This July at a conference at Mundelein Seminary I heard Cardinal George state that the Church is in a more perilous position in this country then it has ever been. In February he said the Church is being despoiled of her institutions and that the new HHS mandate is nothing short of a demand for the Catholic Church in the United States to “give up her health care institutions, her universities and many of her social service organizations.” He predicted that if the HHS regulations are not rescinded a Catholic institution has the choice to secularize itself, pay exorbitant fines forcing it out of business, sell the institution, or close down. He pointed out that freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union, however, “the church could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship—no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long Cold War to defeat that vision of society.”
These comparisons to the former Soviet Union are quite chilling, and although they are easily dismissed, they are quite apt. I have been reading about Poland’s history under Władysław Gomułka, the first Secretary of the Polish Workers Party from 1959-1970. Because he replaced hardline Stalinists, Gomułka was a candidate of hope and change. But as George Weigel explains, the Gomułka “thaw” simply “led to a period of ‘maturity’ for polish communism. There were no longer mass murders, or open and brutal mass coercion…. [But] the regime still remained determined to bring the church to heel while weaning the Polish people from traditional religious loyalties.” The struggle entered a “more subtle” and “dangerous phase.” (The End and the Beginning, p. 51)
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