing into the lives of their employees and their families “those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God,” as Humanae Vitaeputs it.             Pope Leo XIII On the matter of the state conscripting the assets of the Church and its members for such purposes, Rerum Novarum lays down clear principles: [E]very precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit. For laws only bind when they are in accordance with right reason, and, hence, with the eternal law of God. . . .And here we are reminded of the confraternities, societies, and religious orders which have arisen by the Church's authority and the piety of Christian men. . . .In their religious aspect they claim rightly to be responsible to the Church alone. The rulers of the State accordingly have no rights over them, nor can they claim any share in their control; on the contrary, it is the duty of the State to respect and cherish them, and, if need be, to defend them from attack. Pope Leo laments that in his own time “a very different course has been followed”:  In many places, the State authorities have laid violent hands on these communities, and committed manifold injustice against them; it has placed them under control of the civil law, taken away their rights as corporate bodies, and despoiled them of their property, in such property the Church had her rights, each member of the body had his or her rights, and there were also the rights of those who had founded or endowed these communities for a definite purpose, and, furthermore, of those for whose benefit and assistance they had their being. Thus, Leo asserts that the Church “cannot refrain from complaining of such spoliation as unjust and fraught with evil results; and with all the more reason do We complain because, at the very time when the law proclaims that association is free to all, We see that Catholic societies, however peaceful and useful, are hampered in every way, whereas the utmost liberty is conceded to individuals whose purposes are at once hurtful to religion and dangerous to the commonwealth.” Catholic Social Thought, it seems, is as much about speaking truth to power as it is about not letting those in and close to power speak for truth. Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. Among his many books is Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press, 2010) © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved February 17, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Cornelius Sullivan on Caravaggio, Billy Joel, and the Marilyn-Elvis Syndrome

Caravaggio and the Marilyn-Elvis Syndrome

July 25, 2011

By Cornelius Sullivan

The Sacrifice of Isaac, Ufizzi Gallery, Florence

NAPLES, FLORIDA --  “Only the good die young.”- Billy Joel. Just back from Rome at my house in Florida, in the woods, thoughts and visions of Caravaggio were still fresh in my head.  At an impromptu party in the garage of my neighbor Eric, the conversation turned to a discussion of the fact that most of the long haired young guys of the Southern Rock band on the overhead video are dead, probably from drugs. That’s right an overhead video in a garage. It is a big garage with twenty foot high ceilings and a 1969 Mustang Fast Back Coupe, a 1957 Chevy pickup truck, parts of antique cars, some hanging from the roof, and vintage motorcycles. And when Police Detective Eric plays this music I know that a party is beginning. It is not far but I always go on my scooter, it is a tradition, but Eric tells his friends that it is so I won’t be bitten by an alligator.


Billy Joel, the famous American singer-songwriter, “The Piano Man”, bought a painting from me a few years ago in Gloucester, Massachusetts at my studio-gallery. It was seven in the evening and I was exhausted and hungry about to go home but I couldn’t stop painting. A couple looked in the door and a man said “Are you open?” I didn’t look up, and I said “No, but you can come in.” Then I recognized him, but I was in a strange painting mood and I said, “You are very famous, right?”  He shrugged. Then I said, “Oh no, you’re a celebrity look-a-like.” Then he handed me his American Express card, I said, “Billy, I was just busting …. … .”  We became friends at that point and it was comfortable because I viewed his fame as a burden that he carries that is separate from him.  I thought he was comfortable with his great abilities and think he still is.


In previous articles I tried to establish that Caravaggio was a great and revolutionary painter often rejected professionally and having a tough time in daily life. He killed a man and left Rome a wanted man, never to return.  Finally, I suggested that he knew how great he was.


At the Opera house in Paris after the debut of Carmen, the supposedly sophisticated audience laughed and shrieked. Georges Bizet went to the streets of Paris and walked. He was dead at thirty six years old.  George, we know how great Carmen is, and thank you. 


Van Gogh sold one painting in his life.


Modigliani threw his unappreciated limestone and marble sculptures into the Seine.


Caravaggio strides across both groups, the unappreciated ones, as well as the Marilyn, Elvis artists who were smothered by too much adulation.  His competitors while copying  his style and innovations often got the good commissions rather than him.


Raphael died young but his death and life were graced like his art. The pope allowed his mistress to stay with him in the papal palace while he frescoed the walls of the pope’s apartments. He died painting his Transfiguration, unfinished, but not looking so, now in the Vatican Museums, he was working on the Christ figure. The painting was carried leading his funeral procession through Rome. He is buried in the Pantheon.


