CHA Will Review the Proposed New Rules for the HHS Mandate

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JReducation said:
… One of my former superiors explained it to me like this. He said that the problem they have with us in Rome is multidimensional. First, we think that we’re important to the world and to the Church. They see is as one of many.

Second, we take our freedom of speech into the Church, as if the US Constitution applied inside Catholicism. They see that as arrogance and the “Great American Heresy”. We place democracy over faith.

Third, whenever we don’t like something, Americans tend to bash. They see that as rude. We don’t know how to beg for attention. We demand it, as if everyone has the obligation to drop what they’re doing and pay attention to American Catholics. In other words, we don’t always say please.

Fourth, we hurl stones at the Church, but we dare not do the same to our political leaders. They find that offensive, because the hierarchy outranks the politician.

He was explaining to me that there is a chasm of culture between American Catholics and other Catholics. In his opinion, it’s the American Catholic who will have to learn to accommodate, because we make up a very small percentage of the Catholic Church. The majority of Catholics around the world think more like the Europeans than like us.

What I’m saying is that while we do have problems, we have to learn a different strategy to get Rome’s attention. Demanding it is going to get the opposite result. We’re just going to be snubbed.

Currently, we have a crop of bishops and religious superiors who know how to think and speak “European”. It took a long time to get there. As a result, we have more Americans in the Vatican than we have ever had. We also have some formidable bishops and religious superiors.
Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
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JReducation said:
I believe you got the right of it. I was in that fix it mode once upon a time and it almost got me dismissed from the order until my then German superior explained to me what I posted above. The more I thought about it the more it made sense why the Vatican and even our general superiors did not pay much attention to Americans. You can ask you Dominican confreres. We all went through this period of about 200 years of being ignored by Rome and by major superiors.

They have an advantage over us. Europe is much older than we are. They are used to seeing things break and waiting and watching the system gradually restore things back to order, only to be replaced by something else that breaks.

We in the USA are a young nation that developed at an exponential rate. In less than 200 years we went from 13 colonies to the most powerful, influential and wealthiest nation on earth. It was almost too fast, to the point that we began to believe that speed and efficiency are synonymous. The Europeans, the Asians, the Middle East and the Africans know better. They have been around longer. They’re like the grandmas and grandpas who are slow, but full of wisdom.

The wisdom is the ability to acknowledge that things get fixed when the system is allowed to work and that systems work slowly. The disadvantage the American Catholics have is that we have lost touch with our roots. We’re very American. We do things quickly and if it doesn’t work we try something else and we continue until we get it right. In the meantime our blood pressure rises and we die of heart attacks more than any other people on earth, because we burn ourselves out. I believe this is why cloistered nuns and cloistered monks live so long. They don’t dwell too much on the Church’s problems. They take them to prayer and when they finish praying, they don’t talk about it again. They move along to the next thing. They too belong to cultures that are very old and wise.

The Catholic Church is not American. The Latin Church is European and the other Churches are Easterners. Those cultures do not operate like we do. They don’t worry too much about things moving slowly, because they have lived through so many hard times inside the Church and in their political arena and they always manage to make it work out. They’re not in a hurry to fix this today only to have to replace it with another crisis tomorrow, which may be worse than today’s crisis. It’s kind of a “better the devil you know” attitude.

That’s why they shied away from us for so long. Remember, the Vatican didn’t even want diplomatic relations with the USA until Pope John Paul came to the papacy. The Vatican was perfectly happy with an Apostolic Delegate that dealt with the assignment of bishops in the USA and had nothing else to do with American Catholics. When asked to send religious to the USA, Pope Pius X once said, “Start you own religious congregations.” The religious that came to the USA were not sent by the papacy. They came on their own. Most of them followed the immigrants. Many were invited by the American bishops.

There was always a shyness on the part of the Vatican. They didn’t know how to deal with us. It was not that they did not care, it was that we were too different and they did not understand us. I believe that we still don’t understand each other. But it’s going to have to be we who adapt to them, not them to us. They are older. They are the majority of Catholics and they have experience dealing with crisis. Heck, we’ve never had a war on our own soil since 1812. Crisis rattles us at our foundations. That’s not the case with a Church that is made up mostly of people who have a long history of crises. The know that things will be fixed and that nothing will ever be perfect. One problem replaces another.

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
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Perfect, dear Brother!

:clapping::clapping::clapping:

:signofcross:
 
Government largesse as we now know it isn’t the same as Christian works of mercy. Christian works of mercy are done for the love of God and for the love of the people that he loves, and they’re done without expectation of repayment. Mother Teresa’s work was an excellent example of Christian works of mercy, for example. On the other hand as you’ve seen with Obamacare, government largesse is done to secure political gain and to “improve” society according to some vision of a secularist utopia. These things are very, very different.

In this country it used to be the case that large social programs were oriented towards goals that had altruistic content, such that Christians could sign onto them with a clean conscience and fully work within them, as they were designed for the common good as understood by a generally Christian culture. They were never really Catholic at the federal or state level though, and we have to admit this. Nevertheless, they did accomplish some general social good and Catholics have long made “common cause” with other Christian groups as part of their responsibility to society. We also were willing to participate in grants and co-operative programs with government for the good of society, within which we could sometimes pursue works of mercy untrammeled. This was considered alright, even if not perfect. In some cases, and in some ways, these programs were substituted for the normal works of mercy that Christians have always done. These programs “substituted” for them because they were easier, reached a lot of people, and satisfied the description well enough in the American mind.

