Category Archives: church

Benefit of clergy

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Whether or not the recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was just (I do not think it was), it’s clear that Cheryl Perich was not fired for religious reasons or indeed for any secularly legitimate reason.1 Her firing would have been illegal had it been carried out by a secular organization. Shortly after the verdict was announced, The New York Times spoke out against it in a fairly sharp editorial. After reviewing the facts of the case and the court’s reasoning, the Times argued as follows:

The court’s conception of the ministerial role is more encompassing than it has been defined by state and federal appellate courts. Its sweeping deference to churches does not serve them or society wisely.

Recent legal decisions have so enlarged the scope of clerical benefit where it can be argued to pertain to religious establishjments and not to individuals as to constitute an establishment of religion (or so it seems to me) in clear violation of both the spirit and the letter of the first amendment. We’re now seeing this establishment flex its new muscles in ongoing disputes regarding the availability of health insurance coverage for contraception and abortion under the new federal health care law, in which Catholics and Evangelicals seem to be forming a political alliance that is going so far as to claim that its opposition to contraceptive coverage is based upon respect for the individual conscience and to demand a broad conscientious exemption that would include “employers with religious people running them or other people of conviction who are running them.”

If we follow the reasoning of the Supreme Court and the allied Bishops and Evangelicals we are not permitted to judge the morality of their position on the basis of it’s social consequences or it’s consequences to individuals who will be denied access to legal redress and necessary health protective services. This is a position that I believe can only be maintained by trivialization of the persons affected and the importance of the health care issues involved, more or less on the order of Foster Friess’s comments about birth control this past week; or as Melissa Moschella writes in the National Review Online:

Forcing employers or insurers to fund an activity that they believe to be gravely wrong is a denial of individual conscience rights. Is free access to contraceptives an equally fundamental moral right to be protected even at the cost of others’ conscience rights? Is it a prerequisite for a free and ordered society? Anyone inclined to say yes should consider the following question: Would it be worth risking one’s life or livelihood, emigrating to an unknown land, or fighting a revolution to secure all-expenses-paid access to contraceptive services? Only for those who have made sexual expression their religion.

It is in the nature of the sort of casuistry being used by the “religious” with respect to this issue to set up and attack straw persons and to pretend that wolves are sheep. The Catholic bishops’ design to impose Catholic teaching upon Catholics and non-Catholics alike is patently obvious.2 It is laughable for Timothy Dolan to present himself and his fellow princes of the church as victims of presidential overreach. Indeed, according to a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter,

Perhaps Obama saw, as many of us do, the bishops’ actions as an attempt to legislate beliefs that they cannot get their own people to obey. . . . The sad truth is, if the numbers of Catholics leaving the church are any indication, most Catholics in the United States probably see the hierarchy more as victimizers than victimized.

Here’s some more casuistry. I’ve just received an email from Senator Roy Blunt in answer to a call I made last week to Senator McCaskill’s office urging her to oppose Blunt’s amendment to a transportation bill that would have attempted to repeal the contraception mandate. It reads in part:

In August 2011, the Administration announced its decision to mandate that all insurance companies and employers cover contraception and sterilizations with no copay. This unprecedented decision is an affront to the deeply held convictions of millions of Americans, which is why I introduced legislation to repeal the mandate. . . . The government should not force doctors to perform procedures or employers to provide coverage for services they view as immoral any more than the government should force treatments on Americans. The federal government has no business in a doctor’s examining room and the Administration’s actions have put our nation’s deep commitment to religious freedom in jeopardy.

But the controversy isn’t about anybody’s conscience.3 It’s about power, or more precisely it’s about the ability of the Catholic hierarchy and allied Evangelical groups to to command the power of the state to manage the lives and welfare of those millions of Americans Mr. Blunt pretends to represent. And of course Mr. Blunt and the Republicans don’t want to keep the government out of doctors’ examing rooms in states requiring that women seeking abortions undergo ultrasound examination. In Texas and Oklahoma the government requires doctors to force women to view the procedure, and in some other states the government forces doctors to perform invasive vaginal ultrasound examinations when that is required in order to perform the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy.

