In a revealing interview with James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, Cardinal Timothy Dolan described President Barack Obama’s abrupt about-face  on the birth control mandate and the interactions he’s had with Obama’s White House over the last few  months.

Cardinal Dolan, who serves as Archbishop of New York and the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, told Taranto he had a 45 minute meeting with Obama last November during which time the president promised to protect the Church’s religious freedoms as the health care law was implemented.

During the meeting, Dolan cited specific statements the president had made and asked for clarification:

“I said, ‘I’ve heard you say, first of all, that you have immense regard for the work of the Catholic Church in the United States in health care, education and charity. . . . I have heard you say that you are not going to let the administration do anything to impede that work and . . . that you take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness. . . . Does that accurately sum up our conversation?’ [Mr. Obama] said, ‘You bet it does.’”

Dolan then asked for permission to relay that message to his fellow bishops. “You don’t have my permission,” the president said, “you’ve got my request.”

Dolan goes on to describe the next conversation he had with the president, which occurred at the end of January when he received a call from the Oval Office telling him that not only would the birth control mandate be enforced, but that the bishops had until August “to find out how you’re going to be able to comply.” Dolan says he told the president: “Well, sir, we don’t need the [extra time]. I can tell you now we’re unable to comply.”

For Dolan and the rest of the bishops, the primary issue remains religious freedom, not contraception.

As Taranto explains, what rankles the Cardinal most is the government’s narrow definition of a religious institution. “Your local Catholic parish, for instance, is exempt from the birth-control mandate. Not exempt are institutions such as hospitals, grade schools, universities and soup kitchens that employ or serve significant numbers of people from other faiths and whose main purpose is something other than proselytization.”

Dolan finds it complete “unswallowable” that a bureau of the American government “would take it upon itself to define ‘ministry’ . . . We would find that to be—we’ve used the words ‘radical,’ ‘unprecedented’ and ‘dramatically intrusive.'”

In addition, the government’s position on the mandate and its myopic religious exemption amounts to penalizing the Church for serving all of society, not just Catholics.

“We don’t ask people for their baptismal certificate, nor do we ask people for their U.S. passport, before we can serve them, OK? . . . We don’t serve people because they’re Catholic, we serve them because we are, and it’s a moral imperative for us to do so.”

The Cardinal went on to talk about the president’s attempt to quell the uprising over the mandate by announcing a so-called “accommodation” in which the government made it appear as if they were shifting the burden of paying for the insurance from religious institutions to insurers.

Dolan described the call he received from the president on February 10:  “He said, ‘You will be happy to hear religious institutions do not have to pay for this, that the burden will be on insurers.'” He then asked the president if he was seeking his input on the matter and was told no, that the modified policy was already a done-deal. The call came at 9:30 a.m. and by 12:15 of the same day, the president was announcing the alleged accommodation to the country.

The matter quickly became complicated by the dissident Sister Carol Keehan of the pro-ObamaCare Catholic Health Association who announced that she was happy with the accommodation. This put the bishops in a tough spot because it is they, and not Keehan, who speaks for the Church, which made it imperative for them to come out with a statement quickly to avoid confusing the faithful.

However, they wanted time to study the modification first.

“We wanted to avoid two headlines. Headline 1 was ‘Bishops Celebrate . . . Accommodations.’ . . . The other headline we wanted to avoid is ‘Bishops Obstinate’,” Dolan said.

This is what prompted the “circumspect” statement they issued on the date the accommodation was announced. It expressed hope that the new rule might be a good first step but stated that the bishops would needed to study it before taking a formal position on it.

Within hours, “it dawned on us that there’s not much here, and that’s when we put out the more substantive [statement] by the end of the day, saying, ‘Whoa, now we’ve had time to hear what was said at the announcement and to read the substance of it, and this just doesn’t do it’,” Dolan said. 

In spite of the care they took to properly guide the flock, the press gave them the “Bishops Obstinate” headline anyway.

The interview is a revealing look at not only the president’s duplicity but also the difficulty being imposed upon the leaders of the Church by the government’s increasing encroachment on religious freedom.

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