President Obama's support for his signature health care act took a fresh hit Friday. The Catholic Health Association, the nation's largest private health care provider, has rebuffed the latest White House moves to make its contraception coverage mandate more acceptable to Catholics and conservative evangelicals, according to Religion News Service.
The CHA was a critical voice in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2009. Sister Carol Keehan, head of CHA, drew standing ovations from progressive Catholics.
I wrote then about how Keehan and nearly 60 other nuns and leaders of religious orders found the legislation's numerous anti-abortion funding provisions were indeed sufficient. Their statement that the reform was "life affirming" legislation, gave pro-life Catholic legislators enough cover to allow them to vote for the bill.
Keehan was greeted like a rock star on a visit to Washington and named to Time magazine's Top 100 most influential people. Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was sputtering mad over the CHA action, arguing that protections to avoid taxpayer funding of abortion was inadequate in the ACA.
But the ACA also contained provisions for the Department of Health and Human Services to establish what kinds of essential preventative health care must be offered in all insurance plans without co-payments.
When HHS and the Obama Administration came out with the contraception-coverage-with-no-co-pays requirement it caused a firestorm among Catholic bishops and the doctrine-minded faithful. It offered no exception for faith-based organizations and institutions that offered services other than prayer, worship and religious education for co-believers.
The Obama administration came back with a modification that would let faith-based schools, colleges, hospitals and charities avoid directly paying the bills but require their insurers to pick up the tab.
That went nowhere with the bishops and their evangelical allies at the Becket Fund. Both groups say the core problem is that government should not be in the business of defining who is "religious" enough to have a religious exemption on matters of conscience.
Obama supporters and progressives say the conservatives are waging a war on women and their legal right to control their own health care.
Now, however, the Keehan's influential CHA has joined forces with the bishops. David Gibson, writing for Religion News Service, has the story Friday that Keehan and other CHA leaders sent a five-page letter to HHS saying, in part:
...The more we learn, the more it appears that the ... approaches for both insured and self-insured plans would be unduly cumbersome and would be unlikely to adequately meet the religious liberty concerns of all of our members and other Church ministries..."
...It is imperative for the Administration to abandon the narrow definition of 'religious employer' and instead use an expanded definition to exempt from the contraceptive mandate not only churches, but also Catholic hospitals, health care organizations and other ministries of the Church."
Because artificial contraception is against Catholic doctrine, Keehan's response reiterated that Catholic institutions cannot have direct or indirect involvement in paying for it.
HHS did not respond to Gibson's requests for comment.
Gibson called the CHA letter
... an unexpected blow to the Obama administration and a major boon for America's Catholic bishops.
The bishops are about to launch a full court press under the banner "Fortnight for Freedom" that will drill into the Catholic faithful, from the pulpit to lobbying campaigns in Congress, to oppose the Affordable Care Act as an infringement on religious liberty.
Don't expect this to be their last public relations campaign, either. At the bishops' semi-annual meeting, which concluded this week in Atlanta, they began considering a new communications strategy that would give them a fast-react spokesperson.
The bishops have endured a spring time of bad spin with the general public. Cardinal Sean O'Malley blamed the secular media for this. According to Reuters, he told brother bishops they needed an image campaign because
The recent Vatican crackdown on the largest organization of U.S. nuns turned into a public relations "debacle" for the bishops
And, O'Malley reportedly complained that ...
the Vatican's decision to put bishops in charge of rooting out "radical feminist" elements within the nuns' group was linked in the secular media to unrelated events, such as the bishops' investigation of the Girl Scouts, with negative consequences for the church's image.
DO YOU THINK... the bishops' concerns are well placed? Will better PR help them successfully convey Catholic teaching they consider true, beautiful, and beneficial to all? Or should they be more concerned with convincing Catholics to follow doctrine?