Days after the nation's Roman Catholic bishops announced a campaign to counter threats to religious freedom, Chicago's Cardinal Francis George tried to explain the church's concerns about recent mandates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Though the church's concern primarily focuses on the Obama administration's proposal to provide contraception coverage to all employees, including those who work for religious groups, George clarified in his talk to the Union League Club of Chicago on Monday that the church's opposition isn't personal or politically motivated.
"The difficulty of public discussion … is that the political is the highest level of public discourse," George said. "Therefore, the primary categories of discussion and mutual understanding are liberal and conservative. But they're not evangelical, Catholic or gospel categories. The categories that count in the Gospel are true and false. The bishops try to be people of God. And those are the first questions we ask is: 'Is it true or false?' Political terms are not adequate to discuss it."
George, who spent three years as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he didn't speak for the nation's prelates, but he shares their perspective.
"I speak from Catholic tradition, and we try to speak in one voice," he said.
The cardinal clarified that bishops have supported universal health care since the original incarnation of that conference — the National Catholic Welfare Conference — was founded in 1919.And they still welcome the goal of the legislation, he said.
But the contraceptive mandate violates the First Amendment's free exercise of religion, which applies as much to institutions as individuals, he said. George bemoaned the government's attempts to limit the definition of religious institutions and deny protection to church entities that educate and provide medical care to the general public.
The issue is more than religious freedom, George said. It's "theft of identity," he said.
But most importantly, the cardinal said, the legislation highlights a growing cultural conundrum.
"What is the place of church in society that is secularizing itself very, very rapidly?" he said. "'If the use of religious pluralism is to remove all religious institutions from public life, it's going to be a very different society than what we have now."