"Catholics" and racial bias

There are several serious reasons why a Catholic may decide to vote against President Obama.  Racism, however, is not one of them and it is an embarrassment to our Catholic faith to see an obviously racist posting on a blog that claims to uphold our faith.  

Check out the blog: Restore DC Catholicism  http://restore-dc-catholicism.blogspot.com/ and to Monday’s  (October 29 th) Posting: “Wow! New Migraine Treatment Under Obamacare!”    Hey Janet, Way to go, girl—you’ve shown us your true colors and they ain’t pretty. 

When Religious Freedom Was In Danger in America

Friedhof Cemetery in Washington
Township, Douglas County SD

site of the graves of Joseph and
Michael Hofer, Anabaptist Martyrs

We hear a lot about the threat to religious liberty in the United States today and while researching the Anabaptist movement for a class that I am teaching, I came across an interesting story about a threat to religious freedom in the United States 95 years ago.  It wasn’t Catholics being threatened with mandatory contraceptive coverage, but a far more dramatic story of Anabaptists who gave their lives rather than surrender to the laws of the United States.    First, some background.
The Hutterites are a Anabaptist denomination that emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century from the Russian Empire—though they were not ethnic Russians but Tyrolean Austrian.  Founded in the Austrian Tyrol in the sixteenth century by Jakop Hutter, a hat-maker and itinerant preacher, the Hutterites had left their native Austria for Moravia (in today’s Czech Republic) to escape persecution by the Catholic Hapsburg rulers of Austria.  Hutter himself was eventually captured by the Hapsburgs and burned at the stake in Innsbruck in 1536.  When Moravia fell under the Hapsburg empire, the colonies of Hutterites in Moravia eventually fled first to Transylvania and then to the Ukraine to avoid persecution and military conscription.
Like many Anabaptist groups, the Hutterites are and have always been radical pacifists.  Their religion prohibits them not only from bearing arms, but from wearing military uniforms, following military orders, or paying taxes that support war.  In the Ukraine—then a part of the Russian Empire—the Hutterites had long been exempted from military service but in the second half of the nineteenth century, were required by the Russians to do alternative service in forestry.  Even this was a conscience problem for them as they saw their alternative service as an indirect participation in the war effort. 
Four hundred Hutterites emigrated from the Ukraine to South Dakota in the 1870’s.  There they established their radical way of life which, based on the Acts of the Apostles, requires that property be held in common. That marked them as very odd ducks in American society that has long had a paranoia of anything “socialist” including religious communitarianism.  Four men from this colony in Freeman, South Dakota—the brothers Joseph, Michael, and David Hofer and a relative, Jakob Wipf—were drafted in 1917 to fight in World War I.  Community leaders were in a quandary as to what they should do.  The decision was that they should report to the induction center as ordered but neither put on a uniform nor carry a gun.  They were forcibly shaved of their beards and had their hair cut contrary to their religious customs and sent to Fort Lewis Washington where they were court-martialed and sentenced to 35 years in prison for their refusal.  (The sentence was later reduced to 20 years.)  They were sent to Alcatraz, then a military prison, where they were chained to the ceiling of a cold and damp underground cell.  Uniforms were left in the cell and the prisoners told that if they were cold they could dress in the uniform—they stayed cold rather than compromise their beliefs.  They were transferred to Leavenworth Kansas but Michael and Joseph Hofer were so weakened by the cold and by the near-starvation they had had to endure, that they died three days apart.  The bodies were shipped back to their families in South Dakota.  When their coffins were opened, the bodies had been dressed in the military uniforms they had refused to wear as a mark of contempt for the martyrs and their religious convictions.  
After reading a story like this I am not impressed at the charges of attacks on religious liberty coming from some voices today.  And as usual I am very impressed at the stories of how Anabaptists—Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish—stand faithful to their beliefs in spite of the disadvantages it causes them in our modern society.

The Need to Keep a Cool Head Beneath the Mitre

Would someone tell His Grace

of Baltimore that we use wine,

not Kool Aid for Holy Communion

 A friend of mine, a layman, had dinner the other evening with his bishop.  He and the bishop are close personal friends and Michael says that it is a break in the prelate’s cycle of loneliness to have a few drinks and supper with him.  I am sure it is.  This friend is a warm and sensitive fellow and I would guess that the bishop gets the personal affirmation that is often lacking or, is suspect when it comes from the clergy.  Being a bishop is a lonely career.   I gather from Michael’s remarks to me today that the topic of conversation was much to do about the “crisis” of religious freedom.  This particular bishop is a good man but—and maybe because he is a good man—simple, even naive.  I don’t mean to say that he isn’t intelligent; he is bright enough but he lacks a critical analytical mind.  And I know from some of the statements he has made in talks and in the diocesan newspaper that he has drunk the Kool-Aid being served out by Archbishop Lori and a few others about how our religious freedoms are under attack by the current administration.  I do think that we need to be vigilant about our freedoms but I am enough of a historian to know how in the past demagogues have fanned prudence into paranoia and good citizenship into totalitarian regimes.  (I am currently re-reading William L. Shirer’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)  

The following article appeared in the news a week or two back. 

