This is brilliant! First the joy, then the ethics. But ethics is fundamentally and from the start about joy, happiness, what it takes for humans to flourish. What Fr. Barron argues in terms of effectiveness (and hence strategy) in evangelization is true also in principle, in terms of ethics as moral philosophy. (A wonderful, comprehensive treatment of ethics from a Christian perspective is Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Sources of Christian Ethics.)
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Fr. Robert Barron on Effective Evangelization
This is brilliant! First the joy, then the ethics. But ethics is fundamentally and from the start about joy, happiness, what it takes for humans to flourish. What Fr. Barron argues in terms of effectiveness (and hence strategy) in evangelization is true also in principle, in terms of ethics as moral philosophy. (A wonderful, comprehensive treatment of ethics from a Christian perspective is Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Sources of Christian Ethics.)
An Attack on Rights of Conscience: Bishops' Fact Sheet on HHS Mandate
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
3211 FOURTH STREET NE WASHINGTON DC 20017-1194 202-541-3000 FAX 202-541-3166
How important is the right of conscience in American tradition?
It has always been of paramount importance: “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority” (Thomas Jefferson, 1809).
In the past, has the federal government respected conscientious objections to procedures such as sterilization that may violate religious beliefs or moral convictions?
Yes. For example, a law in effect since 1973 says that no individual is required to take part in “any part of a health service program or research activity funded in whole or in part under a program administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services” if it is “contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions” (42 USC 300a-7 (d)). Even the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which requires most of its health plans to cover contraception, exempts religiously affiliated plans and protects the conscience rights of health professionals in the other plans. Currently no federal law requires anyone to purchase, sell, sponsor, or be covered by a private health plan that violates his or her conscience.
How has the Department of Health and Human Services departed from this policy?
By issuing a mandate for coverage of sterilization and contraceptives (including long-lasting injections and implants, and “morning-after pills” that may cause an early abortion) in virtually all private health plans. In August 2011 HHS included these procedures in a list of “preventive services for women” to be required in health plans issued on or after August 1, 2012. On January 20, 2012, HHS reaffirmed its mandate while deferring enforcement against some religious employers until August 2013.
Is it appropriate to require coverage of these as “preventive services”?
No. The other services on HHS’s list seek to prevent serious disease – breast cancer, lung cancer, AIDS. Pregnancy is not a disease. The Institute of Medicine committee that compiled the “preventive services” list for HHS said in its report that unintended pregnancy is “a condition for which safe and effective prevention and treatment” need to be more widely available – setting the stage for mandated coverage of abortion as the “treatment” when prevention fails. Note that women who suffer from infertility, which really is an illness, were ignored in this mandate.
Didn’t HHS include a religious exemption?
Yes, an incredibly narrow “religious employer” exemption that fails to protect many, perhaps most, religious employers. To be eligible an organization must meet four strict criteria, including the requirement that it both hire and serve primarily people of its own faith. Catholic schools and hospitals would have to eject their non-Catholic employees, students and patients, or purchase health coverage that violates their moral and religious teaching. Jesus and his apostles would not have been “religious enough” for the exemption, since they healed and served people of different faiths. The exemption provides no protection at all to sponsors and providers of health plans for the general public, to pro-life people who own businesses, or to individuals with a moral or religious objection to these procedures.
3211 FOURTH STREET NE WASHINGTON DC 20017-1194 202-541-3000 FAX 202-541-3166
The HHS Mandate for Contraception/Sterilization Coverage:
An Attack on Rights of Conscience
How important is the right of conscience in American tradition?
It has always been of paramount importance: “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority” (Thomas Jefferson, 1809).
In the past, has the federal government respected conscientious objections to procedures such as sterilization that may violate religious beliefs or moral convictions?
Yes. For example, a law in effect since 1973 says that no individual is required to take part in “any part of a health service program or research activity funded in whole or in part under a program administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services” if it is “contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions” (42 USC 300a-7 (d)). Even the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which requires most of its health plans to cover contraception, exempts religiously affiliated plans and protects the conscience rights of health professionals in the other plans. Currently no federal law requires anyone to purchase, sell, sponsor, or be covered by a private health plan that violates his or her conscience.