Catholic and other religious organizations receive huge infusions of public monies from federal, state, and local sources, and for these purposes claim to be secular institutions, as I have pointed out in a previous post. One would think that such institutions would not then be able to claim (or be so mendacious as to claim) benefit of clergy. But consistency and common sense don’t matter in contests like this one. And now the legislature of my enlightened state is taking up the issue. As Planned Parenthood reports today:

SB749 sponsored by Senator John Lamping of St. Louis and HCR 41 from Representative Paul Curtman of Pacific seek to undo the new federal rule and allow any employer to deny birth control coverage to their employees simply because they have a “moral” objection to birth control.

Of course, using public money to fund access to contraception has been part of federal law since 1970, when the idea was introduced by a Representative from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush.4 The enabling legislation passed the house by a majority of 298 to 32 and passed the Senate unanimously. It was signed into law by Richard Nixon. But the religious right aren’t going after Nixon or Bush the first. Their target is the current president.

More later—

Notes

1Reviews of the case may be found here and here.
2As is the fact that Catholic teaching forbids most forms of contraception. In a related matter, Reed Abelson reports in today’s New York Times that Catholic hospitals are expanding by buying other hospitals and changing their character. See “Catholic Hospitals Expand, Religious Strings Attached.” In both cases the church’s practice is not persuasive but coercive.
3Ellis West, a constitutional scholar, has reviewed the issue of conscientious objection in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Among many enlightened things he writes is this: “At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, both its proponents and opponents agreed that the national government should have no jurisdiction over religion, i.e., should pass no laws dealing primarily or directly with religious beliefs and practices, and the religion clauses were added to the Constitution to make that clear. No one suggested then that they were also intended to prevent laws that the government could pass from being applied to persons or groups who did not want to obey them for reasons of conscience.” See “Catholic claims stretch the first amendment.”
4See Ann Gerhart’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Birth control as election issue? Why?“

Religio: taking careful account

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Well, a trip to the emergency room over the holidays interrupted my train of thought. I’m most grateful to a young cardiologist who treated me at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City. As we agreed that I should have a heart catheterization, he remarked gruffly, “You’ll be OK. You’re a healthy guy.” As it turned out, he was more than right. The catheterization turned up no blockages or other problems with my heart—not that hypertension isn’t a problem

—thanks Dr. Ammar! You’re a mensch.

Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops are seeking again to build sympathy for their continued effort to suppress women’s reproductive choices and impose catholic teaching on all employees of catholic institutions, whether they are catholics or not. Rich Lowry, writing in this week’s Time harangues us all in a piece that features a cartoon effigy of the president as Henry VIII, to view the good bishops as an oppressed religious minority and the president as their oppressor.

But the president may have outfoxed the proud prelates this time by removing the birth control mandate from their shoulders and placing it on the shoulders of insurance companies. The bishops are crying foul, as should be expected from a group of privileged citizens who have long been able to claim benefit of clergy in ways that defy rational analysis. Witness their attempt to blame the sexual abuse of thousands of catholic children on American culture—I wonder how that fits in Ireland and Holland—and their casuistic claim that catholic universities are not religious organizations when the issue is grant money.

Tidings of comfort and joy . . .

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“O Magnum Mysterium” is one of the responsories in the Gregorian liturgy of Christmas and as such is much older than “In Dulci Jubilo,” which dates from the early fourteenth century. “O Magnum Mysterium” has about it a formality and high seriousness that one writer refers to the irony of the Incarnation, “the fact that the field animals—mere beasts of burden trying to sleep in the same manger—would witness the birth of the holy Christ child.” “In Dulci Jubilo,” in which we are asked to sing and be merry around the manger, is less formal but also bears the signs of liturgical trope. Both texts depend upon the “in praesepio,” theme from Luke’s gospel.

Unsres Herzens Wonne leit in praesepio.

. . . ut animalia viderent Dominum natum jacentem in praesepio.

. . . et venerunt festinantes et invenerunt Mariam et Ioseph et infantem positum in praesepio.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

It’s a lovely story, taken all together, the holy birth surrounded by signs and portents, the plain circumstances suffused with swarms of angels and the the swagger of magician kings. And it’s part of a larger story that one could wish were true even in the face of certain conviction to the contrary, As professor Tolkien has put it:

There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.1

The text of the story surely came first, but I love this image of Giotto’s that foregrounds the animalia,2 with its wonderful donkey and the angels hiding in the attic. “O Magnum Mysterium” foregrounds the mystery, but “In Dulci Jubilo” seems to address the Christ child, himself, much as Dante addressed Beatrice on the margin of the earthly paradise, Alpha es et O, “Blessed are you who come.”

1See “On Fairy Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, Erdmans, 1966 [1947].
2The original is in the Scrovegny Chapel.

the snake’s the thing . . .

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This is another “Let’s talk about snakes” post in honor of one of my graduate school professors who had a favorite schtick that began with that expression. I’ve written only fifteen of these in the three-year history of this blog, and it’s been a year since the last one. I should likely do better than that, especially since my habit of using the word, snakes, in a figure of speech that bears on some part of the post’s content is always a challenge to my ingenuity. So here goes:

Summer entertainments: We’ve been making the rounds of community arts events in the city this summer more than in some past years. A “Jungle Boogie” concert at the St. Louis Zoo was wonderful fun back at the end of May and introduced us to the Ralph Butler Band. At the Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park, we saw an excellent Hamlet, with no gimmicks other than Shakespeare’s own. We also took in two summer operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Eugene Onegin at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In spite of a few sublime musical moments, Figaro is a silly opera. Some performances try to recapture some of the social satire lost in Da Ponte’s adaptation of Beaumarchais, but the Opera Theatre’s productiom leaned pretty heavily on soubrette and buffo clichés and stage business that did little to distract one’s attention from the silliness, and vocally the performance was pretty lackluster. The Onegin was better. The cast’s powerful voices and Tchaikovski’s music almost lent credence to Pushkin’s poetic melodrama. The performance of Russian-American soprano, Dina Kuznetsova as Tatiana, was exceptional among fine performances by all the lead singers.

The Biden Leaks: Ben Smith at Politico passes on information about how Vice Preaident Biden’s views on the Afghan war were leaked recently. So—if you’re an administration operative and you don’t like some policy your bosses are pursuing, all you have to do is leak information that among your bosses somebody is disagreeing. I’m not always in favor of punishing leakers, but this is a time when I think somebody (maybe more than one somebody) should be fired.

Old time religion: It’s fitting to remember as we celebrate Independence Day that Jefferson’s ringing claim of god-given rights didn’t extend even to all men, in his own time and afterwards for generations, even for generations after we fought a bloody civil war over slavery. And if we needed reminding, the posting of portions of Samuel Seabuty’s infamous defense of slavery over at Episcopal Café should do the trick. I think it is the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other theological conservatives that the gospel as understood by past ages is sufficient in the present. That view doesn’t survive much inspection of the past, when Christian churches and theologians justified slavery and the vilest anti-Semitism, and that’s only a part of the foreground. Friends have recently returned from President Obama’s home state of Hawaii, where they saw striking reminders of the inequality nourished and fostered there by an iniquitous cabal of missionaries and planters—not exactly the home of the brave, to quote Justice Scalia in another context.

A purloined letter: Over a year ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In light of recent events that I may write about one of these days, I took a look at an old blog post that linked to that letter the other day. Imagine my distress when I discovered that the link turned up this. Talk about dead letters! But today I’m happy to report that my letter is still accessible at the Post, though it is now in a different place. Indeed the listing of my letter amongst regular articles in the paper makes me feel less snake bit.

—though I didn’t exactly get a byline . . .