Lies and deceptions

Go read George Weigel's analysis on the lies and spin of the Obama adminstration that is trying to destroy the Catholic church in America.

key issue: The Catholic church has changed.

The administration announced the HHS mandate without any prior consultation with the bishops’ conference, seemingly confident that the conference would acquiesce. When that didn’t happen, the administration consulted Catholic collaborationists in order to come up with an “accommodation” it was confident that the bishops would buy. And when that bit of fakery was rejected by the bishops’ conference for the shell game it clearly was, the administration was caught off guard yet again. Thus the White House was left with a strange Catholic Lite coalition — small-circulation magazines like America and Commonweal, a trade association with a deeply vested interest in keeping HHS happy (the CHA), thoroughly implausible characters like Pepperdine’s Douglas Kmiec, and administration-friendly liberal Catholic journalists — as its allies in selling the spin that a) the HHS mandate had nothing to do with religious freedom, b) the mandate was all that stood between the Republic’s women and medieval sexual peonage, and c) the bishops were being sectarian and unreasonable.

What the administration seems to have missed is that, while the bishops’ conference was being generally supportive in 2009 of health-care reform aimed at universal care (as the bishops had been since 1919), another tide was rising among the Catholic bishops of the United States: a deep concern about the attenuation of Catholic identity over the past two generations. The leader in framing this issue was the immediate past conference president, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., the archbishop of Chicago; his steady, scholarly insistence that the bishops reclaim responsibility for being the custodians of authentic and robust Catholic identity struck a chord with the generation of bishops whose model of leadership is Blessed John Paul II