Single-issue bishops

What type of Catholic is Rutten? Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is certainly not one to being speaking on Catholic issues. My, my Joe. You certainly have an agenda.

I hope any final legislation includes the Hyde Amendment provisions.

No money to kill children. We do not make progress in the realm of the common good if we sacrifice the right to life. This is fundamental to Catholic teaching on Social Justice.

The unborn & preborn don't have health care - they have death care. Nascent human life does not get what it deserves - care, it gets what it does not deserve - death. A double injustice.

"Instead, they have become enmeshed in abortion politics, threatening to undermine a bill that would help ten of millions." Yes, health care for all - starting with unborn & preborn human beings - as the NECESSARY FOUNDATION for care for all those "ten[s] of millions."

The bishops take their marching orders from the FOX "News"/TEA bag wing of the Republican Party. As long as they are political rather than spiritual leaders they will be irrelevant.

Steve

As Archbishop Neumann and Bishop Finn of Kansas City noted in their joint pastoral letter on Health Care, opposing the Public Option is not against Church teaching. You act like those opposed to this boondoggle are against reform at all, which is a distortion of the opposition's viewpoint.

The Church has signaled (finally) that "Kennedy Catholicism" will no longer be tolerated...you cannot serve both God and the Culture of Death. A line has been drawn...which side are you on?

If extending Medicare to age 55 and giving under 55 un-insured group access to the federal employee health care that has no abortion coverage, haven't we kept the no funds for abortion intact? Let's not give up yet.. the pro-abortion people are on the run too/ let's not give them a free shot..let the pro abortion side take the blame for 'killing health care' on the issue of insurance for abortion funding. It's a tiny tiny fraction of the any bill. According to Guttmacher 83% of women right now don't use their insurance for abortion for privacy/ no record reasons.It's only 300-400 dollars cash .. let the man pay or sell his blood.

Tim Ruttan states it perfectly that the bishops are in danger of "disdaining what is inarguably good in pursuit of unattainable perfection." That is the difference between politics in a pluralistic society and adherence to one's religious beliefs. In a speech on religion and politics given in 2006, then Senator Barack Obama expressed it this way:
"Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences."
Disdaining the good for the perfect. We need to work for the common good in an imperfect world.

Peace and blessings.

It does upset the consensus because the Senate bill does nothing, nada, zippo, explicit to prevent us from having to foot the bill. The pro-abortion crowd want the law vauge so they can sneak stuff in.
Plus, I would not worry about single-issue bishops, each and every statement the USCCB has put out on this issues has had many demands. The essential gist is "make health care available and affordable for everyone, and do not do so by killing or otherwise gravely violating people." Alternatively, "we cannot immolate the present to the Moloch of the future, or the reverse" and "we cannot immolate the one to the Moloch of the many"

The pro-life bishops are also for accessable health care, but how to accomplish that is a prudential judgment where there can be many viable answers. I myself don't like exessively large government and would prefer that charities be encouraged and be the vehicle for accessable healthcare for the poor (even if federal funds are involved to spur them on). Further, I think more people generously devoting themselves in these fields in consecrated life or as a temporary thing should be encouraged in the culture. That said, a government run system or option is another arguable solution, as are many other ideas. There is no objectively right answer.

However, the question of respecting the dignity and rights of children, elderly, disabled, poor, and immigrants is a binary moral choice for which there is only 1 correct answer ("You will not murder" just in case some of you NCR people can't guess it). Similarly for those who object to morally repulsive attempts to force them to violate the above persons, or any persons, there is an absolute need to respect those people and their consciences so long as the evils that offend persist in the public sphere. Now that last one probably shouldn't be law (lest you get racist sickos refusing to treat people of different ethnicities), but it is an absolute and invioable right and should be a presumed tenet of public policy.

Abortion is not health care and should not be characterized as such. Health care is about saving lives not taking them...and health insurance should be about covering procedures that save lives not covering procedures that take them. But it is becoming clearer and clearer that one of the main objectives of the pending legislation is to expand abortion funding...in fact those who support using federal dollars to fund abortions would rather oppose the legislation then let it pass without abortion funding. Why not just take abortion out of the pending health care legislation(where it doesn't belong anyway) and take it up as a separate issue?

