AT RICOCHET, Paul A. Rahe has a very powerful piece on the latest controversy between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration. First he points out that while protesting the provision in Obamacare requiring Catholic institutions to cover abortion drugs and contraceptives in their health plans, Church leaders have not protested the fact that individual business owners, including Catholics, will be forced to do the same thing. A compromise on the Church’s behalf is no help to these individuals.

Rahe then explains the roots of the present day crisis. The Church’s enthusiastic acceptance of liberalism on other issues has brought about a disastrous decline in its moral authority and virtually assured that abortion funding would ultimately be government-mandated. He writes:

In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal. They gloried in the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Frances Perkins – a devout Anglo-Catholic laywoman who belonged to the Episcopalian Church but retreated on occasion to a Catholic convent – Secretary of Labor and the first member of her sex to be awarded a cabinet post. And they welcomed Social Security – which was her handiwork. They did not stop to ponder whether public provision in this regard would subvert the moral principle that children are responsible for the well-being of their parents. They did not stop to consider whether this measure would reduce the incentives for procreation and nourish the temptation to think of sexual intercourse as an indoor sport. They did not stop to think.

In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism – the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people’s money and redistribute it.

At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. At no point have its members evidenced any concern for sustaining limited government and protecting the rights of individuals.

I recommend the whole piece.

 — Comments —

Jeff W. writes:

Catholic support for Social Security and the growth of the welfare state reminds me of the mistake Protestants made when they instituted  public schooling.   Protestants wanted to make taxpayers (including Catholics) pay for schooling that would include  watered-down Protestant religious and ethical teaching.  By doing this, they wrongly unloaded their educational responsibilities onto the taxpayers, at the same time committing an injustice against Catholics and other non-Protestants.
 
After 1963, when the Supreme Court outlawed school prayer, public schools began to turn into the wholly secular institutions that we know and loathe today.  Denominations that most enthusiastically supported public education, such as Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, who do not today operate  their own elementary schools or high schools, have lost most of their young people in recent years, due in part to the aggressively secular education their children are now subjected to. 

If Protestants had just run their own schools and never tried to push public schooling, their churches would be much better off today.  It seems to be God’s law that when you shirk your responsibilities, it comes back to bite you.

Roger G. writes:

I’m just glad we Jooos never fell prey to the blandishments of Socialism.

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