Day: April 23, 2012

Episcopal perps?

Barack Obama delivers a speech at the Universi...
Who will rid me of these troublesome bishops? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Notre Dame alum blogging at The Weekly Standard says a stand-off between Obama and the Catholic bishops on the HHS mandate “may not be good for either side.”

He gives an instance, “the disastrous situation of the president sending bishops to jail for being faithful witnesses to their religious convictions.”

I’d say he’s on to something.

Later, from an informed source, an alternate scenario:

The bishops and obama go head to head — the bishops blowing steam — and Catholics (some) getting all revved up for months. Then, just before the election — a week — Obama caves on HHS and  Catholics are relieved to relax and get off their soap boxes.

They watch the bishops on TV kiss and make up profusely to Obama — photo op all’round, conciliatory quotes from Obama, and it’s practically an endorsement just before casting their ballots. You know nothing would make many of these bishops happier…to be assured they’d get the rest of Obamacare initiated.

As the poor lad legendarily told Shoeless Joe, say it ain’t so.

The Bishop Jenky sermon

The Bishop Jenky sermon/call to arms is video’d and verbalized here, as poached by Orate Fratres from a leftist site that wants to capitalize on it as episcopal politicizing, nasty talk, etc.

A key quote is featured:

The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism. And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry. The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.”

The call to political arms is clear enough, and not new, in view of the importance stated by many bishops of the abortion issue:

This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries only excepting our church buildings could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the instrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb. No Catholic ministry and yes, Mr. President, for Catholics our schools and hospitals are ministries can remain faithful to the Lordship of the Risen Christ and to his glorious Gospel of Life if they are forced to pay for abortions.

Note the abortion emphasis. The HHS mandate (Thou shalt do this, under pain of . . . ) also calls for insurance coverage of morning-after pills, of course; but this is little noted and rarely remembered in reportage of the mandate.

Likewise underplayed or omitted is the religious freedom issue. First they came for the Socialists, etc.? — the Hitler-era sequence meant to alert others to their danger from arbitrary imposition of laws and regulations? Let’s see . . . A war on circumcision, the anti-mohel mandate?

Nah. It can’t happen here.

Are you sure?