Janis Joplin was a bright unexpected flame that burned for a short time, extinguished by drugs. I do not intend any disrespect but it is hard to imagine a great old Janis. Her gift was tied to youth.


I am amazed that Caravaggio could paint on the run, island and city hopping in the Mediterranean.  Most of his paintings were so big that they would not fit through the door of my studio. The support system of monasteries, convents, and palaces in the places of the four year exile must have been impressive.  The world was bigger or smaller then, depending on how you look at it.  He was not threatened by extradition.  Hollywood film director, Roman Polanski, is for his past crimes in the United States.


For Caravaggio the “price on his head” was literal. In other words if you could produce his head in a basket, you got the reward. He was comfortable enough on the run to continually paint masterpieces. The subject often would be whatever saint the monastery was named after. But then he would get paranoid about bounty hunters finding him, and he would move on.


There are paintings that have decapitations and blood. David and Goliath, Judith Beheading Holorfernes, Salome with the head of John the Baptist.  Because he lived in a different time we take the paintings as allegorical and historical.  They are in fact close to being autobiographical.

Judith Beheading Holofernes, Galleria Nazionale dell'Arte Antica, Rome

If Caravaggio lived today would we read about his quiet overdose?  That’s not nearly as interesting as sword fighting, the price on his head, his painting himself as Goliath, and running after the boat and dying on the beach.


When looked at closely, all lives can appear small and the same. They all have some greatness, some pain, some failures, rising youth, declining age, and death.  


Where does the self destructiveness of great creative talents come from?  Is it as simple as the fact that they become mad by failing to put the big round peg of great creativity into the small square hole of ordinary life?  We thank them even as they fail, because it enables us to live our lives bigger.


We drank cold beer and shook our heads because those Rock musicians died so young.
 

Beheading of John the Baptist, St. John’s Cathedral, Valetta, Malta

articles by Cornelius Sullivan

Michael Novak on Obama's Deceptive Hidden Premises

Michael Novak at NRO argues that the HHS attack on religious institutions rests on deception.  It is a power grab, based on four hidden premises, and “the grossest violation of the separation of church and state by any administration in American history.”

The most evil thing about the Obama administration’s recent violation of the separation of church and state is its deceptiveness. With his order requiring inclusion of contraception and abortifacient drugs in insurance coverage, the president is smuggling the hidden premises of NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and other supporters of abortion into U.S. law, and doing so untruthfully. 

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instruction attacking religious institutions such as hospitals, universities, and programs for the poor rests on four hidden premises. 

(1) The first deception is that the president has issued a “contraception mandate.” It is not that; it is a presidential power grab. No state or other jurisdiction is trying to ban contraception. Neither the Catholic Church nor any other religious body is trying to ban contraception. The means of contraception are even more widely available than in drugstores; one can pick up condoms in restrooms, even in restaurants. The reason for this deception is to make opponents appear to be doing something they are not. They are not banning contraception. It is dishonest to focus on contraception instead of on the real issue, the attempt to extend presidential power into areas constitutionally forbidden to it.

READ MORE

This is NOT about women's health; it is about preventing and killing babies

Dr Rebecca Peck's forthcoming February 2012 Linacre Quarterly article, "Significant Risks of Oral Contraceptives (OCPs): Why This Drug Should NOT Be Included In a Preventive Care Mandate" (co-authored by Charles Norris, and incuding 72 references) will be a powerful tool for us. Her open letter (below) is a very practical extension of her Linacre Quarterly article that you have her permission to use as you wish.

Dear Friends,

I just wanted you to see this thread of a discussion on some points related to the HHS mandate.

Although the religious liberty issue is universally compelling, another crucial point is that birth control is NOT preventative care (see below). The current administration wants this to be about the Catholic Bishops denying women their "women’s health". This is why I feel our recent research article is so timely and important right now (1). The pill is not a warm little fuzzy harmless object. It causes significant harm and the American people have been deceived for long enough. As a practicing physician, I see the fallout every day—young women with blood clots in their legs, strokes, early breast cancer, HPV, and cervical cancer. This is NOT about women's health; it is about preventing and killing babies. The present administration will try to pit US Bishops against women and try to portray the bishops as a bunch of old men that don't want women to have their "women's health" options, but this has no credibility.

Every day, I, my husband Benjamin, and other doctors like us do TRUE preventative care. We do pap smears looking for cervical cancer, perform breast exams looking for breast cancer, refer for mammograms, order colonoscopies looking for colon cancer, and give immunizations to prevent pneumonia and influenza. These time-tested measures are very different from prescribing a pill to prevent a CHILD. A child is not a disease. Pregnancy and fertility are not disease states; they are normal physiological processes of the human body.

