Will Bishops Cave on Obamacare?

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iloveangels said:
All this stuff that you have here is neither here nor there for the OP’s question. He wondered if the bishops would actually just throw in the towel and do what the HHS mandate demands in some fashion, either overt (not likely) or covert (quite a bit more likely). We shall see.
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And I specified which issues that could “cave” on, and which are, in the words of our bishops, “non-negotiable”. The OP’s question cannot be answered because the OP incorrectly presents the Affordable Care Act as some monolithic piece legislation that is universally immoral.

It is impossible to answer a question based on flawed premises. The premises must be addressed, before a coherent answer can be given.
 
I agree. Forcing people to buy something is wrong. It is different from a tax. Be careful of what you wish for; this kind of power can be used in very, very many discreditable ways.

I think we need some hard-core civil disobedience from the Catholic community on the HHS issue.
 
Well, the bishops didn’t get invited to the White House like MoveOn.org, SEIU, and and number of left leaning organizational leaders did the other day! When and if they do get invited, will it be for discussion or for the President to lay out for them the terms of surrender of their religion?
 
iloveangels said:
Yes, power and authority are two different things, just like legality and morality are two different things.
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Runningdude, you are simply making the distinction between what is politics and what is religion, and with that I agree. This is why I wrote the above statement. Some things in Obamacare, including some of the objections against it, are political in nature, whereas some are religious in nature. For the reasons given above.
runningdude said:
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The OP asked if the bishops would ever back down on “Obamacare”. The bishops can never back down on abortion or contraception, but are free to accept taxation in the form of mandatory insurance. One is a matter of morality necessity, and the other is a matter of discretion.
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The bishops, much as they might not realize this, are NOT political agents. They really don’t have anything to say on political policy, whether the country as a whole should be taxed etc. They need to stay out of it as they do NOT have experience and training to even understand the issues. They’ve demonstrated that over and over in living color. That’s how we got into this miserable mess in the first place. They had a gigantic echoing DUH moment (year, decade?) and left themselves wide open for political disaster. If they don’t realize what happened here, someone needs to tell them in no uncertain terms, the Democrat party is not their friend. The church was knifed in the back this spring. Bishops are the experts in religious law and morality, particularly for Catholics, but they are not experts in politics.

The government has NO business dictating morality to us, as THEY do NOT have the experience and training to do so, and have also demonstrated that over and over in living color. And why should they? Their business is politics. We must deal with them on a political basis.

Are the two related? Yes, but not as directly as many not-very-well-informed people think. Catholics need to become more informed on both their religion and their politics and individual Catholics have to take some responsibility for making sure that these kinds of collisions don’t occur. Can the bishops help with that? Certainly, but not by pontificating a bunch of stuff from “on high” and simultaneously taking government money and kissing government rear end–which is how we got into this mess. The bishops need to teach religion to Catholics if they don’t like how this is turning out. That’s what they need to spend their time and effort doing. That is their proper role in all of this. And currently, based on the condition of catholic catechesis, they’re getting a D- or an F on that score. They flunked the final exam, which was administered this last spring, and finalized on election day.

The scriptures say, "Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Matt 22:21.
 
The USCCB is going to get a retake of sorts on that test. It will consist in deciding whether to stand firm and coherent on AUTHENTIC Church teaching–in the face of much pressure and politics and cost–when the HHS mandate comes due and the waste products hit the fan. Or not. This is the test.

The general population isn’t as involved in this retake. The bishops will have to act nearly alone–because of the mess we’re in on I don’t know how many fronts, and because of political mistakes and bad management, some of it going back years. The bishops can fail the test and fall flat on their faces–or–they can dig deep down and pass with flying colors. We’ll see which they do.
 
runningdude said:
The OP’s question cannot be answered because the OP incorrectly presents the Affordable Care Act as some monolithic piece legislation that is universally immoral. It is impossible to answer a question based on flawed premises. The premises must be addressed, before a coherent answer can be given.
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Oh, please! Give me a break. The premises are not “flawed,” because it is obvious from the question itself, that “the OP’s question” is in relation to the HHS Mandate portion of Obamacare. Unless, of course, you know of other portions of Obamacare that the Bishops have been opposing in the past year and some other portion of Obamacare that the Principle of Double Effect could apply to? And, if you couldn’t understand that from “the OP’s” initial post, then it was made quite clear in “the OP’s” follow up post - #22.
 
rogue13 said:
Oh, please! Give me a break. The premises are not “flawed,” because it is obvious from the question itself, that “the OP’s question” is in relation to the HHS Mandate portion of Obamacare. Unless, of course, you know of other portions of Obamacare that the Bishops have been opposing in the past year and some other portion of Obamacare that the Principle of Double Effect could apply to? And, if you couldn’t understand that from “the OP’s” initial post, then it was made quite clear in “the OP’s” follow up post - #22.
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Yes. The election is over.

To runningdude: This kind of fuzzy political manipulation was the order of the day last week, not this one, and not going forward. That’s all past.