Also, in case you weren't aware, the federal government has been running a health care program since the 1960's. It's called Medicare and it has run up unfunded liabilities on the order of 40 TRILLION dollars. This type of reckless spending (by both political parties) is bringing the country to the edge of bankruptcy...even Moody's has recently stated that under pessimistic conditions the US could lose its Aaa debt rating as early as 2013. Considering the abysmal performance of Medicare, prudence dictates that we should consider options other than the pending legislation that will result in more control of the health care system by the federal government. Proposing legislation that we cannot afford is a moral problem, and bankrupting the country can hardly be considered an "inarguable good".

The USCCB is on record supporting universal healthcare that respects the rights and dignity of every human person.

Yet what part of publicly-funded abortions do you not understand? You believe that somehow the legal and public-funded slaughter of unborn human beings is worth it, just as long as everyone can afford a trip to the doctor? Or, better put, let's look the other way on legal and public-funded abortion - so everyone gets their prescriptions.

And the bishops wouldn't be so opposed to the bill had the Senate voted to exclude public funded abortions in the first place! The bishops weren't looking for a fight, the Senate left them with no choice.

Anyway, this twisted logic you and Ms. Kennedy apply to healthcare reform is the real problem. Instead of using Bishops as punching bags, why not try the adult thing: read the Bishops objections and then prove them either wrong or lacking.

What contemptuous dribble!

The bishops are in no danger of becoming single issue advocates. As anyone who has been paying even a little attention would notice, the bishops almost universally take rather complex, nuanced views on a great variety of issues. The bishops do, however, acknowledge there is a hierarchy of goods and moral imperatives.

You wish them to take a simpleton's position. You in fact wish to turn the bishops into a single issue constituency regarding the current health insurance proposal, ignoring the moral complexity, the nuance, and even grave moral danger this could entail.

Further, you write an untruth. The health reform plans do not and can not maintain the status quo on abortion. If you were passingly familiar with the scope of what is being proposed, you would realize this must, by its very nature, make a change in the abortion landscape. The question is, in which direction shall this change occur?

Next, I would remind you that at no point does Catholic morality endorse the utilitarian thinking of doing evil in the hopes that some good should come of it. To endorse a health plan that was not pro-life, but rather expanded taxpayer funding of abortion or requirements for insurance to cover abortion, would be like knowingly making sacrifice to an idol while expecting God to grant your prayers.

Finally, regarding the consensus, it certainly is and always will be fragile, because it does not really exist. It is like an temporary cease-fire in a combat zone. Everyone knows the two sides have irreconcilable positions, and both are determined to eventually win through to victory. Catholics should certainly work to morally discourage abortion, and to provide practical alternatives to it. Abortion can never be "safe", just as suicide, euthanasia, and murder are never "safe". It is good that the mothers live through this often now (though the rates of complications and even death remains strikingly high for what is supposedly a minor, routine procedure), that gives them the chance to repent and do penance. However, Catholics must work to end the legal fiction that abortion is a fundamental constitutional right, for there is no right to that which is always evil. We can disagree as to how best to use the law to discourage or stop abortion, but the current legal arrangement is a scandal and outrage.

Single-issue liberals in Congress won't allow abortions to go without public tax funds, so they are willing instead to allow healthcare reform to die.

The sacrament of abortion is sacrosanct for the Left, health care reform be damned!

I can't believe the combination of mean-spiritedness and naivete on display in these comments.
For the former, I'll point to D.B., who apparently believes the Church should be the tea-baggers at prayer. Citing such obvious Republican partisans as Finn and Neumann is the clincher.
For the latter, Bthompson's plaintive plea for "people generously devoting themselves in these fields...as a temporary thing" is hardly an alternative. We don't ask soldiers or law enforcement personnel to do their equally necessary work out of the goodness of their hearts. (Where thy treasure lies, there is thy heart, if I recall.)
Such a call for idealism makes an odd companion to the Ayn Rand-motivated right. To use Ben Hecht's line about Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, it is like a virgin in a bawdy house, asking for a glass of lemonade.

Wrong. Well past wrong.

There's single issue zealotry at play, but it's not the bishops. It's the pro-aborts who are determined to do away with the Hyde Amendment and the political consensus, held across Republican and Democratic administrations for more than 30 years, that the government doesn't fund abortion except in very rare circumstances.

You are pointing the finger at the wrong people, Mr. Ferullo. If health care fails, it won't be because of the bishops. It will be because of people determined to remove even the slightest moral discouragement from the taking of human life in the womb by making everyone pay for it.