The point also needs to be hammered home that we are not just talking about insurance mandated contraception—we are talking sterilizations, “morning-after” pills, and abortions. Christians and Catholics can come together on the abortion issue. Accordingly, the way the pill causes abortions needs to be explained in a coherent manner (2). Manufacturers of the current birth control pill formulations have reduced estrogen content in an attempt to reduce some of the risks cited above. But, reducing the estrogen increases the likelihood of ovulation. The pill’s "backup" mechanism then comes into play by preventing implantation of the several day old embryo into the uterine wall. Since life begins at conception, the layperson can understand that this necessarily means that the new life is aborted.

Finally, regarding the recent decision of Komen to reinstate support for PP, the hypocrisy of this must be exposed. Birth control and abortion—PP's 2 major lines of business—INCREASE the risk of breast cancer (3).

All people of integrity want women to have options regarding their family planning, but why are the only discussed options those that are contrary to the Catholic Church's teaching? Fertility awareness and modern methods of Natural Family Planning—over a dozen distinct methods—cause NO harms at all! All have wonderful benefits for women that empower them, strengthen their families, and work with their bodies in the natural way God created them.

Blessings,


Rebecca Peck, MD

PS It should also be pointed out that HAVING children and BREASTFEEDING—a woman using her body as it is designed—actually protect a woman's health. Pregnancy is not a disease; pregnancy PREVENTS disease.

(1) Peck, R; Norris, C. "Why OCPs Should Not Be Part of a Preventative Care Mandate: Significant Risks and Harms of OCPs", Linacre Quarterly, Feb 2012 (forthcoming)
(2) Stanford, J; Larrimore, W. "Postfertilization effects of OCPs"www.polycarp.org
(3) Kahlenborn, C. http://www.polycarp.org/overviewbreastcanceroralcontraceptives.htm andhttp://www.polycarp.org/overviewabortionbreastcancer.htm

HHS and Soft Totalitarianism: Defining Religious Freedom Down

George Weigel makes the argument at First Things about Obama's push against the institutional pluralism of civil society.  The administration's drive to foist its agenda on the world has been called "moral imperialism."  At home it involves destroying the heart of the American democratic republic, squeezing out the space between state and individual, the mediating structures that are the heart of social justice and the key bulwark against totalitarianism.  

HHS and Soft Totalitarianism

Feb 15, 2012

George Weigel

The Obama administration’s recently-announced HHS regulations, which would require Catholic institutions to subsidize health insurance coverage that provides sterilization, abortifacient drugs, and contraceptives, should be located within the context of the administration’s three-year long effort to define religious freedom down.

As the administration has demonstrated in its international human rights policy, it regards religious freedom as a kind of privacy right: the right to freedom of worship, which the administration seems to regard as analogous to any other optional, recreational activity. No serious student of religious freedom, however, takes the redefinition of religious freedom as freedom-to-worship seriously. For if that redefinition were true, there would be “religious freedom” in Saudi Arabia, so long as the “worship” in question were conducted behind closed doors. And that is manifestly absurd.

The HHS regulations announced on January 20 are one domestic expression of defining-religious-freedom-down.   READ MORE

Culture and the Sexual Revolution

A Tale of Two Concerts By Anthony Esolen    WEDNESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2012 Last summer, at the insistence of a good Catholic friend, my daughter and I drove to a small village in Cape Breton, to attend a Celtic music festival.          Don’t imagine glitter. The festival was held in a big green field behind a Catholic church. There were benches, but most people had brought lawn chairs or towels, or were standing, about 4,000 in all, quite a crowd for a place far in the countryside. All kinds of people were there, old and young, men and women, kids running around, carpenters, fishermen, farmers, local musicians and step-dancers, and at least one professor – me. Everyone eagerly waited for the star performers. They had arrived overnight, driving 800 miles from a previous engagement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a van big enough to transport the band, equipment, and four children.

