Catholic bishops push for health care reform

With gathering force Bishops across the country are calling for a united Catholic voice for health care reform legislation, reports Catholic News Service. Access to care and respect for life are the unifying themes of the Bishops' messages.

How abortion is handled is a pivotal issue for those whose voices were amplified by the National Catholic Register.

The Labor Day Statement of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) also reflected those values, saying "the dignity of work and “the contributions and rights” of the American worker, the importance of health care reform, and recent collaboration between the Catholic Church, unions, and health care workers."

The Consortium of Jesuit Bioethics Programs issued a clear, concise statement of The Moral Case for Insuring the Uninsured [.pdf] which said:

Each year, according to a report of the prestigious Institute of Medicine, approximately 18,000 Americans die prematurely because they lack health insurance. Persons who lack insurance typically do not seek medical care until their illnesses have progressed to the point when they can no longer be ignored. Then the illness is far more difficult (and expensive) to treat.
This simple fact of the death toll from lack of insurance should provide the moral will to treat this situation as we treat any national emergency that threatens large numbers of Americans whether that emergency is from an aggressor such as terrorists, a natural disaster such as Katrina, or a communicable disease such as swine flu. In national emergencies, we require our representatives to determine what needs to be done to alleviate the threat and to appropriate the resources to do it. In such situations we would be very surprised to hear our representatives or members of the media talking about whether this was the right time for action, arguing to slow down the momentum toward action, or debating whether we can afford to act.

Minority dissent on the right cannot reasonably be seen as negating the calls for reform.

Moderation?

Today's resignation under a "cloud" of Scranton Bishop Joseph Martino portends change for politically aggressive, conservative bishops.

"Moderazione" is the message from the powers that be, persuasively argued Mark Silk of Trinity College's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life.

Catholic religious journalist David Gibson wrote that some bishops may be uneasy with the "more strident and even partisan tone of many church leaders":

Last week, Santa Fe Archbishop Michael Sheehan publicly broke with that minority, telling National Catholic Reporter that the anti-Obama views represented a minority of bishops, and that the majority was hesitant to speak up.
"The bishops don't want to have a battle in public with each other, but I think the majority of bishops in the country didn't join in with that, would not be in agreement with that approach. It's well intentioned, but we don't lose our dignity by being strong in the belief that we have but also talking to others that don't have our belief. We don't lose our dignity by that," he said.

Too bad for the protestant Religious Right? It relies on what Silk calls "take-no-prisoners" members of the Catholic hierarchy to echo and add credence to its campaigns - most recently the counter-factual campaign against health care reform.

Catholic Right drifts away from Papal Encyclical toward Protestant Conservatives

Today's NYT piece by David Kirkpatrick led both Grant Gallicho and Mark Silk to note how the Catholic right has put itself at odds with the church's social justice position.

Gallicho, himself Catholic, analyzed the comments of Bishop Nickless of Sioux City. Nickless told the NYT:

Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined ‘best procedures,’ which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses.

Gallicho responded:

Government monopoly?
Patient choice?
Does the bishop understand that in several states insurers operate virtual monopolies?
Or that many Americans have no choice when it comes to health insurance? That they take what they can get or else they go broke–or they can’t get it, suffer a catastrophic illness, and break the rest of us?
Are we to believe that the profit motive is better than “bureaucratic standards”?
Is that church teaching too?

Silk summarizes church teaching as recently reflected in Pope Benedict's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Silk writes:

As I've pointed out here, the pope's encyclical teaches that food, drinkable water, "basic instruction and elementary health care" are all "elementary and basic rights." Sure there's politics and prudential judgment involved in determining the best way to provide people with health care, but so is there in determining the best way to provide people with food and drinkable water and breathable air.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Web site where it takes a stand for the broad, generous health care reform which church social policy implies. And against abortion. Which the Christian Right is attempting to use as a wedge issue by arguing there is unequivocal support for abortion in the various health reform proposals.

Carefully sorting abortion out produces equivocal results that do not support towering rhetoric from either side of the health reform debate. Consider the recent work of Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman on that issue.

As a result, Conservative Catholic bishops who are joining the Christian right on that may find themselves at odds with both church policy and reality.

U.S. Bishops demand a high standard for full reconciliation

The price of full reconciliation of the four disastrously un-excommunicated, right-wing Catholic Bishops?

A full-throated end to their anti-Semitism and holocaust denial, demanded the The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Tuesday.

Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, the president of the group, also "called the statements by Bishop Richard Williamson 'deeply offensive and utterly false' and called the outrage from Jews and Catholics 'understandable.'"

Specifically about full reconciliation, reported the Boston Globe, George said:

The Holy Father's lifting of the excommunications is but a first step toward receiving these four bishops, and the priests who serve under them, back into full communion with the Catholic Church. If these bishops are to exercise their ministry as true teachers and pastors of the Catholic Church, they, like all Catholic bishops, will have to give their assent to all that the Church professes, including the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Mention of the Second Vatican Council is important here. because it resulted in the church's renunciation of anti-Semitism and led to a historic warming of relations between Catholics and Jews.

Until Tuesday the U.S. Catholic bishops were largely silent on the matter, thus provoking criticism.

Now, they are apparently pushing back against any real or perceived Vatican impulse to give the bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X any but the most exacting path to full reconciliation.

Pushing back is what service of their church requires, given the pope's refusal to invest more heavily in quieting the waters he has whipped into an unrelenting storm.