The unholy alliance between Catholic bishops and the GOP

Catholic leaders are self-righteously trying to infringe on the liberty of all Americans. And head-in-the-sand Republicans are cheering them on

The Episcopal Church used to be described as the Republican Party at prayer. Today's GOP has moved far right, and suddenly the Catholic bishops are now the Republican Party in the pulpit. 

For many Catholics — and I intermittently try to be part of the church I was raised in — this is a betrayal of their beliefs about the place of faith in public life. For Republicans, the turn toward social issues, manifest in their misalliance with the bishops in a war on birth control, further radicalizes their presidential primary process and their congressional politics — and further weakens their prospects in November. 

The bishops could have welcomed President Obama's compromise on insurance coverage for contraception — that religiously affiliated institutions don't have to provide or pay for it, but insurance companies do. Insurers will finance the coverage but save money in the long run, since the cost of birth control is far less than the bills for unwanted pregnancies. Instead, the bishops reinforced their anathema, announcing that they were not "focus[ing] exclusively on the question of religious liberty" — the very cause that sparked the opposition to the original regulation, which required religiously affiliated organizations to provide employees with copay-free coverage for birth control. The bishops essentially revealed that their original cause was also a cover for opposing "the nationwide mandate of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients" — the morning after pill — which for them "remains a grave moral concern."

The unholy alliance of the bishops and the GOP threatens the party's ultimate presidential candidate and its House majority — and diminishes its chances of taking the Senate.

Let's translate this ecclesiastical speak: Bishops believe that birth control services should be denied to non-Catholics and Catholics alike. The bishops can't persuade their own flock — among whom contraception is a norm, not an exception — so they attempt to enforce their doctrine through public policy. They even huffed that they "were not consulted in advance" about the president's revised policy — and then demanded a law that would entitle institutions and employers to forbid coverage for any health service to which they had a moral objection — even if they weren't paying for it. (Should an employer who is a Jehovah's Witness be allowed to delete any insurance for blood transfusions — which Witnesses regard as biblically prohibited?)

In other words, in this pluralistic society, the prelates of one denomination are attempting to impose their strictures on everyone of every faith and none. This echoes the failed efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to prevent the legalization of divorce in Italy — and worldwide, their graceless enmity toward civil marriage for same-sex couples. It's hard to escape the sense that if they could get away with it, they would remake America in their own dogmatic image and likeness. Where logically do you draw the line? If the remarriage of those who are divorced is morally wrong — a lapse into "living in sin" — why not outlaw it?

The hierarchy has moved perilously close to the caricature of the church that was invoked to oppose the election of the first Catholic president in 1960. To allay the fears, and answer the bigots, in a speech written with the help of the great Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray — imagine if his role had been known at the time — John Kennedy affirmed his belief in an America "where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." How far we have strayed from that ideal when the bishops are issuing instructions to a president who isn't Catholic.