The secular Leftists who control the White House were steamrolled last week by the Catholic Church, and they still don’t understand why. Obama’s requirement that church organizations provide contraception and abortifacients unleashed a mighty backlash from Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Leftists fancy themselves as champions of the First Amendment, but now we know that doesn’t include the free exercise of religion.
The real reason the White House was steamrolled is that the Left doesn’t understand what it is up against.
Rachel Maddow, for example, thinks people of faith oppose the Obama mandate because it provides “a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats.” To Maddow, profound religious conviction couldn’t explain the backlash. Instead, “partisan cudgels” provide an explanation more familiar to her.
Consider further the always caustic and usually wrong Eric Boehlert of the Soros-funded Media Matters.
Boehlert says the fight with the churches “feels like 1962, we’re arguing over ‘birth control’ in 2012.”
Boehlert doesn’t understand this fight isn’t about birth control, but religious freedom.
Boehlert doesn’t understand that the usual Leftist tactic of mockery and ridicule won’t work on these opponents. Name calling is nothing compared to what faith communities are willing to endure.
The fight between American churches and Obama isn’t like the birth control debates of 1962. It isn’t a “war on contraception.” It echoes different fights from different years.
In 1941, when Adolph Hitler was at the peak of his power, the Catholic Church publicly challenged Hitler’s euthanasia program against the handicapped. Munster Bishop Clemens von Galen courageously delivered a series of sermons against the Gestapo, the closing of Catholic institutions, and most of all, the T-4 euthanasia program. Through the summer of 1941, von Galen waged a war of conscience against Hitler, in the open, and with the imprimatur of the Catholic Church.
Heinrich Himmler wanted von Galen dead, and sent the Gestapo to arrest him. The Bishop asked the Gestapo agents for a moment, and changed into his full bishop’s regalia – putting on his mitre, episcopal ring, pectoral cross, and carrying his crozier - then presented himself for arrest. The Gestapo agents promptly left without him, and von Galen spent the remainder of the war alive.
Earlier, in 1933, Hitler intervened in the internal affairs of the German Protestant churches by forcing the church to conduct leadership elections. The corrupt elections resulted in the installation of pro-Nazi church officials who sapped the church’s moral authority. It was this government-caused division within the church that launched the resistance of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He worked covertly to preserve “intact churches” as compared with the “destroyed churches” tainted by government interference in matters of conscience.
Bonhoeffer’s principles were more important to him than his life, and he was hanged in April 1945.
The fight over Obamacare is less about 1962 birth control debates, and more about 1955. In The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs (Ignatius Press, 2009), Father John Huang Yongmu describes the meddling in church affairs by the Red Chinese. The communist government has long sought a say in the selection of Chinese bishops and church priorities.
Father Huang wrote in his diary:
We already guessed the diabolical plan of the Communists against the Catholic Church. The first step was to control the church. The second was to restrict its activities so as to destroy it completely. Some people did not see clearly what was starting to happen. They were too optimistic and inclined to say Chinese Communism was unlike Russian Communism. But that was a fable told by foreigners.Huang spent decades in prison because he refused to acquiesce to communist demands. Other Chinese priests were not so lucky.
I’m not suggesting that Obama’s unconstitutional commands to the Catholic Church represent the same degree of evil as Red Chinese or Nazi meddling.
But that’s precisely the point. The Church has taken on far more murderous foes, more ruthless enemies, than Obamacare. The White House obviously doesn’t appreciate the resolve of their opponents. Simply, the Catholic Church will never comply with Obama’s mandate to violate the church doctrine, no matter what.
Leftists like Maddow and Boehlert acutely underestimate the resolve of faith communities. They resort to mockery and ridicule, attacking church doctrine as silly and obsolete, as an issue settled way back in 1962.
They don’t understand what the fight is really about. Control of internal church policy in the face of oppressive government intervention is an old familiar fight to Christians. Mockery and ridicule from the Left is nothing compared to what those opposing Obamacare are willing to endure.
Big Government