The stars were Natalie MacMaster, who some believe to be the finest Celtic fiddler in the world, and her husband Donnell Leahy, also a phenomenal musician, with their accompanists and their children – and their faith, their traditions, and their devotion to the land where they were born.  For it was a homecoming. When they greeted the crowd, they remembered with love the good priest who married them in that same church, whose body now lay in the cemetery beside the field. I sat beside Natalie’s brother, Kevin, who regaled me with family lore, of MacMasters and Leahys, most of whom do other things besides playing music to put bread on the table, but who get together as families on an evening to play Celtic music, long into the night. It seems that the children take up one instrument or another. There were children – the sweetest thing of all. After Natalie and Donnell made the hills sing with music, they retreated, and, one after another, their children and their cousins came out, step dancing. They would call out a name, and a child would appear – first three teenage girls, almost young women, then five boys in a row, then a scattering of boys and girls down to the youngest, a little girl who had to be held by both hands as she toddled on stage and did a step or two.  Each child danced a little differently, one or two of the boys making the crowd laugh with boy-antics, and as each came forth, from tallest to smallest, the people applauded and whistled, louder and louder, until with that last baby girl there was nothing but delight and merriment. The girls wore skirts, the boys wore white shirts and black ties; and they all looked like cousins. They shared the same blood, the same home, the same history, the same faith. Every element in the scene was in its place. There was the land, to which Natalie and Donnell are still devoted. There were the neighbors, the other families whose histories accompanied their own family history for generations.  There was the church, to whom everyone belonged – or should have belonged; and the memories of people no longer with them, memories ready to be stirred by a glance towards the churchyard near. There was the warm faith of the great musicians, and the vault of the sky above, deepening into a sapphire blue in the twilight of a northern summer evening.          Donnell Leahy and Natalie MacMaster  What I beheld that night was culture, in its full and true sense. I don’t know how long it will last, even in that backwoods village in Nova Scotia. Even there, the agents of anticulture have been doing their work – television penetrates, and schools operate under government-mandated curricula.  Even there, men and women are forgetting to marry, and are raising such few children as are born, outside of the haven of wedded love. People in charge of tourism in Cape Breton have touted the old Celtic music, and there’s a school or two where you can learn it, and even some of the old language. I’m told that there are more speakers of Gaelic in that part of the world than there are in Scotland itself.  And yet, a school here and a program there do not a culture make. Everything at that concert, those things and they alone make for a culture. And only in a field of faith, where even hearty merriment is duly ordered to our worship of God, and giving Him thanks. And everything present there, as I considered the matter later, the sexual revolution would destroy: family, community, traditions, faith. For it would drive men and women apart. It would kill children in the womb. It would take away most of the cousins.  It would sow transience and infidelity at the heart of the nearest human relations and found marriage upon the sands of appetite. It would first turn the human heart away from God, and toward the flesh; and then it would harden the heart against even the goodness and holiness of the human body. What would it put in that concert’s place? The halftime show at the Super Bowl perhaps. It is almost absurd to complain when the show features a moment of shocking vulgarity. For years, the show has been vulgar from start to finish.   It is vulgar in its noise, garish lights, prinked up entertainers, and massive celebration of egotism. There is nothing sweet, nothing meek, nothing gentle, nothing to move the heart, nothing to open the mind; no quiet show of talent, no spirit of giving, no humility, no memory, no honor, no devotion, no kindness – not even the merry earthiness of a bawdy joke. It is all crass, harsh, and bitter.  That is where we have come. The decadent inhabitants of the great city of Rome became people who enjoyed the blood of gladiatorial combats. We have become the sorts of people who enjoy, if that’s the right word, the incessant howl of selfishness. How can it be otherwise, when we have degraded love itself, in the most intimate embrace of man and woman? Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College.  © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Retrieved February 15, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Michael Novak on Joe Paterno

Why My Critics Are Wrong

 Published in National Review Online February 13, 2012

By Michael Novak

The many critics of my article on Joe Paterno proved that some people in our culture, thank God, have not become “non-judgmental.” Some still have a robust moral sense. Same for most sportswriters I have read or heard, who seem to have taken the same tack as my critics, impugning as with one voice Joe Paterno’s moral legacy. At the same time, this readiness to diminish the classic greatness of Joe Paterno’s moral responsibility exposes the dangers at the opposite extreme.

My critics are correct on one small point: I did choose not to assess whether Coach Paterno was guilty of moral fault. Any such assessment is morally corrupting, and for four reasons. First, Americans react with horror to anything smacking of child abuse, and properly so. But we have recently experienced massive rushes to judgment that turned out to have been calumnious. We have seen psychologists in court misuse “repressed memories” to falsely accuse child-care providers of molesting tots over a long period of time. What an agony for those falsely accused — and later acquitted, too late to get their reputations wholly cleansed. 

Second, we all went through the press stampede to condemn the young men of the lacrosse team at Duke for a deed they did not commit. It took months for the courts to vindicate these men’s innocence. Lesson: Those who falsely accuse athletes frequently go unchallenged for a very long time.

[YOU CAN READ THE WHOLE ESSAY AT MICHAEL NOVAK'S WEBSITE, www.michaelnovak.net HERE. In addition to being a distinguished philosopher,  theologian, and public figure, Michael Novak is the author of The Joy of Sports, which was chosen by Sports Illustrated as one of the 100 best sports books of the 20th century.]