By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Last Saturday, January 22, on the forty-ninth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, called on the faithful to “pray, fast, and work for the day when the gift of every human life is protected in law and welcomed in love” on the anniversary of the court’s decision. He asks for prayers through “when we anticipate a decision by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.”
His Excellency is correct. This year holds much in store. In fact, we have to go back twelve years to find a critical and decisive time of similar significance.
January 2010 found Capitol Hill in the home stretch of Congress’ debate on Obama’s historic national healthcare takeover, and the USCCB was intimately involved. While today Archbishop Lori recognizes clearly the fundamental issue at stake in Dobbs, twelve years ago our bishops didn’t see the lay of the land so well.
The mood at the USCCB was different in 2010. Bishops, exhausted after fighting the clerical abuse and cover-up scandals for eight years, finally had something to cheer about — the election of Barack Obama. Finally, Archbishop Wilton Gregory exulted, a victory over racism!
The momentum built every day. In June 2009, Obama made his triumphant appearance at Notre Dame, while university police arrested dozens of peaceful pro-life demonstrators for trespassing on campus. President John Jenkins, CSC, connived to sneak Obama into campus by a back way, to avoid the unthinkable scandal of this exalted honoree being insulted by being forced to pass by thousands of pro-lifers lining the school’s main entrance.
And the gift just kept on giving. By the end of 2009, the romance between Obama and the bishops was going strong, and the new administration joined the bishops in devoting their full resources to passing Obamacare.
To be sure, the bishops’ support of Obamacare should not have come as a surprise. The bishops’ conference had supported a broad socialist platform including national healthcare since 1919.
That year, the National Catholic War Council (NCWC), the predecessor of today’s USCCB, published its “Program for Social Reconstruction” — a document as utopian as Wilson’s “War to End All Wars.”
In an interview 94 years later, New York’s Timothy Cardinal Dolan reaffirmed the NCWC’s resolute position: “We, the bishops of the United States — can you believe it — in 1919 came out for more affordable, more comprehensive, more universal health care” (Meet the Press, December 1, 2013).
For The USCCB, Socialism
Is An Honored Tradition
The bishops’ leftward slide came to life with renewed vigor in the years since the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Since the 1960s, Catholic hospitals have come to depend increasingly not only on federal funding but on a growing myriad of government regulations governing health care. By 2009, when Obama introduced the notion of national health care, America’s bishops were eager to get on board and get bailed out of what was a truly distressing consequence of their zealous naiveté.
“Health reform will bring the U.S. closer to a true, coordinated health care system. We need and deserve a solid health care infrastructure that serves everyone and promotes the common good,” chirped the Catholic Health Association [CHA] as Obamacare moved towards adoption. (CHA President Carole Keehan ardently supported Obamacare throughout the negotiations and stood behind Obama as he signed the bill into law. In 2015, Obama told attendees at CHA’s centenary celebration that “We would not have gotten the Affordable Care Act done had it not been for her.”)
But what about federal funding of abortion? Ah — details, details. Yes, bishops opposed taxpayer funding of abortion, and the House version of Obama’s health care bill did so as well, thanks to an amendment by Cong. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). At the time, there were still pro-life Democrats in the House, and the Stupak amendment received 64 Democrat votes.
However, when the Senate passed a version of Obamacare without Stupak’s provision on Christmas Eve, the stage was set for ten weeks of hard-nosed negotiations.
So the bishops went into action.
In January, the USCCB launched a nationwide program designed to “get down to the parish level in every diocese.” Were they asking Catholics across the country to demand that their representatives and senators preserve the Stupak Amendment?
No. They were campaigning for “immigration reform.” On January 6, Bishops John Wester and Howard Hubbard announced that over a million postcards “touting the need for immigration reform have been ordered by dioceses and parishes across the country . . . the cards will be sent to congressional offices. The campaign is being run by the Justice for Immigrants campaign, an official project of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”
Some “Prime Mandates”
Are More “Prime” Than Others
Why the sudden shift of priorities? According to Catholic analyst Cliff Kinkaid, the USCCB faced more critical issues at the time: Many of the Catholic Church’s hospitals were absorbing costs incurred by their unpaid treatment of an increasing number of indigent patients, and they were feeling the financial pain.
“In a January 13 conference call and briefing,” Kinkaid reported at the time, “Kevin Appleby, a representative of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, explained in frank language why the bishops are so desperate to pass the health care and immigration bills. He said that the bishops want a federal health plan to absorb the costs being borne by the nation’s 600 Catholic hospitals to cover illegal aliens.”
Appleby said, “We have Catholic hospitals throughout the country that experience the same things . . . we serve undocumented immigrants in our emergency rooms and community clinics, et cetera. So we have a stake in this in that the burden will fall not just on our providers but [on] taxpayers throughout the country.”
This was one of the clearest indications yet that support for national health care legislation is a means by which the bishops “can dump some of the costs of operating Catholic hospitals on the American taxpayers,” Kinkaid reported.
But there was even more at stake: The bishops desperately needed a positive issue to champion, and abortion didn’t qualify. After all, the scandals had put a serious dent in bishops’ finances, with $4 billion in payouts to victims alone.
Do the math: While bishops stood to receive hundreds of millions for their hospitals and their NGOs from Obama’s health care and immigration policies, they got zero for their pro-life efforts. So the bishops sought a more harmonious and positive reception not only with the Obama, but with Democrats, who had the White House and majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill.
This was nothing new. Since the days of Roe v. Wade, the USCCB had always concentrated on the Left’s “social justice issues,” ignoring Humanae Vitae altogether and leaving pro-life leadership to the laity.
To grease the wheels for their work with the Obama administration, Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) hired one of Washington’s most radical homosexual public relations firms to lobby for its social justice agenda in Congress. CCUSA never announced the hire, but in 2011, the Gay Blade, Washington’s premier homosexual newspaper, broke the news:
“Lobbying disclosure reports filed with the House and Senate show that Catholic Charities USA paid the Sheridan Group $476,750 between April 2010 and April 2011 for lobbying services and advocacy work related to the Catholic organization’s anti-poverty projects,” the Blade wrote in a story dripping with irony and scorn.
The rest is history. Obama lied to Stupak and the bishops, Obamacare funded abortions with taxpayer money and spawned the HHS mandate that religious groups have spent hundreds of millions fighting to this day. But the USCCB and its NGOs have prospered, working hand in hand with the Obama and Biden teams at the border and beyond.
So here we are. Today, true to form, our bishops support Joe Biden’s agenda on everything except abortion — and on that issue they have chosen to remain silent. And apparently, they’ve been paid very well for it.
So with Prufrock, it’s fair to ask Archbishop Lori: “Your Excellency, has it been worth it, after all?”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress