Catholic Family News

The US Bishops Were Not Much Help!

 

By John Vennari

 

    As this issue of Catholic Family News goes to press, the health care bill is still being hammered out in secret committee, contrary to Barack Obama’s explicit promise to ensure all discussions on health care be open and televised.

     “That’s what I will do in bringing all parties together and broadcasting these negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what their choices are”, said Barack Obama in Los Angeles on January 31, 2008.[1]

    During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama promised this eight times.[2] Yet when C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb petitioned Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for full televised coverage of these crucial health care meetings, he was refused outright. Obama and his Party determined to hide these sessions behind closed doors.

    Even some in the mainstream media slammed Obama for his blatant dishonesty. CNN’s Jack Cafferty blasted Obama with both barrels:

 

“How dare they?  President Obama, Democratic leaders have decided to bypass a formal House and Senate conference committee in order to reconcile those two health care bills.  Instead, White House and Democratic leaders will hold ‘informal’ — that's another word for ‘secret’ -- negotiations, meant to shut Republicans and the public out of the process.  What a far cry from the election when then-candidate Obama pledged to, quote, ‘broadcast health care negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are,’ unquote.  President Obama hasn't even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency in government.  It was all just another lie that was told in order to get elected ...  Here's hoping the voters remember some of this cr*p when the midterm elections roll around later this year.”[3]

 

    Those who were shocked that Obama failed to keep an explicit promise he repeated eight times in his 2008 campaign can only be pitied. Those of us who know what Barack Obama is really all about are not the least surprised. In fact we expect nothing less than a constant stream of lies, half-truths, and corruption from the Obama administration.

     As reported in previous issues of Catholic Family News, Barack Obama is a student of the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the radical left-wing organizer from Chicago. Alinsky’s two fundamental principles, openly stated in his Rules for Radicals, are:

    1) Dogma is the enemy of mankind, all truth is relative;

    2) There is no such thing as a fixed rule of ethics. For Alinsky, the end justifies the means. All ethics are elastic according to the situation you are in or the strategy you need to employ.[4]

     Worse, Alinsky elevates corruption of the leader to a kind of virtue.

     “The man of action views the issues of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms,” says Alinsky. “He asks for ends only. Whether they are achievable and worthy the cost of means, only whether they will work. To say that a corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the Immaculate Conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process. He who fears corruption fears life.”[5]

     Alinsky goes on to say that action is for mass salvation not for the individual’s personal salvation; and a leader who places his personal conscience and personal salvation first, “does not care enough for the people to be ‘corrupted’ for them.”[6]

     Obama, a life-long fellow-traveler with communists and radicals,[7] is only following the principles he imbibed as an Alinsky community organizer. Obama himself admitted “his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life.”[8] Thus we should not be surprised when we behold the Obama administration as a freak show of dishonesty, corruption and perversion.

     For example, if the reader will pardon these vile examples, this past June 29, Obama heaped abundant praise on 84-year-old homosexual activist Frank Kameny. Prior to this, in a letter dated May 31, 2008, Kameny defended bestiality saying there is nothing wrong with this practice, “as long as the animal doesn’t mind.” He further said, “If bestiality with consenting animals provides happiness to some people, let them pursue their happiness.”[9]

    This did not prevent Barack Obama on June 29 from publicly honoring Kameny at the White House for his many years as a homosexual agitator. Obama said, "And so we are proud of you, Frank, and we are grateful to you for your leadership."[10]

    Since then, Kameny went on to call God a “sinful homophobic bigot”. In an October 13, 2009 letter to Peter LaBarbera, president of the nonprofit Americans for Truth, Kamany said, “Your God of Leviticus (and the whole Bible) is clearly a sinful homophobic bigot. He should repent of his sinful homophobia. He should atone for that sin. And He should seek forgiveness for the pain and suffering which His sinful homophobia inflicted upon gay people for the past 4,000 years.”[11]

     Jennings also supports “homosexualizing” school children, including kindergarten and pre-school children, through the group he founded called Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN). This group recommends books to school children containing homosexual acts described graphically.[13] Jennings also wrote the Foreword for the book Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling.

    Like Kameny, Jennings also blasphemes God saying, “What had God done for me other than make me feel shame and guilt. Scr*w you, buddy, I don’t need you around anymore.”[14]

     On October 15, fifty-three members of Congress signed a letter to Barack Obama asking him to remove Jennings from his position as Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. They noted that Jennings is not fit for this position due to his push for the pro-homosexual agenda in American schools, and his unrepentant drug use he boasts of in his book Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son.[15] To date – more than three months later — Barack Obama has not removed Jennings, but keeps him in the post as the nation’s “safe schools” czar.

    Aristotle said, “Of what sort someone is, such is the end which seems good to him.”[16] Homosexuals who openly blaspheme God and who work to pervert our pre-school children “seem good” to Barack Obama. He honors them, and keeps them in positions of high authority even after their perversion is brought to his attention. Thus there is no doubt what sort of debased person is Barack Obama.

    And it is this debased Obama, this man who is in revolt against Catholic moral order and the natural law, who now presides over the massive government power-grab called “health care reform”.

 

A Quick Look at Obamacare

 

     Commentator Pat Buchanan recently provided a true outline of Obama’s “health care” bill: “a federal takeover of one-sixth of the economy; bureaucrats would decide who gets care, when and for how long. And a panoply of new taxes, fees and regulations would be imposed, producing a revenue windfall for the federal government and a quantum leap in federal bureaucrats.”[17]

     What follows is a brief sampling of what Obamacare contains; legislation so perverse that even left-wing Camille Paglia described House Healthccare Bill as “horrors”

     • Forces Citizens to Purchase Health Care Plans. The bill requires each individual to have health care coverage, whether it be through private insurance companies or through a government plan. If not, he or she will be fined. Should the Health Care bill pass, the mandate will become “law” in 2014.

    This is contrary to the whole function of government, as the government does not have the right to force individuals to purchase health care, and fine them if they fail to comply. Prior to the Senate vote, Republican Senator Jim DeMint and a number of other Republican senators objected that such a provision was un-Constitutional. This may be true, but even if coercing citizens to purchase health care somehow was “Constitutional”, it would still be immoral and beyond the just limits of government authority.[18]

    This provision in the health care bill also opens the door for further State Absolutism. Once we accept the principle that government can force us to buy something we otherwise have the personal right to refuse, then what next will the government force us to acquire under threat of fine or imprisonment? This is government intrusion into the details of our lives wherein the government has no place.

     • Increased Power of the IRS as Health Care Enforcer! Obama’s Health Care Bill enlists the IRS as the healthcare enforcement agency. Byron York writes in The Washington Examiner, “Under the Democrats' health care proposals, the already powerful — and already feared — IRS would wield even more power and extend its reach even further into the lives of ordinary Americans, and the presidentially-appointed head of the new health care bureaucracy would have access to confidential IRS information about millions of individual taxpayers. In short, health care reform, as currently envisioned by Democratic leaders, would be built on the foundation of an expanded and more intrusive IRS.”

    The creation of 111 new bureaucracies, which can only result in more expense, more federal control, more intrusive regulations, and greater irresponsibility and inefficiency;[21]

     • Retains the “Death Panels” by “providing for bureaucrats working for a new comparative effectiveness institute funded by a tax on health benefits. The institute could publish the protocols needed to deny patients access to life-saving treatment on cost grounds”;[22]

     • Contains no ban “on federal promotion of assisted suicide and/or health care rationing treatments”;[23]

     • Authorizes Medicare to pay doctors for providing advice to patients on end-of-life care.[24] (In other words, a doctor explains to sick, tired, demoralized grandma that she has the option of ending her life through doctor-assisted suicide; which is a mortal sin that sends the soul to hell.) This provision should come as no surprise since billionaire George Soros, a fierce financial supporter of Obama, is an unapologetic advocate for legalized euthanasia, and even launched “Project on Death in America” which promotes the position that euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide should be “legal”; [25]

    • Penalizes Marriage: “Obama’s health care bill discriminates against marriage while financially favoring unmarried couples living together.”*
     • Claims to have the support of the American Medical Association (AMA). What most people fail to realize, as Dr. Lee Hieb notes, is “the AMA represents only 17-19% of physicians actually in practice,”[26] and thus does not speak for most doctors. The AMA makes the bulk of its money not by membership dues, but by a monopoly the AMA developed on a coding system that hospitals must use to bill the government, the CPT code book. This monopoly brought the AMA $111 million in 2008 alone. Thus the AMA, as Dr. Hieb notes, is now a “self-absorbed, self-preserving jobs program which has sold out the Hippocratic ideal for the promise of shekels from government toadies.”[27] In fact, the Chicago Tribune recently headlined an article on the topic: “Medical Billing Code Monopoly Explains American Medical Associations Support for Health Plan, Critics Say”;[28]

     • Home Visitation Programs to Children by Federal Agents. The Home School Legal Defense Association warns the Health Care “reform” contains provision for billions of dollars to be spent to “allow the federal government to fund home visitation programs, where government officials would enter homes and monitor children and instruct parents in how to raise their children”.[29]

 

Where are the Bishops?

 

     The above litany does not cover all the horror of Obama’s Health Care “reform”, and does not even mention that the Senate version of the Bill provides public funding of abortion. In fact, the House “Stupak Amendment” was probably nothing more than a ploy to ensure House passage, and to keep it on the fast track to the Senate, wherein pro-life provisions can be removed afterwards.

