Will Catholics Flee Obama over HHS Mandate?

Tom, you’re not the only one to step away from the blog for a while and return to find you’ve missed out on a lively discussion. I’ll chalk up my absence to a very busy legislative season here in the People’s Republic of Washington, where lawmakers are rushing to change the definition of marriage rather than deal with the $2 billion budget deficit, the stagnant local economy, high unemployment, the deteriorating transportation infrastructure, underfunded public employee pensions, or…

Funny thing about an election year — normally the Democrats would just pay cash to beef up support from their favored interest groups, but the state treasury is drier than this morning’s martini. All that’s left are the base-energizing freebies like redefining marriage, banning plastic grocery bags, forcing private insurance companies to pay for abortion, and a host of other circus events lawmakers have designed to keep voters distracted from their procrastination on serious fiscal problems. Good thing that doesn’t happen at the federal level.

I was pleased to see Thomas Peters’ running tally of bishops who have spoken out against the Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate forcing employers to pay for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization. The number is up to 145 as of this posting. Certainly it’s refreshing to see such outcry, though as they say in marketing, it all depends on your target audience. If the bishops are aiming their statements at their flocks, the more revealing tally would be the number of Catholics who don’t much care what the bishops have to say about anything of moral gravity, particularly below the waist.

If, on the other hand, the bishops’ statements are aimed at putting political pressure on Obama, the outlook isn’t much more promising. Obama is many things, but uncalculating isn’t one of them. He’s gambling the mandate (if it survives a constitutional challenge) won’t cost him significant political support, and with good reason. The polling cross-tabs are on his side for now. Pat Buchanan’s fantasy of the bishops declaring to Obama that every pastor will read a denunciation from the pulpit two weeks before the election is wishful thinking at best. Instead, the bishops are asking us to fast for climate change.

Early on, I chimed in and took flack for asserting that Obama’s mandate most likely won’t result in a massive exodus of Catholics from Pharaoh’s city. More than a few good folks have reminded me that “it’s about conscience, not contraception.” Yes and no.

True, the fundamental issues at hand are conscience protection and the free exercise of religion. But I’m not convinced that’s how most U.S. Catholics will view this in the long run. Humans have a penchant for focusing on symptoms rather than the disease, and contemporary culture is disastrously myopic in all directions. Often it appears our only interest in the future is looting it to bribe the present, while our grasp of history and heritage lessens with every high school commencement. We don’t even look at today with sufficient depth to grasp the seriousness of the issues before us. Insofar as the average Catholic considers Obama’s mandate, I suspect it will be from the standpoint of what’s he’s forcing rather than his right to force it. Why? Because Catholics, like a lot of Americans, have grown frighteningly comfortable with a very powerful state. The last few years provide examples of unprecedented government overreach — Obama’s mandate that every citizen purchase health insurance, his law allowing the government to indefinitely detain citizens without trial, or the Transportation Security Administration’s free hand (no pun intended) to fondle and x-ray us in airports. Will a population largely accustomed to an intrusive state find yet another coercive intrusion problematic in and of itself?

Admittedly, my conclusions are colored by the fact that I am a Catholic who spends my workdays immersed in politics and public policy in the Pacific Northwest. Not without reason do we call this the pagan Northwest. The culture is uniquely secular, a fact I wasn’t able to appreciate until I lived elsewhere in the country. Washington and Oregon are, after all, the only two states where your Hippocratic-bound physician can legally help you commit suicide. But the secularism doesn’t stop outside the vestibule. The mandate hoopla has been going on for a while now and I’ve heard little about it from my parish or diocese. Sure, the latest edition of the diocesan newspaper featured a couple articles, but the average small-town Washington community paper has a larger circulation than our Catholic newspaper. This week’s parish bulletin included a letter promoting Catholic schools (if you can call them that), and yet another desperate plea from the aforementioned diocesan newspaper begging for subscriptions, but nothing, not a peep, about the new mandate. Washington state’s bishops are having a hard enough time trying to get Catholics fired up about the looming redefinition of marriage, and I haven’t even heard anything about that from my parish, either.

My state’s Catholic Conference appears more concerned with lobbying to maintain and expand social assistance programs than fend off assaults on the Church and the culture. So while many Church leaders are tip-toeing around “sensitive” issues for fear of offending the more squeamish of the flock, the Church’s lobbyists and social service functionaries are climbing farther in bed with a government that wants to silence and neuter it.

What’s more, few of my pewmates are talking about the marriage issue or Obama’s mandate. Most local Catholics I know, and most Catholics I’ve met who supported Obama in 2008, are more concerned with the struggles of everyday life than they are about issues of conscience protection or the legal definition of marriage, which can seem removed or academic. Much more tangible to them are basic questions of survival — how am I going to feed my family if the shop closes, how am I going to keep my home, pay the doctor bills, what am I going to do when unemployment benefits run out next month, or what am I going to do now that my 401(k) is gone?

Is this region a microcosm of the rest of the nation? For your sakes, and for more than a few reasons, I pray not. But while there certainly are vibrant areas and bright spots around the country, it’s clear the secularism, apathy and poor formation rampant here are problems elsewhere, too, even if in different degrees and varieties. A couple days ago Thomas Peters drew attention to a Wisconsin congregation that gave their bishop a standing ovation upon news of his vociferous opposition to Obama’s mandate. That’s encouraging and we all hope to see more of that in the coming months, but for now I suspect scenes like that are still the exception rather than the rule.

Because politics is a practical exercise and not an abstract one, we must also consider one vital question: Will Obama’s ultimate opponent play any role in peeling away his Catholic supporters whom this mandate has soured? At the risk of committing heresy here, I’ll come right out with it and say that barring a seismic shift in events or momentum, Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. You’d think he would have learned the art of word choice after saying he likes being able to fire people, but his “I’m not concerned about the very poor” remark showed he still has a few feet left in his mouth. Context or not, his remarks and privileged background make for an apparent aloofness to the plight of the poor, which does not endear him to left-leaning Catholics, even those who feel betrayed by Obama. For these and other reasons, when it comes down to the wire it’s difficult to imagine a great many Catholics ditching Obama for Mitt.

This isn’t about finger-pointing or “I told you so,” though I certainly believe it was naive to think this wasn’t coming.  This isn’t even a prediction — attempting to predict the future in politics is so very futile, and besides, in graduate school a professor warned us that historians are the worst prophets. This is about making sure we confront a terrible reality: The culture of death is playing to win. We’ve grown too comfortable with the quiet atrocities decimating western Christendom. Francis Cardinal George, a prominent member of the U.S. episcopate, remarked recently, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” From our comfortable, convenient lives, it’s easy to forget that if you peel back the thin veneer of civilization, a seething cauldron of ugliness and anger stirs underneath. I experienced this firsthand as a Dominican brother with several thousand folks in the West Coast Walk for Like a few years back; never before had I heard such vitriol thrown at me as when the pro-abortion demonstrators caught sight of my habit. Obama’s mandate is but a dressed-up, sanitized, bureaucratically sanctioned extension of that brutal reality.

Can Catholics unite and win this fight? We all pray so (and pray we must — unceasingly). Blessed Pope John XXIII reminded us that, in spite of the gathering darkness, Christ has not abandoned the world he redeemed. But we fool ourselves if we think this a purely political battle and therefore place our trust and hope in salvation by political action. Politics, law, and government are the products of culture. Too many so-called “conservatives” think we can transform and renew our civilization by passing laws and electing the right candidates. They forget one of the Old Testament’s chief lessons: The kingdom will not change until the people do. As Emily Stimpson pointed out, there’s much work to be done.

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