Cardinal Dolan: 'Liberty Letter'

Cardinal Timothy Dolan is clearly continuing to fight the good fight.

A piece published in the Wall Street Journal highlights Cardinal Dolan's relentless efforts to redirect the discussion of the Obama administration's contraception mandate to focus on its assault on religious liberty.

Obama wants to be seen as the great protector of women. He thinks the contraception mandate is a winning issue for him.

He doesn't want his mandate to be seen as trashing the First Amendment and spitting on the Constitution, but that's the reality of what it is.

Cardinal Dolan reminds us that our precious God-given freedom is under attack.

The debate over the Obama Administration's birth control mandate has been ingloriously fact-free, even more than usual. So amid demonstrably false claims about a plot to relegate women to the era of "Mad Men," if not Salem, Massachusetts circa 1692, Cardinal Timothy Dolan's letter on religious freedom deserves more readers.

"We have made it clear in no uncertain terms to the government that we are not at peace with its invasive attempt to curtail the religious freedom we cherish as Catholics and Americans," the archbishop of New York wrote in a public epistle to Catholic bishops last Friday. It's an eloquent and powerful document, though not one that received much of any media notice. "We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it," he continues.

Cardinal Dolan explains that "As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our youth and helping the poor." The problem, and the genesis of this Catholic confrontation with Washington, is the government's "bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church" and its bid "to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised."

The test of pluralism in a democracy is the protection afforded to minority views, especially of religious faith and practice. Nine of 10 health plans already cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, and they present no ethical or moral qualms in a majority of the others. (The economics are another matter.)

But the Administration is using raw political force to compel a small subset of schools, hospitals, charities and other religious institutions "to maintain in our policies practices which our Church has consistently taught are grave wrongs in which we cannot participate," as Cardinal Dolan puts it.

He also relates a remarkable meeting that he says the White House convened with the bishops to "work out the wrinkles" of the mandate. Having accepted the invitation, the bishops asked if concrete policy changes like broadening the mandate's exemptions were "all off the table. They were informed that they are."

In other words, the White House's solution is merely for the bishops to shut up about the wrinkles. Cardinal Dolan writes that "there was not even a nod to the deeper concerns about trespassing upon religious freedom." White House staffers also cited some writings by vicars of the Catholic left in support of the mandate, in effect telling the bishops that they know less about church teachings than your average Washington Post columnist.

As a study in ideology and power, the anecdote is chilling, compounded by all the recent claims by Democrats and liberals that Catholics who actually abide by their faith are opposed to modernity. Such prejudice is supposedly defunct in contemporary America, except when it's practiced against religion.

..."Religious freedom is our heritage, our legacy and our firm belief," Cardinal Dolan concludes. The sad reality is that his letter will not persuade the dominant wing of America's governing political party from insisting that religion kneel before its secular will.

It's crucial for Americans to hold Obama and the Democrats accountable for attacking our religious freedom.

I don't understand why any American would bow to Obama and voluntarily permit him to strip away our rights.

"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."

--MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.