Diary of a Parish Priest

So What Did Sebelius Say?

After all the furor over the ill-advised invitation by Georgetown University to Kathleen Sebelius to speak at the "non commencement event," and the predictable deaf ear turned toward it by the University administration, what did she say?

Well, pretty much work hard, work for the common good, keep your idealism, Carpe diem. She was pretty heavy on the Georgetown sports metaphors (the transcript of the speech I read doesn't transcribe whether there was any hooting or hollering when the teams were mentioned). Which ideals she meant for the graduates to hold onto wasn't clear, but strongly implied that elders don't have them anymore.

She used the word "Catholic" once in referring to John Kennedy's presidential campaign but did not identify herself as one. And she repeated the poorly understood phrase "separation of church and state" which has often been used in an attempt to silence public discussion about moral issues.  (Some critics have noted there was little to fear Catholicism would influence anything Kennedy did, public or private.)  

Some of then-Senator Kennedy’s opponents attacked him for his religion, suggesting that electing the first Catholic president would undermine the separation of church and state, a fundamental principle of our democracy. The furor grew so loud that Kennedy chose to deliver a speech about his beliefs just seven weeks before the election.

In that talk to Protestant ministers, Kennedy talked about his vision of religion and the public square, and said he believed in an America, and I quote, “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against us all.”

Kennedy was elected president on November 8, 1960. And more than 50 years later, that conversation, about the intersection of our nation’s long tradition of religious freedom with policy decisions that affect the general public, continues.

 

Indeed it does. Except under Sebelius' watch, it's the federal regulations that are being imposed on Catholics. 

In support of the US Catholic bishops call for faithful Catholics to be heard, Holy Cross will have petitions available for parishioners to sign which call for the protection of religious liberty in the United States.

Be Afraid then Write, Email and Call

A Real Three Ring Circus

The media circus over Obama's HHS mandate that religious institutions provide health care coverage for artificial contraception, abortifacients and surgical sterilization grows daily. The cast of characters streaming into the Big Top would be amusing, except that this three ring circus is deadly serious.

Did you know: Every Christian denomination denounced artificial contraception prior to 1930.

Did you know: "The Morning After Pill" prevents pregnancy in some cases by preventing implantation of an already living and multiplying human life?

Did you know: That Natural Family Planning is more effective at preventing pregnancy than female chemical contraception and equally effective as male barrier contraception?

Why do some of our elected representatives feel as though they have the right to challenge the legitimacy of the teaching authority of our bishops by misinterpreting polls on artificial contraception? What about if we put each of the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes to a vote? Or how about if we nullified each commandment we routinely break? Our chuch teachings are ideals to help us strive for holiness, not a political party platform. Jesus himself lost at least one crucial poll...the crowd chose Barabbas. 

The brazen attempt to both minimize the theological objection to artificial contraception and ridicule or ignore the teaching authority of our bishops is bad enough. But coverage for abortifacient drugs and surgical sterlization are also mandated by the HHS directive. 

Bad when politicians turn theologians or preachers, worse still when they challenge our own.

Archbishop Chaput: HHS Mandate "... belligerent, unnecessary and deeply offensive to the content of Catholic belief"

Everything Archbishop Chaput writes is lapidary and clear. The Archbishop's response to President Obama's latest assault on our religious freedoms is no exception:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) refused on January 20 to broaden the exception to its mandate that nearly all Catholic employers must cover contraception, abortifacients and sterilization in their health care plans.

