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The Most Reverend Alexander K Sample, Bishop of Marquette, has published a letter to be read at all Masses this coming weekend. It follows the lines of a model letter suggested by the USCCB (United States Conferene of Catholic Bishops) that all the bishops have been asked to send to their priests and comes in the wake of the Obama Administration's decision to force all employers, including Catholic employers, to offer health coverage that includes sterlization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception thereby denying Catholics and the Catholic Church the freedom to practise and live according to their religious beliefs.
Letter from Bishop Sample on Religious Liberty The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has a web page dedicated to the issue of the protection of conscience in the light of the US Department of Health and Human Services announcement. Visit it to see how you can contact Congress to protest this directive. (As a non-US citizen I don't believe I can do this myself.)
Cardinal Di Nardo also preached powerfully about this attack on religious liberty in his homily at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception during the Mass in the evening before the Washington DC March for Life.
This is fantastic. And, as many immigrants came to America for freedom of religion, we have a great "cloud of witnesses" to back us up.
ReplyDeleteI am very proud of this good Bishop Sample.
ALL the bishops should be doing this. The Church needs to present a united front. ?BTW, there is no reason you can't write to the congress critters from your district. You don't have to be a citizen. Just write it as the pastor of your parish, and that would be fine. [What you can't do, is sign petitions for proposition X, Y, Z to be placed on a ballot. You have to be a registered voter for that and they'd check, or are supposed to check.)
ReplyDeleteIn Britain, the NHS provides all these services. We Catholics do not approve nor avail ourselves of them. We fight to have abortion outlawed but we do not suggest that we should not pay for the NHS while it provides for the views of others. In a democracy they too have freedom and we have a duty to uphold that freedom while we argue our case. Are we really suggesting that Catholics should not join an insurance scheme to protect themselves from cancer because others use that scheme to get contraception advice? I fear there is a lack of understanding here
ReplyDeleteNo, that is not what we are suggesting. What the bishops would, I think, say in reply to your query is: "We have to buy the health insurance products of our employees because that is how things work here in the USA. Of course we want them to receive treatment for cancer and we are happy to buy a product that gives them that treatment. But we are not prepared to buy services for our employees that conflict with our beliefs." Why does the federal government want to force us to buy such products? The NHS is quite a different case. It is the government (admittedly using tax payers' money) that buys the services. In the current case, it is the government requiring the Church to buy these services for its employees. I hope you can see the difference.
DeleteFrederick: Wild curiosity, but does not the government (assuming you are from the UK) directly take your money in taxes to pay for the NHS? Last I checked it was a fairly healthy chunk of money out of the average wage slave's check. It's your tax dollars that are paying for abortions in the UK. You are forced to support immoral practices, essentially at the point of a gun. [Don't pay taxes, eventually they could throw you in jail, so I'm not exaggerating.]
ReplyDeleteIn the US, until Obama the want-to-be dictator took over, the taxpayer was largely shielded from being forced to pay for such things. We'd prefer not to have the blood of the innocent on our hands. Until Obama took over, we used to have such things as freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. I pray the whole ObamaDeathCare MESS will be deemed unconstitutional and thrown on the ash-heap of history where it belongs with its Marxist instigator.
And Frederick, why must you 'uphold' the 'freedom' of the proaborts to kill the innocent? What about their 'respect' [none] about upholding YOUR freedom not to help kill the innocent?