Take your lead from liberal Catholics is the Obama administration’s message to the US Catholic bishops on the contraceptive coverage debate, according to Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
Dolan says White House aides urged the bishops to listen Catholics who have accepted the administration’s plan, such as the editors of America magazine.
Writing on his blog, Dolan said, “a recent meeting between staff of the bishops’ conference and the White House staff ended with the President’s people informing us that the broader concerns of religious freedom – that is, revisiting the straight-jacketing mandates, or broadening the maligned exemption – are all off the table. Instead, they advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the ‘enlightened’ voices of accommodation, such as the recent hardly-surprising but terribly unfortunate editorial in America.”
Vice President Joseph Biden, a Catholic, has conceded the Obama administration ‘screwed up’ its handling the contraceptive mandate, but says the ‘compromise’ offered by the White House resolves the problem.
“I was the one that was tasked to meet with the National Conference of Bishops, and others and Cardinal Dolan, to talk about this,” Biden said in remarks at Iowa State University Thursday. “The fact of the matter is, the ultimate resolution to this problem is where it should have been in the first place.”
“The conscience clause is being honored in its literal sense. What is happening now is that we have been able to provide what was hard to set up – it got screwed up in the first iteration – is that any hospital, no matter where it is, no matter who runs it, profit or non profit, religious based or otherwise, has to provide insurance to their employees like everybody else does,” he said.
Cardinal Dolan says that the US bishops would continue to seek a reversal of the Obama plan, urging Congress to broaden conscience protections. However he added that a more promising approach might be a court challenge.
“This has not been a fight of our choosing,” Cardinal Dolan says.
“We’d rather not be in it.”
Dolan promised the bishops will continue their battle to rescind the Obama mandate.
“We have to be realistic and prepare for tough times. Some, like America magazine, want us to cave-in and stop fighting, saying this is simply a policy issue; some want us to close everything down rather than comply, … some want us to engage in civil disobedience and be fined; some worry that we’ll have to face a decision between two ethically repugnant choices: subsidizing immoral services or no longer offering insurance coverage, a road none of us wants to travel, wrote Dolan.
Sources
- Timothy Dolan Blog
- Politico
- Images: Weasel Zippers