How has the Department of Health and Human Services departed from this policy?
By issuing a mandate for coverage of sterilization and contraceptives (including long-lasting injections and implants, and “morning-after pills” that may cause an early abortion) in virtually all private health plans. In August 2011 HHS included these procedures in a list of “preventive services for women” to be required in health plans issued on or after August 1, 2012. On January 20, 2012, HHS reaffirmed its mandate while deferring enforcement against some religious employers until August 2013.
Is it appropriate to require coverage of these as “preventive services”?
No. The other services on HHS’s list seek to prevent serious disease – breast cancer, lung cancer, AIDS. Pregnancy is not a disease. The Institute of Medicine committee that compiled the “preventive services” list for HHS said in its report that unintended pregnancy is “a condition for which safe and effective prevention and treatment” need to be more widely available – setting the stage for mandated coverage of abortion as the “treatment” when prevention fails. Note that women who suffer from infertility, which really is an illness, were ignored in this mandate.
Didn’t HHS include a religious exemption?
Yes, an incredibly narrow “religious employer” exemption that fails to protect many, perhaps most, religious employers. To be eligible an organization must meet four strict criteria, including the requirement that it both hire and serve primarily people of its own faith. Catholic schools and hospitals would have to eject their non-Catholic employees, students and patients, or purchase health coverage that violates their moral and religious teaching. Jesus and his apostles would not have been “religious enough” for the exemption, since they healed and served people of different faiths. The exemption provides no protection at all to sponsors and providers of health plans for the general public, to pro-life people who own businesses, or to individuals with a moral or religious objection to these procedures.
Isn’t this an aspect of the Administration’s drive for broader access to health care for all?
Whether or not it was intended that way, it has the opposite effect. People will not be free to keep the coverage they have now that respects their convictions. Organizations with many employees will have to violate their consciences or stop offering health benefits altogether. And resources needed to provide basic health care to the uninsured will be used instead to facilitate IUDs and Depo-Provera for those who already had ample coverage. This is a diversion away from universal health care.
But won’t this provide “free birth control” for American women?
That claim is false for two reasons. First, the coverage will be mandatory, not a matter of free choice for any woman. Second, insurance companies will not be able to charge a co-pay or deductible for the coverage, so they will simply add the cost to the standard premium everyone has to pay – and among those being required to pay will be people who oppose it on conscience grounds. That is no victory for freedom.
By objecting to this coverage, is the Catholic Church discriminating against women?
Not at all. The Church’s teaching against early abortion is based on respect for all human life, male and female. Its teaching against contraception and sterilization is based on respect for the power to help generate a new human life, a power held by both men and women – so health plans in accord with Catholic teaching do not cover male or female sterilization. It is the HHS mandate that shows disregard for women, by forcing them to purchase this coverage whether they want it or not.
Do religious employers violate the consciences of women who want birth control, by refusing to cover it in their employee health plans?
No, they simply decline to provide active support for procedures that violate their own consciences. If an employee disagrees, he or she can simply purchase that coverage or those procedures elsewhere.
What solution to this dispute would be acceptable?
Ideally, HHS can leave the law the way it has always been, so those who provide, sponsor and purchase health coverage can make their own decisions about whether to include these procedures without the federal government imposing one answer on everyone. If HHS refuses, it will be especially urgent for Congress to pass the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act” (HR 1179/S. 1467), to prevent health care reform act from being used to violate insurers’ and purchasers’ moral and religious beliefs.
1/20/12
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World
- February, 06 2012
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Newsweek
From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered because of their faith.
The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.
Read more here . . .
Monday, February 6, 2012
Oh dear! A dismal view of the old country
Oh, Britannia!
It's not her fault but six decades on, Queen Elizabeth rules a wave of social disintegration.
