Awesome interview by Cardinal Dolan re: the governments attacks on the Catholic Church

Dolan: White House is "strangling" Catholic church

(CBS News) The spat between Catholic leaders and the Obama administration over its contraception policies is heating up again, with one of the nation's most prominent Catholic leaders charging that the White House is "strangling" the church over the matter.
Timothy Cardinal Dolan told "CBS This Morning" Tuesday that the compromise reached earlier this year is not sufficient because the exemptions made for churches are too restrictive.
"They tell us if you're really going be considered a church, if you're going to be really exempt from these demands of the government, well, you have to propagate your Catholic faith and everything you do, you can serve only Catholics and employ only Catholics," Dolan said.
"We're like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry," Dolan said.
More than 40 Catholic organizations sued the Obama administration Monday over a government requirement that most employers provide birth control coverage as part of their employee health plans.
Catholic dioceses, institutions sue over contraception rule

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department adopted the rule to expand health care for women. Last year, an advisory panel from the Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government, recommended including birth control on the list of covered services, partly because it promotes maternal and child health by allowing women to space their pregnancies.
However, faith leaders from across religious traditions protested, saying the mandate violates religious freedom. The original rule includes a religious exemption that allows houses of worship to opt-out of the mandate, but keeps the requirement in place for religiously affiliated charities.
In response to the political furor, President Obama offered to soften the rule so that insurers would pay for birth control instead of religious groups. However, the bishops and others have said that the accommodation doesn't go far enough.
Dolan also criticized Georgetown University's decision to invited Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak to graduates of its school of public policy last week because of her role in formulating the policy.
"Well, I do think that's a problem. Georgetown is the oldest Catholic university in the country. Part of Catholic identity is to be in union with the bishops," Dolan said.
"When they would invite someone that is so dramatically at odds with one of the central tenets of the faith, that does bother us," Dolan said.
Sebelius is a practicing Catholic and mother and spouse of Georgetown graduates. Georgetown University President John DeGioia defended the university's decision to invite Sebelius as evidence the university "is committed to the free exchange of ideas."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Breaking news: 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sue the Obama Administration

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BREAKING: Cardinal Dolan of NY, Cardinal Wuerl of D.C., Notre Dame--And 40 Other Catholic Dioceses and Organizations--Sue Obama Administration

By Terence P. Jeffrey

May 21, 2012

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Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - The archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The dioceses and organizations, in different combinations, are filing 12 different lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country.
The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. has established a special website--preservereligiousfreedom.org--to explain it lawsuit and present news and development concerning it.
"This lawsuit is about an unprecedented attack by the federal government on one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference," the archdiocese says on the website. "It is not about whether people have access to certain services; it is about whether the government may force religious institutions and individuals to facilitate and fund services which violate their religious beliefs."
The suits filed by the Catholic organizations focus on the regulation that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced last August and finalized in January that requires virtually all health-care plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions.
The Catholic Church teaches that sterilization, artificial contraception and abortion are morally wrong and that Catholics should not be involved in them. Thus, the regulation would require faithful Catholics and Catholic organizations to act against their consciences and violate the teachings of their faith.
Earlier, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had called the regulation an "unprecedented attack on religious liberty" and asked the Obama administration to rescind it.
“We have tried negotiation with the Administration and legislation with the Congress--and we’ll keep at it--but there's still no fix," Cardinal Dolan, who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement released by the conference this morning.
"Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now," the cardinal said. "Though the Conference is not a party to the lawsuits, we applaud this courageous action by so many individual dioceses, charities, hospitals and schools across the nation, in coordination with the law firm of Jones Day. It is also a compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty. It's also a great show of the diversity of the Church's ministries that serve the common good and that are jeopardized by the mandate--ministries to the poor, the sick, and the uneducated, to people of any faith or no faith at all.”
Cardinal Dolan's New York Archdiocese filed suit today in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York. Joining the archdiocese as plaintiffs in the suit are the Catholic Health Care Sytem, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, Catholic Charities of Rockville Centre, and Catholic Health Services of Long Island.
In their suit, these groups name HHS Secretary Sebelius, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their departments as defendants.
The archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is being joined in its lawsuit by Catholic Charities of the Washington Archdiocese, the Consortium of Catholic Academies of the Archdiocese of Washington (which includes four parochial schools), Archbishop Carroll High School, and the Catholic University of America.
"This morning, the Archdiocese of Washington filed a lawsuit to challenge the mandate, recently issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, that fundamentally redefines the nation’s long-standing definition of religious ministry and requires our religious organizations to provide their employees with coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization, even if doing so violates their religious beliefs," Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington said in an open letter posted online this morning. "Just as our faith compels us to uphold the liberty and dignity of others, so too, we must defend our own."
"The lawsuit in no way challenges either women’s established legal right to obtain and use contraception or the right of employers to provide coverage for it if they so choose," said Cardinal Wuerl. "This lawsuit is about religious freedom."
"The First Amendment enshrines in our nation’s Constitution the principle that religious organizations must be able to practice their faith free from government interference," Cardinal Wuerl said.

