When I heard that President Obama had sent a personal video message to the Catholic Health Association and to Sr. Carol Keehan at their annual meeting this Monday, thanking them for their work in helping pass the Democrat health care plan, I wasn’t surprised.
But after thinking about this move, shouldn’t I be surprised? After all, when you follow the day-to-day of politics you can miss the big picture. So let’s step back a moment and try to see what shape the forest has taken, and how Obama has been pruning the Catholic faithful back.
The first point to understand is that Obama knows about the debate Catholics are having over him.
That’s why he usually talks only to Catholics who share his agenda. He has been careful to ensure that the terms of his debate with Catholics have always been on his terms. He sends CHA a video and gives Sr. Keehan a pen because he knows that these individuals chose to follow him instead of the bishops. So he makes a place at his table for them and rewards what he sees as their loyalty.
Obama is also keenly aware of his critics, and keeps careful watch over who is opposing his efforts. Obama knew by the end of the healthcare debate, that the bishops were an obstacle to passage of the bill, perhaps even the main obstacle, and he knew this as well. Yet he does not reach out to them. He simply, determinedly, strips them of their institutional allies. He supports those who dissent from them publicly. He gives the politicians who they criticize places of power in his administration. It’s all rather like a German prince in the middle ages who picks his side between the Lutherans and Roman Catholics, not for doctrinal reasons, but because he wants peace in his kingdom – at the cost of the other side.
More to the point in this message, he speaks of the “courage” of those in CHA who lobbied for his health care bill (courage against what? why the opposition of the bishops, of course!). He calls the passage of the bill a “major victory … for the most vulnerable among us” (this coming from the most pro-abortion President in history). This is a particularly stinging line to critics of the health care bill, such as the bishops – who opposed a bill that they were prone to accept otherwise, precisely because they believed (as I do) that it will end up harming the “most vulnerable” unborn (and elderly) among us.
Finally, he says to Sr. Keehan and the CHA, that in passing his bill, they “did so in a way that protects your long-standing beliefs.” In other words, he supports their claim that being Catholic doesn’t mean you have to be obedient to the authority of the bishops or avoid publicly scandalizing the faithful. Obama, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say, thinks he can interpret what it means to be Catholic better than the bishops when they draw upon two thousand years of tradition.
Obama’s actions are therefore directly harmful to Catholic unity because not only does he not believe in the unity provided by the bishops of the Church, he doesn’t think Catholics ought to be unified by their bishops, either.
This insight is what made me realize that I have for so long missed something crucial that makes Obama dangerous to the Catholic Church in America: Catholics who follow Obama’s vision for America, in large part, also follow his vision of the Catholic Church – as an egalitarian assembly of individual truth-seekers that take their hope from progressive visions of social activism, and who are constantly at loggerheads with an out-of-touch traditionalist hierarchy.
For instance, I have yet to hear a Catholic who supports the Obama agenda say, “I like Obama’s agenda, but of course I don’t believe what he thinks about or how he acts towards the Church.” It seems that the Catholics who support Obama’s agenda, or the individuals who criticize Catholics for not supporting his agenda, very often couch their support for him in political, not religious terms. But Obama has made religious claims, and overstepped religious boundaries, in pursuit of his political goals. In the ensuing mix-up, there can be no complaint that Catholics who oppose Obama are confusing politics with religion, for when Obama places himself against the authority of the bishops, he has stepped into the Catholic scene.
To provide a couple brief parallel (and purely hypothetical) examples, what if Obama sent a message to a group of orthodox jews who violate kosher laws and praised them for supporting his domestic initiative of promoting American pork consumption?
Or again, what if Obama sent a message to a group of Jehova’s Witnesses who practice blood transfusions and thanked them for their support of National Donate Blood Day?
In both these hypothetical cases, Obama is praising “political” actions with deep religious connotations that, when chosen by those who claim to practice each faith, violate what it has traditionally meant to be Jewish or a Jehovah’s Witness. (I doubt anyone would try to argue as a Catholic that the teaching authority of bishops is not on at least equal footing as kosher requirements for orthodox jews or the prohibition against blood transfusions for active Jehovah’s witnesses.)
I think this point about the conflict between Obama’s political overtures and the constitutive beliefs of Catholics is useful to keep in mind whenever we see Obama interacting with the Catholic community as such. He has demonstrated that his political goals often rely on “ecclesiastical” means – i.e., the promotion of doctrinal factionalism within the Catholic Church.
So unless you support Obama for President of the American Catholic Church, you may want to critically re-think your support for his unprecedented support of public dissent in the life of the Catholic Church in America.
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