Oh dear. I do so want to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Like millions and millions of her subjects in Britain and in Commonwealth countries overseas, I give her not only my full loyalty but also my warmest admiration. She is a woman of courage, of sincere and humble Christian faith, and a magnificent sense of service. She has that rare thing, a true sense of duty. Down all the years since her accession to the throne, she has never wavered in it. We love her for it.
The problem lies not in offering thanksgiving for her service and duty – I am glad to do so, and to show my gratitude to the Queen for all that she has done and continues to do. The problem lies in the idea that we should celebrate the nation that Britain has now become.
Of course there have been some changes over the past sixty years that have been splendid and good. Racial bigotry and prejudice are now rightly deemed vile and wholly unacceptable – jokes and cruel remarks, and denial of basic services to people on the grounds of race were once regarded as quite normal and it’s good to see that go. And the advances in material wellbeing at all sorts of levels – dentistry, availability of good food, decent coffee – are all good news. Medical treatment has improved – look at the cure of diseases that sixty years ago would have proved fatal or crippling, the advances in care of the elderly and handicapped, the control of pain.
Oh, and much more: educational opportunities, travel opportunities, leisure pursuits – all these are available on a massive scale compared to that of 1952.
But...just look at us in Britain and ask if we are happy, or generous to one another, or honest in our dealings, or secure as we hurry about our everyday business. We aren’t. Huge numbers of people every day have their homes wrecked by burglars. Children face the break-up of their families: more than half of those born last year will never know a childhood with two married parents who stay faithful to one another. Theft has become commonplace – shoplifting, car-stealing, workplace fraud. Among young people, suicide is now known on a scale unthinkable in the 1950s. Drunkeness, especially among teenagers, and especially in public places such as shopping centres and parks, is now very normal on Friday and Saturday nights.
In the country of Shakespeare and Dickens, we are semi-literate. Large numbers of young people cannot write, and know very little history and practically no literature at all. Universities have had to start offering simple lessons in grammar and composition in order to get students to a position where they can start to make use of the teaching offered by professors and lecturers.
We have big problems with boys and girls becoming addicted to dangerous drugs. We have large numbers of boy and girls suffering from sexually-transmitted diseases.
We abort large numbers of babies every year: as a nation we are now dying, as the number of children born is inadequate to replace the numbers of people growing old.
We are angry with one another: crimes of violence form a large part of the criminal statistics, schools struggle to cope with the verbal and physical attacks that pupils make on teachers, public notices at railway stations and in banks and post offices beg people not to shout or abuse the staff.
We are hurt and confused: the symbols of our common values are routinely denounced as being offensive or sexist or – a weasel word that crops up again and again - “inappropriate”, so a crucifix worn around the neck, or a picture showing a happily married man and woman with their children, or a Bible on public display, are denounced.
We are frightened of the future: having children seems to be something that requires risk-assessment, and anyone with a good-sized family is regarded as rather odd. We are worried about this so we try to pretend that everything is all right by soaking ourselves in the latest sordid gossip about the sexual antics of television actors or politicians; we eat too much; we engage in daft expensive schemes of plastic surgery in attempts to look younger than we really are.
In too many ways, the Britain of the 21st century is a sad and dreary place, differing from that of 1952 in the essential spiritual values that really make life feel worth living. The Queen still exemplifies those values: belief and trust in God, openness in worshipping him, service of neighbour, commitment to duties to the community. We all want to live as though we honoured some decent values too. Perhaps the Diamond Jubilee will enable us to get a grip about doing so. We must hope for this. I do so want to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
Joanna Bogle writes from London.
Want to read more articles by Joanna Bogle Click on the links below
- Just don’t smash it, Dave | 20 December 2011
- Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? | 1 December 2011
- Fatherless youths run riot | 12 August 2011
- A perfect gentleman | 12 July 2011
- There are perks to being middle-aged | 9 May 2011
Retrieved February 6, 2012 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/oh_britannia
Ross Douthat on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Bishops
Uploaded by berkleycenter on Jan 11, 2012
http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu
[PA: The title of the clip is meant to be Ross Douthat on the Origins of Catholic Neo-Conservatism. The topic discussed is the response of orthodox (not neo-) Catholic thinkers like Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus to the U.S. Bishops' pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, published in 1986. The letter expressed a statist conception of economics and public policy neither called for by Catholic social teaching, in the view of its critics, nor within the competence of the bishops. Douthat points out that the kind of liberal-statist conception espoused by the bishops was not only in direct opposition to President Reagan's (and Margaret Thatcher's) policies, but also was rejected by governments of all political persuasions, including the European social-democratic parties, in this period.]