An "accommodation" offered Friday by the White House did not solve the problem. Instead, it triggered withering criticism from legal scholars like Notre Dame’s Carter Snead, Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon, Princeton’s Robert George and Catholic University of America president John Garvey, along with non-Catholic scholars like Yuval Levin, the religious liberty law firm The Becket Fund and numerous Catholic and other organizations.
Many Catholics are confused and angry. They should be.
Quite a few Catholics supported President Obama in the last election, so the ironies here are bitter. Many feel betrayed. They’re baffled that the Obama administration would seek to coerce Catholic employers, private and corporate, to violate their religious convictions.
But it’s clear that such actions are developing into a pattern. Whether it was the administration's early shift toward the anemic language of "freedom of worship" instead of the more historically grounded and robust concept of "freedom of religion" in key diplomatic discussions; or its troubling effort to regulate religious ministers recently rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna Tabor case; or the revocation of the U.S. bishops’ conference human trafficking grant for refusing to refer rape victims to abortion clinics, it seems obvious that this administration is -- to put it generously -- tone deaf to people of faith.
Philadelphians may wish to reflect on the following facts. The Archdiocesan Secretariat for Catholic Human Services spends $278,000,000 annually on services to the community. About 4,000 employees comprise our Secretariat’s work force. Catholic Social Services is the largest social service agency in Pennsylvania and the largest residential care/social service sub-contractor with the Department of Human Services of the City of Philadelphia.
There’s more. Archdiocesan Catholic Health Care Services is the largest faith-based provider of long-term-care services to the poor and elderly in the five-county area, and the seventh-largest nationally. And our Nutritional Development Services ministry serves more than 8 million meals a year to school children, summer programs and child care centers. It also provides 2 million pounds of non-perishable food to needy families and the elderly through its Community Food Program.
Much of the money used by these ministries comes from public funding. But of course, the reason these ministries are trusted with public funding is that they do an excellent job. The service relationship works well without compromising the integrity of either the government or the Church. In fact, in a practical sense, government often benefits more than the Church.
It’s also important to note that many millions of the dollars disbursed are resources directly donated by faithful Catholics to carry out their Gospel mission to serve the needy. For the Church, this makes perfect sense: As a believing community, we share our resources freely and gladly. We’ll cooperate with anyone in service to the common good, so long as we are not forced to compromise our religious beliefs.
But the HHS mandate, including its latest variant, are belligerent, unnecessary and deeply offensive to the content of Catholic belief. Any such mandate would make it morally compromising for us to provide health care benefits to the staffing of our public service ministries. Moreover, we cannot afford to be fooled -- yet again -- by evasive and misleading allusions to the administration’s alleged "flexibility" on such issues. The HHS mandate needs to be rescinded.
Many critics are focusing on the details of this or that particular version of the HHS regulation -- the narrowness of the religious exemption, the breadth of the mandate, the hollowness of the grace period. As useful as this approach may be, it risks wandering into the weeds. The White House response on these points is ambiguous and weak. The true magnitude of the issue is getting lost as just another debate about details.
In reality, no similarly aggressive attack on religious freedom in our country has occurred in recent memory.
The current administration prides itself on being measured and deliberate. The current HHS mandate needs to be understood as exactly that. Commentators are using words like "gaffe," "ill conceived," and "mistake" to describe the mandate. They’re wrong. It’s impossible to see this regulation as some happenstance policy. It has been too long in the making.
Despite all of its public apprehension about "culture warriors" on the political right in the past, the current administration has created an HHS mandate that is the embodiment of culture war. At its heart is a seemingly deep distrust of the formative role religious faith has on personal and social conduct, and a deep distaste for religion’s moral influence on public affairs. To say that this view is contrary to the Founders’ thinking and the record of American history would be an understatement.
Critics may characterize my words here as partisan or political. These are my personal views, and of course people are free to disagree. But it is this administration -- not Catholic ministries or institutions or bishops -- that chose the timing and nature of the fight. The onus is entirely on the White House, which also has the power to remove the issue from public conflict. Catholics should not be misled into accepting feeble compromises on issues of principle. The HHS mandate is bad law; and not merely bad, but dangerous and insulting. It needs to be withdrawn -- now

Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM

 

 

Catholic News Agency post 2/11

Archbishop Chaput on the Vocation of Christians in American Public Life

Vocations of Christians in American Public Life

  Archbishop Chaput's most recent speech on the role of Catholic faith in American public life traces the unhealthy division between a politician's private moral beliefs and their public voting records to the speech President Kennedy made about his own Catholic faith during his run for the presidency.

In erroneously viewing the history of our republic as purely secular, and reassuring the public that if elected he would not be a Catholic president, (or perhaps even as a president who was truly Catholic,) Kennedy established the principle that politicians should divorce their private moral and religious beliefs from their public advocacy. 

The Archbishop calls Kennedy's landmark speech "sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong.  Not wrong about the patriotism of Catholics, but wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation’s ."

In this far reaching and thoughtful speech, Chaput emphasizes the importance of Catholic witness in public life decrying ecumenism based on polite behavior instead of truth as empty, and a lie.

