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| Quite appropriate that the silencer on this American lamb is a black collar. |
I've been watching this current 'religious freedom' crusade of the USCCB with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. I haven't been sure what's really been going on. As Bill Lyndsey notes in his current post on the shenanigans which went on inside the Komen Foundation relative to Planned Parenthood, the Catholic pro life movement is aligning itself with some pretty ugly agendas in it's monomania with abortion. My cognitive dissonance comes from the fact I really have a difficult time believing our bishops have any deep personal motivation for this monomaniacal attitude about the issue of abortion--as opposed to their anti gay marriage crusade. With that crusade I can easily see a great deal of deep seated personal psychological motivation for some of them to beat their breasts about the so called evil gay agenda. But abortion, and now birth control? I don't see any real personal motivation other than career advancement. Maybe that 's because this monomaniacal focus seems to have worked very well for Cardinal elect Tim Dolan, the gregarious smiley face of this strategy and Archbishop Charles Chaput, the not so smiley face.
If it's career advancement pushing this fight with Obama, that just kicks things up another notch to the Vatican. Why would the Vatican be interested in the USCCB creating a war with the Obama administration over birth control in insurance coverage? Especially given Catholic employers have already been doing just this in some form or another in 28 states and a whole host of other countries, and lay Catholics have utterly rejected the teaching on birth control? I have finally had to admit it doesn't have anything to do with abortion or birth control or the good of the souls of the laity. It has to do with protecting the hegemony of the power distribution in Roman Catholicism and enhancing it's perceived global foot print. This is a war that has nothing to do with the body of Christ and everything to do with duping the laity into continuing to allow the bishops, and through them the Vatican, to be the ONLY voice heard in Catholicism. It is a covert attack on the power of the laity to have a voice by appealing to tribalism for us to just hand our voice over to them. It is directly in keeping with the mindset of the past two popes and this current Vatican who have made it a point to disembowel Vatican II teaching on the Church as the People of God, any power for the laity, and the teachings on subsidiarity. That this solo voice also speaks for the interests of the 1% should not go unnoticed, because it is this 1% with whom our hierarchy wishes to maintain it's primary association. The rest of us are expected to ignore all that while we eat our bread and maybe get to drink our wine.
In case readers haven't figured out by now, I am really angry about the brazenness of this campaign and it's duplicity. If mainstream Catholic writers and editorialists refuse to see this and insist we lay Catholics support this so called 'religious freedom' crusade, I will be generous enough to assume it's because they draw their daily bread at the sufferance of one bishop or another. I am not in that position and so I feel very free to call this campaign what it is--an attempt to destroy the power of the alternative lay voice in the Roman Catholic Church by having us meekly hand it over to them.
I've read several right-wing political commentators who seem to think the mandated birth control in health insurance coverage is going to play to essentially mid-west blue-collar Catholics as bullying on the part of the government against the Catholic hospitals, universities, etc. I wonder just who the commentators think make up the huge percentage of Catholics who USE birth control? I strongly suspect the bishops are over-playing their hand and are far to stupid to realize it. The mainstream media seems to be playing along for the bishops. It will be interesting to watch the poll returns in November. Because that is where the test is.
ReplyDeleteVeronica
I've read those commentaries myself, and while this line of argument may play in certain areas, mostly south of the rust belt, it won't garner much traction elsewhere come November. People either have jobs or they don't. Maslow's hierarchy comes into play at that point, not the Catholic hierarchy.
DeleteI wonder when things changed so that one had to be a Republican if one was a Catholic. Abortion, gay marriage, contraception threaten the heart of Catholicism say the Bishops.
ReplyDeleteThe death penalty, destruction of unions and a decent wage, cutting unemployment compensation and heating aid, housing foreclosures, joblessness, compensation, eliminating universal health care and Social Security are just minor issues in their playbook.
I wonder when the sheeple will wake up and say, "You can pry this pill from my cold dead hands! Enough!
Things changed when the Vatican lifers realized they were going to lose a great deal of power if the underlying philosophy of Vatican II came to fruition. These guys would be taking their marching orders from the bishops and not giving them to bishops. This was way too hard a 'pill' to swallow. Paul VI used the real pill as a way to bring things back under 'control'. It failed miserably until our Cardinals elected JPII who grew up in a system which taught him all he needed to know about coercive power, what to look for, and who to promote. Lay Catholics are going to pay the price for his papacy for a very long time.
DeleteWhat really saddens me is people who still believe we have choice in the political realm but not in the spiritual realm. If we give up choice in the spiritual realm we give up real choice in any other realm because we either act from institutionalized guilt or intellectual sloth.
Coolmom, it gradually started changing as JPII appointed bishops that were more political, and Opus Dei, Legionaries and the other personality cults in the Church started gaining the upper hand. I am thankful we didn't have to hear the notorious 'government is threatening our religious freedom' letter from the pulpit, although it was irritating enough having to see it in our bulletins. I've noted over on Bilgrimage that the bishops have great insurance paid for with our tithes. I was irritated that the bishops right out of the gate started behaving like President Obama was Public Enemy Number One for advocating the Affordable Care Act. We really need a gradual transition to a single payer system, but for a variety of reasons I doubt we'll ever see it in my lifetime. One reason is that the Catholic and Protestant right wingers would never agree to a system that publicly funded reproductive care, and particularly not abortion.
ReplyDeleteKathy I really think the rightwing, other than the upper echelon of the Republican party, would revel in a single payer system if they only understood the benefits for them personally. I can remember vividly wondering how many of the older white tea partiers had Medicare cards in their pocket and how many would give them up as the cost for upending The Affordable Care Act. My guess was zero.
DeleteSomehow we have to get the message out that our erstwhile leaders are not about the issues which we care about, but about how they keep their places as leaders and power brokers.