By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
First Teachers has found Sycamore Trust (sycamoretrust.org) to be a trustworthy source on what is happening at the University of Notre Dame. (The trust is an association of Notre Dame graduates dedicated to preserving the Catholic identity of the university.) We are sad to relay to our readers the latest information from Sycamore Trust’s newsletter about how the school is dealing with the requirement in Obamacare that employers provide coverage for contraceptives, including abortifacients, in their health insurance programs. Fasten your seatbelt.
According to Sycamore Trust, “Notre Dame is complying with the contraceptive mandate in renewing its student health insurance program for 2014-15. Aetna, the insurer, will now provide students with free abortifacients and contraceptives. Moreover, the university will itself enroll all otherwise uninsured graduate and foreign students in the plan.”
First Teachers has not yet been able to locate a statement from the university on this matter. But in Sycamore Trust’s view, what is happening is clear: Notre Dame is now doing what it had previously stated — in a court challenge to the Obamacare mandate — “would be scandalous.” The school “is doing this voluntarily. It could have dropped the program or switched to a self-insured program free of the mandate. Notre Dame is complying with the contraceptive mandate in renewing its student health insurance program for 2014-15. Aetna, the insurer, will now provide students with free abortifacients and contraceptives. Moreover, the university will itself enroll all otherwise uninsured graduate and foreign students in the plan.”
Sycamore Trust reports that it “inquired several times” of Notre Dame to get the university’s explanation for this change in policy, but that the school’s representatives “did not respond.” The trust then went directly to Aetna, whose representatives advised them “that it will indeed comply with the mandate by providing free contraceptive coverage and will so notify all enrollees.”
The irony is staggering. Just a few months back, Notre Dame’s public position was that the contraceptive mandate would compel the university to “violate [its] sincerely held religious beliefs” and “sever Notre Dame from the Catholic Church.” Sycamore Trust asks how Notre Dame will “explain why it can in good conscience voluntarily do what it says the government may not require it do without violating its religious liberty.”
Sycamore Trust closes its newsletter with the following: “Notre Dame declared to the court that to comply with the mandate would cause scandal that would be especially iniquitous with respect to its students. [T]he mandate would require Notre Dame to commit scandal, which…is particularly grave when associated with those ‘who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2285). Yet, Notre Dame has now voluntarily decided to ‘facilitate’ a program under which free abortifacients and contraceptives will be put in the hands of its students. The clash between Notre Dame’s profession of Catholic identity and its action is stark indeed.”
This is discouraging news. No question, Catholics will lose this battle with the Obama administration if prestigious Catholic institutions such as Notre Dame begin to take the position that it is “reasonable” to compromise on Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. If any of our readers have more information on this development at Notre Dame, perhaps something that will cast the administration at Notre Dame in a different light, we would welcome hearing from them.
On another topic, one that arises for Christians who teach in America’s public schools: How should Christians who teach in public schools comply with our Lord’s directive that we be witnesses to our Christian faith, while at the same time respecting the freedom of religion and freedom of conscience of the non-Christian students in their classes, whose parents’ tax dollars pay their salaries?
I came across a blog site by Paige Givens (paigegivens.com), an author and public school teacher who explained her way of dealing with the dilemma: “[I]t is okay for you to bring Jesus into your classroom,” she writes. “We may not be able to explicitly teach the Bible and prayer to our students, but we can live the Word. We can live the way Jesus calls us to live. That’s what He’s called us to do, after all! We are just seed-planters. He is the one who saves.
“So how do we plant seeds? How do we live the Word when we can’t teach about the Word? We love.” And what does “love” look like in a classroom? “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
She closes with the following: “And this year I am going to show His love, perhaps to little ones who have never experienced it in their own lives. I am going to be a seed planter, not by reading scriptures aloud at school, but by showing them in my actions.”
Well said. Givens is expressing in the terms of her own life what St. Francis meant when he said, “Preach the Gospel always. Use words if necessary.” (It is questionable if St. Francis ever said this. No one can locate the passage in his writings. But that might not matter. It is a comment that is in line with his approach to teaching the Gospel.)
Givens’ message is sound. It always struck me that the non-Christian students in the school where I taught could not have failed to notice the decency and strength of character of the practicing Catholic members of the faculty at the school. There was a difference between them and the aging hippies on the staff, one that cast Catholicism in a favorable light.
I would add another thing that a Catholic public school teacher can do. The people who write the curriculum for our public schools and teach in the country’s schools of education make a point of stressing the need for students to be given “both sides” of an issue, so that they can form their opinions in an intelligent choice. Catholic teachers can do a great deal of good by doing precisely that; by making sure that the students in their classes hear an honest and fair presentation of the Church’s side on historical issues and current events.
The most secular liberal administrators will have a hard time applying pressure to a Catholic teacher who does that, who gives the “other side” to the liberal consensus during a discussion of, for example, legalized abortion, tax credits for parents of Catholic school students, the Church’s teaching on evolution, Marxism, and the Crusades.
The Catholic teacher in a public school does not have to “preach” the Catholic position on any of these issues. Our side comes out quite well when it is presented accurately and fairly in an open exchange of ideas in the classroom.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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