Look at the short list of issues the Archbishop identified that confront us, and notice how many depend precisely on our beliefs as Catholics:

abortion; immigration; our obligations to the poor, the elderly and the disabled; questions of war and peace; our national confusion about sexual identity and human nature, and the attacks on marriage and family life that flow from this confusion; the growing disconnection of our science and technology from real moral reflection; the erosion of freedom of conscience in our national health-care debates; the content and quality of the schools that form our children.

Read the entire text of the Archbishop's speech on their diocese's webpage by following the link at the top of this post.

Two Strike Outs and a Home Run

Those were Grant Desme's at bats in his last game as a hot minor league prospect for the Oakland Athletics. The 23 year old outfielder told reporters on a conference call that he truly felt called to the priesthood and will enter a Catholic seminary, St. Michael's Abbey in Orange County California next year. St. Michael's Abbey is home to a monastery of Nobertine monks.

Desme had been seriously considering a call to the priesthood for 18 months and played this last season almost to test his resolve to leave baseball. Despite his success this year in being named the Arizona Fall League MVP, he became more convinced than ever that God was calling him to be a priest. "I love the game, but I'm going to aspire to higher things," Desme said.

His family, teammates and many fans have been supportive of his decision which will involve at least ten years of study and formation before ordination.

Grant's decision was carried in the San Franciso Chronicle, which has an online blog open for comments. The eighty-one comments recorded so far are a commentary, a sad one, on the public's perception of the priesthood today. Read the article and comments here.

Pray for Grant and other young men and women to gather the courage to answer God's call and enter priesthood and religious life, especially during this Year of the Priest.

Practically Catholic

My mother's mother was the 11th child of twelve and spent her childhood in upstate New York and later in Brooklyn. She came from a long line of Protestant settlers who made their way down from Conneticut after emigrating to the "New World" in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. (Though not on the Mayflower.)

I remember my grandmother telling stories about how she had to "convert" to marry my grandfather and how nobody but the two of them seemed happy about it. She was "disowned" for quite a while by her own family and looked upon with suspicion by her Catholic in-laws. Grandma said she and Grandpa's wedding ceremony was supposed to take place in the sacristy or the rectory, but somehow they managed to exchange their vows in the sanctuary.

When her sister and brother and law would finally visit, I remember lots of conversation about the deacons in the Episcopalian church (before the permanent diaconate was restored in the Catholic church) and that their clergy could be married. I always got the impression from my great uncle that the Catholic church was newer than his older, more traditional church - they were "high" Episcopal. Meantime, my grandmother would confide, don't worry, Episcopalians were "practically Catholic."

Well, with Benedict XVI's decision last week to welcome Anglicans into the Catholic church, that turned out to be truer than she knew. Many commentators from the right are heralding the pope's move  as the most important ecumenical step in decades, while some on the left are deriding it as homophobic and misogynistic. I suppose it displeases those who always imagined that ecumenism meant the Catholic church would abandon some or all of its teachings or disciplines, or those who deride any clear cut theological doctrines or liturgical practices. It will certainly be interesting to see how things work out.

Meantime, I admire my grandmother's courage and applaud her common sense. I hope she's smiling in heaven that Pope Benedict shares her point of view.

Canterbury Cathedral

The Green Eyed Monster Which Mocks the Meat It Feeds On

Lectionary Readings 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Green connotes many good things like spring, hope, new growth, youth, life, vitality, ordinary time, but since the time of Shakespeare, also the especially negative emotions - jealousy and envy.

The green of jealousy or envy is thought to derive from the idea that those who harbor such emotions have too much bile, and so a sickly pale. Envy is the desire for something someone else has, while jealousy is the fear that someone or something we have will be taken away if we share.

Jesus challenges both emotions, but in today's gospel and in the Hebrew Scripture reading from Numbers, jealousy takes the limelight. 

The anointed 72 who resent the prophesizing of the absent-from-the-commissioning-meeting-without-explanation Eldad and Medad are chastized for their jealousy by Moses; Jesus likewise challenges the disciples who resent that outsiders are using Jesus' name to work exorcisms.

All of us tend to create "in" groups and "out" groups. Not everyone is a member of my family, or my neighborhood, not everyone lives in Rumson, not everyone is Catholic, not everyone is my friend, not everyone is my race, not everyone suits my personality. It natural for us to make distinctions, but sinful to deny someone their human dignity because of an arbitrary decision on our part. And we diminish our enjoyment of whatever we have by jealous fear.

How can I open a circle I belong to, how can I be less afraid I will lose by sharing, less jealous?