Cul-de-Sac Catholicism

Why did the U.S. bishops fight the health care bill until the end, even when President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion? The bill may now be law, but questions still linger. In this Web-only article, Nicholas P. Cafardi of Duquesne University School of Law writes with sadness of the crebility the bishops have lost as a result of the battle over health care:

So the bishops found themselves opposed to a law that would provide health care insurance to 30 million uninsured Americans, vastly improve health care insurance coverage for the rest of us, and prevent annually an estimated 45,000 deaths from a lack of adequate health care. And why? For the amorphous anxiety that the health care reform bill might perhaps somewhere, somehow, someday underwrite someone’s abortion? How, in any rational sense of justice, does that uncertainty outweigh the pro-life certainties of this law?

I am saddened that our sacred pastors, men whom I truly admire, allowed themselves to be led into a partisan cul-de-sac that they found impossible to exit. I know that they are wise enough to work their way out of this dead-end eventually, but meanwhile the damage to their credibility in being truly pro-life, and not merely pro-life for partisan purposes, is immense.

Read “Cul-de-Sac Catholicism.”

Tim Reidy