Rhetoric Race and Religion
Several Catholic bishops have threatened that, if made to comply with the HHS ruling requiring Catholic hospitals to indirectly pay for their employees’ birth control, the Catholic church will have no choice but to “give up its health care institutions for Lent.”
What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.
In other words, the Catholic church would rather get out of the healthcare business altogether, even though it would mean sacrificing all the good that Catholic hospitals do, than be made to do something that it considers to be immoral. The moral philosophy guiding this conclusion would seem to be the following: it would be better to not do good in order to avoid doing evil than to do evil in order to keep doing good.
If this is true, then should we not also get out of the U.S. military business?
This statement probably seems like a huge non sequitur so let me explain.
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