Religious Liberty

Paul Rahe, on February 10, 2012, wrote a scathing article, American Catholicism's Pact With the Devil. Paul writes: "[Obama] has unmasked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propensities of the administrative entitlements state and of the Democratic Party. And now he has done something similar to the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church. At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients … The freedom of the church as an institution to distance itself from that which its doctrines decry as morally wrong is considered sacrosanct. … In the 1930s, the majority of the bishops, priests, and nuns sold their souls to the devil, and they did so with the best of intentions. In their concern for the suffering of those out of work and destitute, they wholeheartedly embraced the New Deal."

Rahe continued, "In the process, the leaders of the American Catholic Church fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States - the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity - and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In its place, they helped establish the Machiavellian principle that underpins modern liberalism - the notion that it is our Christian duty to confiscate other people's money and redistribute it.

"At every turn in American politics since that time, you will find the hierarchy assisting the Democratic Party and promoting the growth of the administrative entitlements state. It did not cross the minds of these prelates that the liberty of conscience which they had grown to cherish is part of a larger package - that the paternalistic state, which recognizes no legitimate limits on its power and scope, that they had embraced would someday turn on the Church and seek to dictate whom it chose to teach its doctrines and how, more generally, it would conduct its affairs."

As well as this may be, this is now the time for the priests and bishops of this country to articulate clearly why contraception is a grave moral evil and a mortal sin. Contraception not only destroys women spiritually, the chemical itself is carcinogenic and drastically changes the hormonal constitution of the woman taking it. Thus even changing her nature.

No true joy or heavenly peace will reign in the hearts of those couples who separate the sacred intimate conjugal act (between husband and wife) from that bond which begets the conception of children and bestows supernatural life in the couple's following God's command to cooperate with Him in the procreation of His children.

Every other kind of sexual deviation is banal and will eventually leave those individuals to emptiness, sadness, and despair. It may be true that every conjugal act does not conceive a child, however every intimate conjugal act needs to be open to receive God's greatest blessing, a newborn baby.

Had the bishops and priests taught and mandated that adherence to Humanae Vitae was a requirement to receive the Sacrament of Matrimony in the Church, these poor baptized pagans would never have produced such a scandal in the Church and the world.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam,

Richard Mahoney