However, things have changed dramatically, even though some people have not realized it yet. Most of our federal programs are now very ideological and it’s not Christian ideology they’re based upon, nor are they even oriented towards the general good that we can sign onto. For instance, these healthcare programs now don’t benefit certain classes of people at all, such as the unborn and those who object to reproductive technologies such abortion for reasons of religion or conscience. These programs have at their root the concept of secular utopia with competing rights of the fittest as their driver. And you are not allowed rights of conscience if those products of conscience conflict with the prevailing ideology. IF this reminds you of something you’ve heard before, I’d advise you not to disregard that memory, but to think on it and realize what this means. This is completely wrong, and not Christian in any way. This trend in American life must be resisted.

For some people and groups these things appear to have happened suddenly, but no, they’ve been brewing in the culture for quite a while and gaining power. Their full political manifestations are just now coming into ascendancy though. Are there some groups who mean well and haven’t picked up on these recent developments yet? I think there are. I think there are some very confused people out there. And I think there are some who, losing what used to work, are at a loss for what to do now, or are finding it very difficult to see the way forward. They are stuck in their ways, at least for now.
 
JReducation said:
They’re missing the whole point about religious freedom and focusing too much on the social aspect of healthcare.

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
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Yes. Christian apostolates are not secular social work. The day-to-day activity may look similar. However, the motivation is entirely different.

Mother Teresa used to get criticized like crazy for serving the poor out of the love of God and not getting into the whole grant-seeking thing where you try to change society by force and influence. Changing society by manipulating the whole society wasn’t the goal for her though. Simply serving Christ through the poor and forgotten was.

The Franciscans also live with the poor not so that they can participate in political uprisings with them to foment revolutions or any such nonsense as that. The Franciscans appreciate the poor because of what the Scripture says about the poor. Franciscans are focused on the Gospel to a degree that most non-Franciscans don’t realize. The Franciscans realize that in a very real way poverty is not the worst thing that can happen to a person at all, just like the Scripture says. Not finding God is the worst thing that can happen. Poverty helps them to realize the true relationship of God to man and person to person. Christ himself was poor, how can they not be?
 
iloveangels said:
…it used to be the case that large social programs were oriented towards goals that had altruistic content, such that Christians could sign onto them with a clean conscience and fully work within them, as they were designed for the common good as understood by a generally Christian culture.
True for Europe, with the exception that governments and programs actually were at times Catholic, where that has never been the case here.
iloveangels;9000587:
…These programs “substituted” for them because they were easier, reached a lot of people, and satisfied the description well enough in the American mind.
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Substitute the word European for the word American and this is completely true of Europe too. The EU is the most encompassing welfare state the world has ever seen.
iloveangels said:
…federal programs are now very ideological and it’s not Christian ideology they’re based upon, nor are they even oriented towards the general good that we can sign onto. For instance, these healthcare programs now don’t benefit certain classes of people at all, such as the unborn and those who object to reproductive technologies such abortion for reasons of religion or conscience. These programs have at their root the concept of secular utopia with competing rights of the fittest as their driver
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.
Also completely true of Europe. In fact, the pope has often protested the European desire to go on completely without reference to the Church, re-writing history as many Europeans would have liked it to have happened instead of how it did.

Abortion is widely available in Europe and in fact in Rome. Rome has the distinction of being the abortion capital of Italy.

The things that make this health care thing exceptionally dangerous on American soil are:
  1. Europe is inhibited, to some degree, by its memories of the Third Reich. So even though they may sound like a-historical lunatics, they will hesitate before they will do some things without consideration. This is not true here, where people widely believe that they are “better” than the Europeans and could never have made mistakes like those. Oh enlightened us, which is sheer nonsense on our part.
  2. The sheer amount of money and technological power involved. And the degradation of our system of law, which just piles initiative on top of initiative without ever ratifying a good once and for all, or cleaning up detritus which money is still spent on even though it’s defunct. This is one of the chief reasons we are so far in debt, and the chief reason there are so many loopholes and official interpretations of everything.
  3. The fact that many other nations imitate us in their rush to have things and make progress. We are an unwitting model for the world, even though we are only about 5% of the world. Ask someone in Hong Kong or Cairo who Cary Grant was. They will be able to tell you, even though virtually no American knows who the rulers and most famous figures of Hong Kong or Egypt even are.
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My personal feeling, for what it’s worth is that there are several problems happening here simultaneously.

I do not know Sister Carol personally; but I was stationed in Washington at the same time that she was there and I knew Providence Hospital. She saved that hospital, turned it into a first class hospital that serves predominantly poor people. It’s in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, DC. This was a competent nurse, superior and hospital administrator.

