The Catholic Church Has Launched A Fight Against Obama That’s Unprecedented In American History
Michael Brendan Dougherty
BusinessInsider.com
2-7-2012
We’ve been talking about this emerging conflict between the Catholic Church and the Obama Administration for two weeks, and last night and this morning it exploded all over the mainstream media.
The basics are this: the department of Health and Human services issued a regulation that all non-Church religious intitutions, like hospitals and schools, had to provide employee health insurance that includes contraception, sterlization, and drugs that the Church maintains are abortifacients.
You might be thinking: Doesn’t the Catholic Church oppose all sorts of things? Why are we even talking about this?
Well, it’s true that the Catholic Church opposes legal abortion, it opposed liberalized divorce laws. The current pope and the last one opposed the Iraq War, etc.
But in this case, the government will force the Church’s institutions (hospitals, schools, charities) to act in a way Catholics consider sinful: to directly buy insurance for birth control, sterilization, and drugs that act as abortifacients. No, the government isn’t forcing employees to use those insured services. But forcing Catholic institutions to pay for those services makes the Church complicit in those acts.
And the response of Catholics to the ruling was immediate and harsh.
Put simply: there is simply no time in American history we can recall where nearly the entire body of American Catholic bishops and priests have united to speak against a sitting president by name, and promised civil disobedience.
The Rest…HERE
