Obama wins but battle rages on courtesy of the Roman Catholic Church

By Donald A. Collins | 7 November 2012
Church and State

Too many of us, naively assume that what some might regard as priestly peccadilloes, would lessen the power of the Roman Catholic Church to inflict continuous damage on the unwary of America and around the world.

Is it time to start letting RCC’s laity sell indulgences to priests?

Yes, we know huge sums have been awarded by the US courts to these abused children, but did that reduce the RCC’s continued attacks on women?

Apparently, not. And likely not the huge power the RCC retains in its messages to parishioners.

On the eve of this important Presidential election this past Sunday, November 4, 2012, here is a message I got from one of the many right winger sites—not necessarily a Catholic sender—which helped propagate the RCC message.

Note the hysterical charges, but also note the underlying message against choice. And of course, it is well established that the Vatican is equally against women receiving safe sterilization or in fact, any family planning except rhythm and withdrawal. Here is the text of the email article.

Bishop Orders Priests to Read Anti-Obamacare Letter at Sunday Sermon
BY Jeff Dunetz

With the Obamacare order that Catholic organizations must pay for insurance which provides the day after pill, sterilizations, and contraception which is abhorrent to Catholic practice the Obama administration is attacking freedom of religion. Now some catholic bishops are fighting back and good for them. Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky ordered priests to read a letter to parishioners this coming Sunday, two days before the presidential election, explaining that politicians who support abortion rights also reject Jesus.

“By virtue of your vow of obedience to me as your Bishop, I require that this letter be personally read by each celebrating priest at each Weekend Mass,” Jenky wrote in a letter circulated to clergy in the Catholic Diocese of Peoria.

In the letter, Jenky cautions parishioners that Obama and a majority of U.S. senators will not reconsider the mandate that would require employers, including religious groups, to provide free birth control coverage in their health care plans. “This assault upon our religious freedom is simply without precedent in the American political and legal system,” Jenky wrote.

“Today, Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters who callously enable the destruction of innocent human life in the womb also thereby reject Jesus as their Lord,” Jenky added. “They are objectively guilty of grave sin.”

Earlier this year, Jenky delivered a controversial homily criticizing the contraception mandate. The bishop included Obama’s policies in a list of historic challenges the Catholic Church has overcome in previous centuries, including Hitler and Stalin’s campaigns.

Jenky is the third Illinois Catholic leader to offer pointed guidance for Catholic voters in recent weeks. Last month, Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki offered a commentary on the Democratic and Republican parties’ platforms that he said wasn’t intended as instruction, but guidance.

“There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils,” Paprocki explained in the Springfield Diocese newspaper.

“Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against,” he said. “But I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.”

Lets hope they pray wisely.

One could question how the purveyor of such specific political argument could keep its tax exemption status under IRS code, but that has never been a worry or consideration for the RCC in America as history shows.

Of course these arguments are partly couched in terms that claim the religious institution has lost its freedom when some of its units are being required to offer family planning as part of their health insurance packages.

Let’s put it in personal terms. When a woman wants NOT to have a child that should be the primary need. What the RCC is saying is that it will not help that woman make that choice, so this raises the question of whose freedom is being abrogated, the all male dominated leadership of the richest private institution in the world or a woman, who often struggles to pay the monthly cost of contraception or on occasion the higher price for an abortion or a tubal ligation?

Worse of course is the laying on of guilt! Look at their language–“grave sin”. Now that is really ironic in light of those peccadilloes I mentioned above!!

Bet the majority of those women listening to the words of their supposed spiritual leaders were far from convinced, recalling that most RCC American women use contraception exactly like their Protestant and Jewish sisters.

Thank goodness that issue was settled by Obama’s victory, but if anyone thinks this corrosive battle over women’s right to choose or to obtain contraceptives is over, sadly it is still in full fight mode! Getting those women these inalienable rights should be the primary moral high ground activity of our time. And now we need to promote among those fooled by its language the recognition that the behavior of the RCC has lost forever the ability to again obtain the place of temporal power it so egregiously squandered.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.

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