#350: Is the Obama Administration Forcing Catholics to Violate Conscience?

Some years ago, my wife worked for Catholic Charities, which provided our family’s health insurance. Our insurance card was coded to indicate that this Catholic institution’s insurance did not cover contraceptive services. 

Now the Obama Administration’s healthcare reform has included a provision mandating that Catholic institutions can no longer be exempted from such coverage. Such institutions (not including churches or houses of worship) will be required to provide coverage that includes contraceptive services. So open war has broken out between Catholic leaders and the Obama administration.  Peggy Noonan, in a Wall Street Journal column this week, has called it “a battle the president can’t win.”

I am not writing to defend the Obama Administration, since I believe the new provision infringes on the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment.  I hope the administration either removes the mandate or adapts to satisfy religious institutions.  Failing that, I expect to see the mandate challenged and reversed in court--particularly after the recent unanimous Supreme Court decision reinforcing the freedom of religious institutions to operate by their own, constitutionally protected values.

But at the same time, I am deeply troubled by the rhetoric used by many Catholic leaders.  I see this as a constitutional issue--that is, as a question of basic religious freedom.  But bishops and media commentators across the country are portraying it as a moral crisis.

In fact the buzz-phrase repeated in hundreds of parishes, dozens of websites, and endless interviews of bishops, claims that this mandate will force Catholic institutions to “violate our consciences.”

I’m afraid such language not only distracts us from the real issues, but represents a disingenuous or even hypocritical manipulation of Catholic teaching and practice.

I say this because, while talk of “violating our consciences” is an argument that may serve the political agenda of protecting religious liberty for Catholic institutions, it does not fit either Catholic beliefs or the facts of Catholic life in America. 

At best, it reflects special pleading based on an inconsistent and selective view of Catholic tradition.  At worst, it is the hypocrisy of people invoking their version of “tradition” in one particular case to oppose a principle they have already accepted many times over.

I should begin by clarifying with the mandate does not mean. It does not mean Catholic institutions would be required to provide contraceptives to their clients. It does not require providing contraceptive services to their employees. It does not require that Catholic institutions provide direct payment for these services.

Here is what it does mean: like any insurance system, this will require Catholic institutions to put money into a pool of funds to which many other institutions also contribute.  When employees of any of the institutions need health services, the bill for those services will be passed on to the insurance company, which will pay by drawing money from the contributors’ pool.  By that point, of course, such money can no longer be identified as “Catholic” money or any other kind.  It is all pooled together. [None of this is new. Of 28 states that already require employees’ insurance coverage to include contraceptives, 20 provide no exemption for Catholic hospitals. http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/health/insurance-coverage-for-contraception-state-laws.aspx ]

In practice, this means three things: (1) Catholic institutions do not know if their employees will ask for contraceptive services or not; (2) If employees do ask, that action will either conform to or violate the individual conscience of that employee, so the moral burden will be on that person, not his employer; (3) In any case, they will be no way to determine whose money actually pays for those services.

This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is relevant because my description of how insurance works also describes how taxes work: taxes pay for government spending by drawing from a pool of funds maintained by many contributors.

So the connection between Catholic institutions and the services covered by their employees’ insurance has a direct analogy--namely, the connection between Catholic taxpayers and the services covered by government spending.  And the simple fact is this: we Catholics are already paying taxes (on the federal, state, and local levels) into spending pools that fund any number of things opposed by the Catholic Church.

Many tax-supported institutions already provide contraceptive services.  So do government-funded services like Medicaid. Catholic taxpayers cannot claim their “conscience” prevents them from paying such taxes.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Taxes also pay for executing convicts.  Taxes pay to deport illegal immigrants even if it splits the family apart.  Taxes pay for unjust wars opposed by the US bishops.  Taxes support an unfair tax system that promotes extreme income inequality and class conflict.  Taxes pay for manufacturing and maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.  Taxes pay for torture, rendition, aid to dictators, and drone strikes that kill women and children.  Some taxes pay for abortions (e.g. in case of rape or incest).

All these are opposed by Catholic teaching.  This begs the question: do 60,000,000 Catholics “violate their consciences” by paying taxes? By definition in Catholic teaching, that would make taxpaying a sin, and require Catholics to suffer fines or jail to protect their consciences.

The simple answer is no.  True, we disapprove of many tax-supported actions; we do not like tax money being used for things the Church opposes; we would like that changed, and we look to our executives, our legislators, and our courts to make those changes.  But we keep paying.  And neither the Catholic Church nor Catholic taxpayers label taxpaying as a sinful act in “violation of our consciences.”

We know that we do not have the option of picking which government spending to support, and which spending to refuse.  Our money goes into a huge pool like everyone else’s, and we cannot control what happens to it afterward.

If the US had a single-payer healthcare system, it would work the same way (Medicare already does): taxes would fund a huge pool, and that pool would pay for health services.  We might disapprove of some services, but we would be at best inconsistent, and at worst hypocritical, to suddenly cry “this is violating my conscience” after we had already spent years paying for so many other bad things!

Of course, “Obamacare” is not a single-payer system, so instead of paying taxes into a pool of government money, we pay insurance premiums into a pool of corporate money.  But while both systems use different institutions to handle the money, they use our money in exactly the same way.

If we suddenly hear Catholic bishops, leaders, and media crying “conscience violation!” one reason may be that most Catholic institutions enjoy tax-exempt status, so they are unused to funding services they disapprove of.  But American Catholics have been doing it all their lives.  So just whose conscience is suddenly violated?

Some protesters are saying it is the conscience of the institutions themselves.  I find this position bizarre in the extreme.  Conscience involves an “inner sense” of right and wrong, but institutions have no senses at all.  Any “soul” or “spirit” an institution has comes from its members, who are live human beings.  Any talk of an institution’s “conscience” is really a metaphor for the collective, communal sense among its members.  And since these members (even bishops!) are taxpayers, they are disingenuous at best to suddenly say “I am shocked!  Shocked!” to discover the government mandating payment for services they disapprove of. Even if institutions have “consciences,” this is a troubling double standard.

Catholic institutions are tax exempt for a reason: the separation of church and state makes them exempt from contributing to any government services, whether good or bad.  To my mind, this is clear grounds for battling the new mandate: that it violates the separation of church and state, and fails to ensure the freedom of religious institutions to apply their own values in their own way.

In other words, this battle can be won on authentic First Amendment grounds; it does not require spurious use of the notion of “conscience.” 

So when Peggy Noonan suggests that Catholic outrage over this mandate will force its reversal, she may be right.  But by writing “The Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can't be Catholic anymore” she goes too far. The mandate impinges on Catholic freedom, but the Catholic Church remains Catholic even when it is not free (e.g.:the decades of Polish Catholicism thriving under communist rule).  And Catholics who pay for government-mandated services they oppose do not stop being Catholic.

The Catholic hierarchy, struggling to regain its moral authority among Catholics and Americans, disserves itself by using over-the-top rhetoric that can backfire.  What will they gain if they win the battle over policy but reinforce the PR image of a hypocritical hierarchy?

Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012