Catholics are interested specifically in the HHS mandate, because no matter where you are on the political spectrum or any other spectrum, that’s what we’ve been dealt, with all of its consequences. And so that’s what this thread is about. This is what affects us the most now. This is Church stuff, not political stuff. Political stuff would be another thread, not this one.

This thread is about the USCCB as well as all the individual bishops, cardinals and archbishops, the array of choices they have on the HHS mandate, what their decisions concerning the HHS mandate will be, and where we go from here on the issue of the HHS mandate.

And actually, runningdude, I think you got your clarification straight from the OP himself in comment #47, so dude, put the politics in the crate for another 4 years. That’s not this thread’s issue.
 
Even though I think the USA needs Obamacare, the mandate to pay for everyone’s birth control is wrong. I think it does interfere with religious freedom.

However, I just had an interesting thought. For over 2,000 years bishops have been telling women that they can’t use artificial birth control. Countless women have suffered from this, especially the ones that just kept having children that they couldn’t support. The husbands also suffered, but it didn’t cause the celibate bishops any suffering at all.

Now, all of a sudden the birth control rule is impacting the bishops personally. It is going to cause them a lot of hassles, such as the lawsuits they have initiated to get the rule rescinded. It will truly be interesting to see how they handle this.

On the other hand, archdiocese employees have always had medical insurance through their employer. Is it accurate to say that none of this insurance coverage has ever included birth control, especially if the coverage was purchased through a 3rd party? I sometimes wonder about this.
 
Listener said:
Even though I think the USA needs Obamacare, the mandate to pay for everyone’s birth control is wrong. I think it does interfere with religious freedom.

However, I just had an interesting thought. For over 2,000 years bishops have been telling women that they can’t use artificial birth control. Countless women have suffered from this, especially the ones that just kept having children that they couldn’t support. The husbands also suffered, but it didn’t cause the celibate bishops any suffering at all.

Now, all of a sudden the birth control rule is impacting the bishops personally. It is going to cause them a lot of hassles, such as the lawsuits they have initiated to get the rule rescinded. It will truly be interesting to see how they handle this.
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Political utility is irrelevant when it comes to the rightness or wrongness of the Doctrine of the Faith. Difficult doesn’t make something wrong or right; it just means it’s difficult. Some things are difficult and it’s always been so.

It will be interesting to see how the bishops handle this, but you should keep in mind that no matter what happens, it cannot change Church teaching because what’s true is always true and that cannot change.

Some people still hold out hope that they can make this happen by force somehow. Consider this:
  1. The Catholic Church in the United States is about 5% of the global Church by the most generous estimations there are.
  2. And 80% of American Catholics can’t even be bothered to show up for 45 minutes a week for mass.
  3. Rome already thinks Americans are totally nuts.
    This is a total non-starter. These people who hope to exert some kind of power on Rome don’t have a leg to stand on. None. Not even if this could ever happen because it couldn’t.
Abortion is an objective wrong and it has been taught that way for the entire history of the Catholic Church, and it was taught by the Jews before that. Changing that is a non-issue.
Listener said:
On the other hand, archdiocese employees have always had medical insurance through their employer. Is it accurate to say that none of this insurance coverage has ever included birth control, especially if the coverage was purchased through a 3rd party? I sometimes wonder about this.
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Archdiocesan employees have NOT always had insurance at all. That’s actually a very recent phenomenon. 100 years ago, NOBODY had health insurance at all, let alone the few poorly paid church employees that there were! 50-60 years ago, only really well-off or well-employed did.

In almost all cases, dioceses and archdioceses have been self-insured in this country, yes. There are a few abuses that have occurred, but the HHS mandate has brought them into high profile and I expect that they’ll be fixed here soon. It’s no longer something that some wacky liberal office manager can simply blow off anymore and no one notices.
 
I should also caution that just because you can get away with something somehow doesn’t mean it’s right. There’s an element of that in some objections to Church teaching, and it’s what motivates the desire to modify it, regardless of what the Church says & whether it’s really true according to doctrine, history, scripture, etc…

For people inclined this way, I would challenge them to consider whether they really want to win an emotional skirmish but lose the entire spiritual war, from a personal point of view when they hit their own last judgment. These things do count, and a person can’t keep secrets from God, even in the unusual event they manage to fool everybody else. It doesn’t work that way.

If it’s been made clear for thousands of years what God wants, what the Church teaches, what the Jews believed, then I’m pretty sure that what one person or even one group of people says about it now doesn’t matter a whole lot in the whole scheme of things. Justification or lack of it–what’s right and wrong–has been made very clear on this issue for thousands of years. Defiance of that is pretty much a non-starter for anyone who really belongs to these faith traditions.

Are mistakes made? Do people cower, clutch their shorts and do the wrong thing? Do people get carried away with their own opinions and parade around like they think they’re gold-plated little gods themselves? Yes to all three–occasionally. BUT It always ends badly. It’s always a mistake when this happens. People answer for this. It’s a bad, bad idea.
 
My sources tell me that a very prominent archbishop has told a very prominent tv host that he believes most of the bishops voted for Obama. If that is indeed the case, then my original question is most relevant, in that this would show that many Bishops have been talking the talk, but don’t really have the desire to walk the walk.
 
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