A recent editorial argued: “Is the question of contraception coverage—something most American Catholics already have, and which the bishops have said almost nothing about before now—really where the hierarchy wants to issue a non-negotiable edict? Why were they not this vocal in their opposition to the Bush administration’s use of torture?”
This was not the position of the secularist New York Times nor the liberal-left Nation, but rather the view of the editors at Commonweal, the Catholic lay magazine that bills itself “a Review of Religion, Politics & Culture.”
Like America magazine, its counterpart published by the Society of Jesus, it noted the unusual degree of Catholic unity that was seen earlier in the year.
America said the Catholics on all sides “came together to defend the church’s institutions from morally objectionable, potentially crippling burdens imposed by the Obama administration under the Affordable Care Act.”
Now that the administration has compromised, the two magazines seem genuinely mystified at the stance taken by the bishops in response.
“The fact that many Catholic institutions already comply with state laws requiring contraception coverage makes the USCCB’s extreme demands all the more curious,” Commonweal stated.
It accused the bishops of, among other things, advancing a “novel interpretation of the First Amendment.”
Commonweal added: “It is implausible for the bishops to insist that the revised mandate compels them to cooperate directly in a sinful activity when even the original mandate did nothing of the kind.”
It continued: “Are the bishops not worried that this initiative will be seen as transparently partisan by much of the public?”
Meanwhile, the Jesuit editors at America said last week: “The bishops have been most effective in influencing public policy when they have acted as pastors, trying to build consensus in church and society, as they did in their pastorals on nuclear war and the economy. The American public is uncomfortable with an overt exercise of political muscle by the hierarchy.”
America is undoubtedly more constrained than Commonweal in what it can say; its previous editor, the Rev. Thomas Reese, was forced to resign in 2005 on orders from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the magazine is apparently “monitored” by the powers that be.
However, it hasn’t held back in its critique of the bishops’ “religious liberty” campaign, which “seems to have abandoned a moral distinction that undergirded the conference’s public advocacy in past decades”; “risks ignoring two fundamental principles of Catholic political theology”; and “fails to admit that the administration’s Feb. 10 solution, though it can be improved, fundamentally did what Catholic social teaching expects government to do—coordinate contending rights for the good of all.”
It concluded: “It does a disservice to the victims of religious persecution everywhere to inflate policy differences into a struggle over religious freedom. Such exaggerated protests likewise show disrespect for the freedom Catholics have enjoyed in the United States, which is a model for the world—and for the church.”
The Commonweal editors are worried about the long-term damage. “By the 1990s, after decades of the culture wars waged by Protestant and Catholic groups,” it said, “many younger people came to think of ‘religion’ as politically divisive and overly judgmental, especially on questions of sexual morality. As a result, the number of Americans who have abandoned institutional religion has risen dramatically. One-third of adult Catholics have already left the church. Isn’t that sobering fact more deserving of a national campaign than this self-defeating battle over contraception coverage?”
