The Church’s response to the ObamaCare Mandate calls to mind this journal’s original name, Catholicism in Crisis. Today the Church confronts a crisis – “an invasion of our religious freedom,” Donald Cardinal Wuerl calls it — and the outcome is far from certain. The Mandate is only one in a flood of attacks that will confront the Church in coming years, and our response is hobbled by several problems of our own making. So we have a steep mountain to climb.
Even though the bishops have been allied with the Democrat Party for a century, and have advocated government health care reform since 1919, they never imagined that their allies of such long standing would betray them, twisting their own issue into a dagger aimed at the heart of the Church. Enter Kathleen Sebelius one of the few pro-abortion Catholic politicians actually barred from the Eucharist by her bishop, who wields the dictatorial powers that ObamaCare confers upon the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Sebelius’s Contraception-Abortifacient-Sterilization Mandate caught the bishops by surprise, but the bishops have come together to draw a line in the sand. But what weapons do they bring to the battle?
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