By DEXTER DUGGAN
The problems of the U.S. Catholic Church trying to act as a welfare agency for an aggressively secularist government were spotlighted by a news release from the equally secularist and aggressive American Civil Liberties Union.
It’s an unfortunately familiar scenario of Church bureaucrats entangling themselves with big government in pursuit of their own goals, then discovering anti-religious tentacles grasping for control.
The Wanderer asked four Catholics for their observations regarding ACLU demands that Catholic charitable agencies ensure access to “reproductive health services” for illegal immigrant minors.
The Catholics responded with doubt that Church workers or even bishops would stand up strongly to defend Church moral requirements. In addition, an attorney at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops didn’t respond to The Wanderer.
Elements in the USCCB may hope to advance their liberal political goals by maximizing the number of illegal aliens brought into the United States, but secularists think their own agenda should trump ethical religious principles.
In an April 3 news release, the ACLU noted that religious organizations are among groups that contract with the federal government to provide care for tens of thousands of “unaccompanied immigrant minors” who cross illegally into the U.S. annually.
“Some of these organizations impose their religious beliefs on these teens by denying them access to contraception, emergency contraception, and abortion,” the ACLU said, announcing that it would ask a federal court to order the federal government to reveal how the organizations are denying the teenagers access to “reproductive health services.”
“Recently, the federal government released proposed regulations requiring federal contractors who care for unaccompanied minors to provide access to contraception, emergency contraception, and abortion if a teen has been raped,” the ACLU said.
However, the USCCB “said any requirement that they provide information about contraception or abortion, even a referral or the arrangement for such services, would violate their religious freedom,” the ACLU said.
LifeSiteNews.com reported: “ ‘The bishops want to take millions of dollars in government contracts, but at the same time they don’t want to comply with the terms of the contract,’ ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri told RH Reality Check. ‘Religious freedom is a fundamental right. But that right doesn’t include imposing your beliefs on others to harm them, which is exactly what the bishops are doing here’.”
The RH Reality Check website bills itself as “reproductive and sexual health and justice news, analysis and commentary.”
The ACLU news release said: “The government contracts with and provides funding to USCCB through Catholic Charities to provide care to refugee and undocumented minors in a number of states across the country — including Arizona, California, Florida, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.”
Brad Miner, senior editor at The Catholic Thing blog, told The Wanderer in an emailed statement:
“Catholic agencies involved in aiding immigrants and in alleviating poverty are doing the work Christ enjoined us to do. But in receiving funding from governments (federal, state, and local), these compassionate people need to recall the very old saying that ‘he who sups with the Devil needs a long spoon.’ The likes of Barack Obama and his epigones must not be allowed to modify the Magisterium.”
Earlier in his statement, Miner said: “This issue is really no different than the requirements of the Affordable Care Act — specifically in the HHS mandates that were a sequel to Obamacare — that various reproductive interventions (contraception and abortifacients, for instance) must be covered by employer insurance plans.
“This is what forced the question of religious freedom into public awareness, now lately brought back by Indiana’s RFRA law and California’s ACLU in the matter of abortions for illegal-immigrant girls. Various cases about all this have gone before the U.S. Supreme Court and others are pending,” he said.
“I hope Catholic Charities sues for relief from any edict that would compel them to even provide information about baby killing.
“My fear is that employees of various Catholic charitable organizations may not be steadfast in their embrace of the Church’s moral theology,” Miner continued. “In most parishes last month there was a second collection for various Catholic aid groups. I put a nickel into my envelope; a protest which was, arguably, overgenerous. If the USCCB gets dragged into this dispute, I expect (or, anyway, hope) the bishops will be steadfast, allowing no progressive social consciousness to trump Catholicism’s commitment to life, from conception to natural death.”
In a telephone interview, former conservative California Republican Cong. Robert Dornan told The Wanderer that the ACLU action to ensure “reproductive health care” for illegal immigrants “is racist…This is a Ft. Sumter moment. . . . The ACLU is obviously doing exactly what the Obama administration wants. This is an explosion of evil.”
In 1861, an attack by Confederate forces on the U.S. Ft. Sumter in South Carolina marked the beginning of the Civil War.
“This is all tied together. This is all of a piece,” Dornan said, referring to various recent insults toward practicing Christians by Obama. Dornan described the president as “just cocky beyond all description. We need a word beyond the Greek word hubris.”
Dornan, age 82 and a Catholic, had been an actor and television talk host before first being elected to Congress in 1976. He participated in the civil rights movement for blacks, which picked up momentum in the 1960s.
As for the possibility of Catholic bishops standing up against the Culture of Death, Dornan told The Wanderer, “If our military had generals and admirals with the fortitude of our Catholic bishops, we’d never win a war again.”
Except for a few theologically conservative prelates like Raymond Burke, Charles Chaput, and Salvatore Cordileone, the bishops have “let the flock be ravaged by wolves,” Dornan said. “. . .We have so few . . . who are heroic,” while many even fear to dispute the television networks.
Rob Haney, a Catholic and former chairman of the Phoenix area’s Maricopa County Republican Party, long has been a critic of the USCCB placing the welfare of the liberal Democratic Party ahead of other considerations, even fundamental morality.
“The takeover of the Catholic seminaries by socialist and homosexual-sympathetic professors over a half-century ago has allowed the USCCB to be populated by Democrat Party operatives who advance the liberal social agenda as though it was fundamental Catholic dogma,” Haney told The Wanderer in an email.
“The subordination of Catholic agencies to government edicts through contracts with the Obama administration was easily predictable from a historical point of view,” Haney said. “Therefore, it looks obvious to me that the Catholic authorities signing these contracts knew very well what they were getting into.
“They believe that the immorality of the Democrat social agenda was worth pursuing because of the money that would be coming their way from the misuse of the Catholic teaching for the ‘preferential treatment of the poor’,” he said. “The actions of the USCCB and the Catholic universities under the authority of the bishops lead me to no other conclusion. Watch what they do, not what they say.”
They Must Speak Out
The Wanderer also asked Danny Ramirez, a California pro-life activist and registered Democrat who lives next to the Mexican border, about the ACLU and Obama administration pressuring for “reproductive services” for the minors.
In a telephone interview, Ramirez, a resident of Calexico, Calif., said that in his experience, most Catholic bishops don’t provide support to the pro-life efforts of lay people.
“We need [the bishops] to speak out against Planned Parenthood” and related activities like abortion facilities, he said. “. . .You know how they go around. . . . It’s all [political correctness]. I haven’t seen one bishop speak out,” with the exception of San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who coincidentally was pastor of Calexico’s Catholic parish in the early 1990s.
Ramirez said bishops even resist putting out plainspoken voters’ guides, but instead produce ones that are hard to understand.
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