UNITED STATES
Salon
Tom Frier
A house doesn’t have to fall on my head to tell me a battle royal is brewing within the Catholic Church over the conservative hierarchy’s heavy-handed efforts to clamp down on dissenting Catholic voices. Not when a prominent American nun comes “this close” to calling the present Church leadership a bunch of brown-frocked fascists. Or when a parish priest I know gives the sister a thumbs up and pastes her angry, anguished outcry to his Facebook page.
And now, according to the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, a group of progressive-leaning bishops who’ve so far held their tongues are starting to speak out against their reactionary colleagues who seem determined to yank the Church far to the right and make Catholicism little more than an auxiliary of the Republican Party in its campaign against President Obama.
Lawsuits brought this week by 43 Catholic organizations and 13 dioceses seeking to overturn the Obama administration’s decision to mandate insurance coverage for contraception for employees at Catholic-run schools and hospitals were seen as provocative and premature by the vast majority of the nation’s 195 diocese that did not want to go to court, according to Dionne.
The bishops in these dioceses, says Dionne, “are upset that the lawsuits were brought without a broader discussion among the entire membership of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops,” many of whom object that the leadership is “aligning the institutional Church too closely with the political right.”
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