    Yet in spite of this monstrous legislation that forces US citizens to purchase health care under threat of legal penalty; increases the power of the IRS as health care enforcer; creates 111 new government bureaucracies; retains “death panels”; promotes “end of life” counseling; penalizes marriage, and makes provisions for Federal agents to invade our homes to “inspect” our children, all the United States Bishops objected to – in a letter to the Senate on December 22 – were three points. They want the Health Care bill to:

    1) “Keep in place current federal law on abortion funding and conscious protections on abortion”;

    2) “Protect the access to health care that immigrants [regardless of status] now have, and remove the barriers to access” – in other words, the bishops support government health care for illegal aliens;

    3) “Include strong provisions for adequate affordability and coverage standards.”—in other words, the bishops complain that the bill still leaves 23 million people without medical coverage. This must be corrected so the government guarantees every person in the country is given health care.[30]

     Though the bishops’ apparent pro-life stand is appreciated, two of the three objections from the bishops still favor the socialist principle that government should provide health care for its citizens. The bishops turned a blind eye to all the other draconian measures the health care bill contains, but they did not even object to the socialism inherent in the legislation, a socialism that makes citizens less independent and more personally dependent on the government.

    The best leadership we’ve seen in this area came from two US Bishops who authored a pastoral letter that properly examined the health care reform in the light of Catholic moral teaching.

    Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Archdiocese of Kansas City, (KS); and Bishop Robert W. Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph (MO), released their joint pastoral, “Principles of Catholic Social teaching on Health Care Reform” on August 22, 2009.

    The Pastoral is certainly pro-life; but we will focus primarily on the bishops’ warning against regarding socialized medicine, which destroys Obamacare at its roots.

    The bishops make the distinction that all people have the right to the acquisition of health care, but according to Catholic moral teaching, this does not mean the government has the duty to provide it. The bishops write:

 

“The right to every individual to access to health care does not necessarily suppose an obligation on the part of government to provide it. Yet in our American culture, Catholic teaching about the ‘right’ to healthcare is sometimes confused with the structures of ‘entitlement’. The teaching of the Universal Church has never been to suggest a government socialization of medial services. Rather, the Church has asserted the rights of every individual to have access to those things most necessary for sustaining and caring for human life, while at the same time insisting on the personal responsibility of each individual to care properly for his or her own health.”

 

     Of the need for a genuine health care reform, the bishops note, “There is important work to be done but ‘change’ for change sake; change which expands the reach of government beyond its competence would do more harm than good.” The two bishops warn that “hasty and unprincipled change” would create “a future tax burden which is both unjust and unsustainable.”[31]

     Sadly, but predictably, these solid Catholic moral principles were ignored by the official letter of the US bishops who denounced federal funding of abortions, but simultaneously encouraged government funding for all US citizens and illegal aliens, as if government funded health care is a human right.

     The hour is dark. Unspeakably perverse men run our nation’s capital, and the bulk of our US bishops provide us little protection against them. If anything, today’s post-Conciliar bishops make things worse. Father Michael Orsi noted that the bishops’ unwillingness to effectively oppose pro-abortion politicians “had given license for some prominent Catholics to endorse Barack Obama for the presidency and gave permission to 54% of Catholics to vote for him. Thus, the Catholic vote secured the election of the most pro-death politician to ever sit in the White House.”[32]
    Hats off to Archbishop Naumann and Bishop Finn who broke ranks with their socialist-minded brother bishops and provided sound Catholic principles in the face of the Obamacare nightmare.

 

Postscript: The Massachusetts Upset

 

     As I put the finishing touches to this article, Republican Scott Brown just defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts in the special election to fill the seat vacated by Senator Ted Kennedy. Brown’s win breaks the Democrat’s filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate.

    Mixed signals now come from Washington. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi originally said they planned to steam ahead with the disastrous health care bill, while left-wing Barney Frank actually conceded the health care bill may no longer be workable. On January 21, the day we go to press, Pelosi now says the House lacks the votes to pass the Senate Health Care Bill. The Massachusetts election was a serious upset for the Obama administration, as the election of Scott Brown is seen as a referendum against Obama’s health care plan and against Obama’s socialist policies.

    The fight is still not over, especially when we consider that as of December 2009, “hospitals, drug companies, unions, and a host of health care providers ranging from medical device makers to Planned Parenthood had spent nearly $400 million on lobbying; all with a vested interest in ‘fixing’ health care to their advantage”.[33]

    Now there is talk from a Washington of an alleged “scaled back” health care bill, but who knows what this will be? The problem is, any new draft of the bill will be written by the same socialist-minded bureaucrats who gave us the monstrous health care bill outlined in this article.

    In the natural order, let us continue to work for the defeat of these draconian measures. In the supernatural order, let us pray that these revolutionary politicians who plan the socialist ruin of our country may retreat into failure and confusion. In fact, Heaven has given us a special weapon for this purpose.

     In the 1840s, our Lord dictated a special prayer to Sister Marie de Sainte Pierre, to whom He had revealed His desire for Devotion to the Holy Face. In these revelations, which enjoy the full approval of the Catholic Church, Our Lord instructed Sister Marie de Sainte Pierre to recite the following prayer for the defeat of “revolutionary men”:

 

“Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and all the instruments of His Holy Passion that Thou mayest put division in the camp of Thine enemies, for as Thy beloved Son hath said, "a kingdom divided against itself shall fail".[34]

                       

    Along with our daily Rosary, may I recommend we recite this prayer every day for the defeat of today’s revolutionary men, wherever they are found.