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A southeastern Pennsylvania Church and a youth pastor are facing criminal charges for a mock kidnapping of a youth group  that was meant to be a lesson in religious persecution.   

The Glad Tidings Assembly of God in Middletown and 28-year-old Andrew David Jordan  of Elizabethtown were charged Friday with false imprisonment and simple assault, said Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marisco 

The church staged the event in March. Mock kidnappers covered the teenagers' heads, put them in a van and interrogated them. Neither the young people nor their parents were told beforehand that it wasn't real. The mother of a 14-year-old girl filed a complaint with police.

"This is a sad case for all those involved," Marisco said, adding that while the church's and Jordan's intentions were not necessarily harmful, "they in essence terrorized several children."

What is this fascination with religious persecution?  Whether it is a misguided youth minister trying to impress on his church’s young folk that they may have to stand up for their faith someday or an entire conference of Catholic Bishops sounding the tocsin that our liberties are being stripped away by the Obama administration because employees of Catholic institutions are being given access to contraceptives we need to dial back on the paranoia.  I am not saying that we should not be vigilant about our liberties but I am saying that it is nothing less than criminal (not to mention seriously sinful) to yell “fire” in a crowded theater just because the concession-booth lady turned up the flame under the tea kettle.   Our society is losing all rationality as it continues to polarize into two opposing factions and the Church’s mission is to reconcile the divisions not compound the panic by exaggerated and unfounded accusations.  There was a day in American history when the Protestant citizenry believed with all their heart that we Catholics were out to rob them of their religious liberties and impose Catholicism on them against their will.  Their fears were not without basis as until 1965 Catholic doctrine did indeed teach that when we Catholics became the political majority we had an obligation to establish the Catholic Church as the official religion of the American people and proscribe other worship.  But American Catholics were good citizens who disregarded their Church’s demands on them to overturn the civil liberties granted by our Constitution and confined the authority of the Church to its proper sphere—faith and morals.  We knew that the magisterium was wrong when it came to the question of religious liberty and, indeed, at Vatican II with the Decree Dignitatis Humanae the magisterium came around and corrected its mistaken view.  And today too we need to use our own prudential judgment in political matters.  While we must agree with the Church on questions of doctrine and moral values, and while our politics need to be rooted in our moral principles, we must insist on the sovereignty of the individual conscience in how those values are applied to concrete political decisions. While we do that, however, we should not portray situations with exaggerated claims that we are being “persecuted” when the civil law is not being tailored to our views.        

Cry Wolf!

 What danger does the Patient Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 offer to the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution? 

  First—let’s look at the text. 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

Our concern here is the first two clauses.. There shall be no law respecting an establishing of religion.  There shall be no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.    
       As I understand it the Catholic Church and its institutions will neither have to provide nor pay for there to be provided to their employees and their dependents, any procedure such as sterilization, abortifacients, or  contraceptives that violate Catholic moral teaching.  On the other hand, their employees and their dependents will be given access to these services at the expense of the insurance companies.  While one might expect that the companies would pass the cost of such services along to those who pay the premiums, in fact the insurance companies want to provide these services as they will lower the cost to the companies since birth-prevention is cheaper than the cost of providing medical care for childbirth and subsequent infant-child care.  (That, at least, is the theory.  I am cynical enough to believe that while the insurance companies may in fact want to provide contraceptive and related services, they will still try to pass the (hidden) cost along in order to maximize their profit. That is the way business works ever since ethics courses became optional in American colleges and universities.)    Does making available to employees of religious institutions services that contradict the religious tenets of the employer-organization without any involvement by or cost to the employer-organization constitute an encroachment on free practice of religion? I think that is a bit of a stretch, but I am not a constitutional lawyer.  Of course neither are the bishops.  Most commentators believe that when this issue comes to the Supreme Court, if the Patient Affordable Care Act of 2010 is still standing despite other lawsuits, that the Court will side with the Church on this issue. They base this estimation on the January 2012 opinion delivered by the Court in the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School case v EEOC which, though dealing with remarkably different issues has the same principles (or so some think) at stake in terms of a religious body’s right to determine its administrative policies without government interference .     

      I do think we are going to have to determine sound boundaries both to protect religion and protect from religion in a secular society.  I also think there is a campaign in certain segments of our society to restrict the influence and even visibility of religion, but I honestly don’t think that is the Obama administration’s agenda.  And so I have fears that this “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign by the American Bishops is not a legitimate red flag to protect religious freedom but a thinly veiled political assault on the Obama administration to convince Catholics that they should support the Republican ticket in November.   A greater fear of mine than Obamacare being an assault on our religious freedoms is that when the wolf does come no one will take the bishops' cries for help seriously.