December 6, 2011 | This video is an excerpt from the Berkley Center event The Bishops' Letter 'Economic Justice For All': Twenty-Five Years Later. The basis of the event originated from a letter written in November 1986, in the midst of an economic expansion. The Bishops of the United States published a pastoral letter on Catholic Social Teaching and its policy implications. They gave it the title "Economic Justice for All." A quarter century later, the economy is stagnating, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall St. have emerged, and we are in the midst of a prolonged budget crisis. How well do the Bishops' analysis and prescriptions hold up after 25 years? How relevant is Catholic Social Teaching to today's economic and budget crisis? Does the current political deadlock on the budget reflect different views of economic justice?
The Berkley Center and the Governance Studies Program at Brookings convened a roundtable of four experts to address these questions: E.J. Dionne (Brookings Institution and Georgetown), Ross Douthat (New York Times), Christine Firer Hinze (Fordham) and Rev. Robert Sirico (Acton Institute). Center Director Tom Banchoff moderated. In this video, columnist Ross Douthat discusses the Bishops' letter and its influence on Neo-Catholic conservatism.
[PA: The title of the clip is meant to be Ross Douthat on the Origins of Catholic Neo-Conservatism. The topic discussed is the response of orthodox (not neo-) Catholic thinkers like Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus to the U.S. Bishops' pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All, published in 1986. The letter expressed a statist conception of economics and public policy neither called for by Catholic social teaching, in the view of its critics, nor within the competence of the bishops. Douthat points out that the kind of liberal-statist conception espoused by the bishops was not only in direct opposition to President Reagan's (and Margaret Thatcher's) policies, but also was rejected by governments of all political persuasions, including the European social-democratic parties, in this period.]
December 6, 2011 | This video is an excerpt from the Berkley Center event The Bishops' Letter 'Economic Justice For All': Twenty-Five Years Later. The basis of the event originated from a letter written in November 1986, in the midst of an economic expansion. The Bishops of the United States published a pastoral letter on Catholic Social Teaching and its policy implications. They gave it the title "Economic Justice for All." A quarter century later, the economy is stagnating, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall St. have emerged, and we are in the midst of a prolonged budget crisis. How well do the Bishops' analysis and prescriptions hold up after 25 years? How relevant is Catholic Social Teaching to today's economic and budget crisis? Does the current political deadlock on the budget reflect different views of economic justice?
The Berkley Center and the Governance Studies Program at Brookings convened a roundtable of four experts to address these questions: E.J. Dionne (Brookings Institution and Georgetown), Ross Douthat (New York Times), Christine Firer Hinze (Fordham) and Rev. Robert Sirico (Acton Institute). Center Director Tom Banchoff moderated. In this video, columnist Ross Douthat discusses the Bishops' letter and its influence on Neo-Catholic conservatism.
Will Fidel Return to the Catholic Faith?
So rumor has it--during Pope Benedict's upcoming visit to Cuba. As Matthew Cantirino comments at First Things:
First and foremost, of course, Castro’s reversion would be a stunning personal tale of sin and redemption, offering a powerful testament to the working of grace in the face of all obstacles. And, historically-speaking, it would only would it offer further confirmation of what the events of 1989 and 1991 told us: not only is communism dead, but, perhaps, ideology itself is crumbling in the face of a century of renewed religiosity. Here at the so-called ‘end of history,’ the one force which has outlasted manmade ideologies turns out to be one that had been most widely dismissed, reviled, and written off as impotent. Yet, like Henry IV coming in from the snows of Canossa, religion ultimately triumphed over the pride of a secular empire.
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