Here are the problems as I see them and I can be all wrong here. Take my comments with a grain of salt.
  1. You have a competent nurse and administrator making statements on theological and moral matters. That is like a theologian commenting on how best to avoid the spread of the flu.
  2. You have the CHA and then you have Catholic hospitals who are supposed to be kept in the loop by the CHA and they’re asking, “Which way are we going?” This raises questions about the CHA. Who runs the CHA?
  3. The only face and voice of the CHA that you ever hear about is Sister Carol. Is she speaking for herself or does she represent the other members of the CHA. Where are those other voices and what do they have to say?
  4. The CHA, does not have the authority to speak on pastoral, doctrinal or moral matters. It knows this, but the average person does not know this. This has not been made clear to the American public, big failure on the part of the people who handle the media for the USCCB.
  5. The President is playing his chess game with four “Catholic” pieces: Zebellius, Pelosi, Biden and Sister Carol and he knows how to move them and three of them are women. This issue involves women’s health.
  6. On the flip side of this issue you have these men all wearing black suits and Roman collars. They don’t know how to play chess as well as the President does. There are many sisters and lay Catholic women who are bright and committed to this cause, why are they not being played on the chess board? They certainly have offered. The Sisters of Life made a public statement. The Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist made a public statement, the Conference of Women Religious Superiors have issued a statement. All of them stand by the bishops on this. We go to the newspaper and we see a picture of Vice President Biden with three Catholic women. We flip the page and we see Cardinal Dolan. How doe that look to the less educated American?
  7. Finally, the Holy Father’s last statement on this issue has not been presented to the public. The media passed it up . . . no surprise there. He said that to fight for religious freedom only to get exemptions for Catholic institutions, while other citizens are denied those same exemptions is morally unacceptable. In other words, “Don’t make this a Catholic issue. It’s a human rights issue.”
If people are confused, which they are, it’s because of a poor game plan on one side and a very clever one on the wrong side. Unfortunately, Americans are too dumb to distinguish between what is clever and what is right. Until the clever is exposed for what it is, WRONG, people are not going to figure it out on their own. Let’s be real. We’re talking about a country whose idea of a healthy meal is chicken nuggets, because it’s white meat. :banghead:

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
 
JReducation said:
My personal feeling, for what it’s worth is that there are several problems happening here simultaneously.

I do not know Sister Carol personally; but I was stationed in Washington at the same time that she was there and I knew Providence Hospital. She saved that hospital, turned it into a first class hospital that serves predominantly poor people. It’s in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, DC. This was a competent nurse, superior and hospital administrator.

Here are the problems as I see them and I can be all wrong here. Take my comments with a grain of salt.
  1. You have a competent nurse and administrator making statements on theological and moral matters. That is like a theologian commenting on how best to avoid the spread of the flu.
  2. You have the CHA and then you have Catholic hospitals who are supposed to be kept in the loop by the CHA and they’re asking, “Which way are we going?” This raises questions about the CHA. Who runs the CHA?
  3. The only face and voice of the CHA that you ever hear about is Sister Carol. Is she speaking for herself or does she represent the other members of the CHA. Where are those other voices and what do they have to say?
  4. The CHA, does not have the authority to speak on pastoral, doctrinal or moral matters. It knows this, but the average person does not know this. This has not been made clear to the American public, big failure on the part of the people who handle the media for the USCCB.
  5. The President is playing his chess game with four “Catholic” pieces: Zebellius, Pelosi, Biden and Sister Carol and he knows how to move them and three of them are women. This issue involves women’s health.
  6. On the flip side of this issue you have these men all wearing black suits and Roman collars. They don’t know how to play chess as well as the President does. There are many sisters and lay Catholic women who are bright and committed to this cause, why are they not being played on the chess board? They certainly have offered. The Sisters of Life made a public statement. The Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist made a public statement, the Conference of Women Religious Superiors have issued a statement. All of them stand by the bishops on this. We go to the newspaper and we see a picture of Vice President Biden with three Catholic women. We flip the page and we see Cardinal Dolan. How doe that look to the less educated American?
  7. Finally, the Holy Father’s last statement on this issue has not been presented to the public. The media passed it up . . . no surprise there. He said that to fight for religious freedom only to get exemptions for Catholic institutions, while other citizens are denied those same exemptions is morally unacceptable. In other words, “Don’t make this a Catholic issue. It’s a human rights issue.”
If people are confused, which they are, it’s because of a poor game plan on one side and a very clever one on the wrong side. Unfortunately, Americans are too dumb to distinguish between what is clever and what is right. **Until the clever is exposed for what it is, WRONG, people are not going to figure it out on their own. ** Let’s be real. We’re talking about a country whose idea of a healthy meal is chicken nuggets, because it’s white meat. :banghead:

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂

Fraternally,

Br. JR, OSF 🙂
Click to expand...
Thank you for your assessment. The bolded (mine) really stuck out for me. I think many intelligent Americans who voted for Obama are finally seeing the light. He does still have his loyal base that agrees with his agenda. I think Obama underestimated the vehement response he got from 100% of the USCCB, especially “the letter” which was read in every Catholic parish. I don’t believe he thought the bishops would make such a bold response so quickly.

He underestimated the number of Catholics who would stand by their bishops.
 
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