Sebelius speech at Georgetown

TheWashingtonPost

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ full remarks to Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute

By Kathleen Sebelius

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius answers a question during a briefing to release Social Security and Medicare trustees reports at the Treasury Department April 23, 2012 in Washington, DC.

 (Win McNamee - GETTY IMAGES) Below is the full address Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius gave to Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute Friday. The text was sent in advance of her speech.


Dean Montgomery, members of the faculty, family, friends, and graduates: it’s an honor to be with you this morning. And let me start with some well-earned congratulations. Last weekend, on Mother’s Day, I was at the University of Kansas when my younger son received his Masters degree. So I know the hard work and effort that got you here today.
I married a Georgetown law graduate and am a Hoya Mom – the mother of a double Georgetown graduate. So in my family, Hoya Saxa comes second only to Rock Chalk Jayhawk.
And I was especially pleased to be invited to speak to you, the public policy graduates. Having spent my entire life in public service, I believe you’ve chosen the most challenging, frustrating, exciting, consequential, and rewarding career there is. And today, I want to share a few lessons from my career that I hope will be useful as you begin yours.
I started out as an “unpaid volunteer.” My dad got into politics when I was five, so for most of my childhood, I spent my fall days putting up yard signs and going door to door.
Actually, the more accurate term might be forced labor. There wasn’t a lot of choice in the matter. (It was only later that I discovered that other families were going to football games and picnics while I was attending political rallies).
But what I got from those fall outings, and from our conversations around our dinner table, was a deep belief in the value of public service. And throughout my career, it’s been that unwavering belief that’s carried me to my highest points – and gotten me through my lowest.
I know you share that belief. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here today. You wouldn’t have suffered through regression analysis. You wouldn’t have passed up bigger salary possibilities in other fields.
So my first hope for you today is that you always hold on to your commitment to work for the common good. If you let that focus guide you, you will never go off course.
I learned the second lesson when I came to Washington in the late 60s to attend Trinity College. Those were tumultuous times in our nation’s history, and DC was right in the middle of it. During my college years, the draft was reinstated, as the government ramped up the war in Vietnam. Racial tensions, that had been smoldering, erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and neighborhoods in DC were burned to the ground.
What was striking at the time is how young people were driving these national debates. There was a feeling not just that young people could change the world – but that we had to.
Robert Kennedy spoke about those times in a famous speech. He said: “This world demands the qualities of youth. Not a time of life, but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.”
As you set out on your careers, you may find yourselves tempted to defer to those who are older or have more experience. And on behalf of the parents in the audience, I want to be clear that, even though we may not know who Kim Kardashian is, or why everyone is always so angry about her, we do still have some wisdom to share. You still need to call your mom! (In fact, after this ceremony ends, the first thing you should do is thank the parents, teachers, mentors, and friends who supported your journey to this graduation day.)
But the truth is, wisdom isn’t the only thing that comes with age. Growing older can also bring complacency and cautiousness.
I know Georgetown hasn’t trained you to sit on the sidelines. You’ve studied under leading policy-makers. You’ve proven your skills, not just on tests and papers, but in the real world through programs like Project Honduras.
So my second piece of advice is: don’t wait. Go ahead and do it yourself – because if you don’t, it might never happen.
Now, I wish I could give you a roadmap for exactly how to do that. But the truth is that career paths are usually only visible looking backwards, like the tracks we make in the snow.
I’m an accidental feminist who learned that girls can do anything by attending an all-girls school where we had to do everything. I ended up in Kansas because that’s where my husband grew up. I began my political career because our part-time legislature was a better fit for me, as a mother with two young children, than the 60-hour a week job I had.
As I moved along, I sought out opportunities to learn new skills and new subject areas. I started out working in corrections. Later, I worked on everything from education, to children and family issues, to the budget, to jobs and economic development, to rural challenges.
One of the issues I kept coming back to was health care, culminating in my current position. And now, I have the extraordinary opportunity to help implement legislation that is finally, after seven decades of failed debate, ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health coverage.
But I never would have been here if I hadn’t taken some chances. For me, the biggest risk was running for Kansas Insurance Commissioner. The indicators were not promising. The statewide office had never been held by a woman or a Democrat. The previous three commissioners had close ties to the insurance industry and had served nearly 50 years combined. And it was 1994, when running for office as a Democrat was the basic equivalent of wearing a Georgetown jersey in the Syracuse student section.
But I went for it and won. And I ended up not just getting an incredible opportunity to make a difference, but also gaining invaluable experience for the job I have now. (Who knew?)
All of you are going to face similar choices in your careers. It might be taking a more senior position at a much smaller organization. It might be moving abroad to work. It might be going from running a campaign to becoming a candidate.
And when you do encounter these opportunities, I encourage you take a deep breath and seize them.
And that brings me to the final lesson I want to leave with you today, which is that no matter what path you choose, it’s going to be hard.
Ultimately, public policy is about making difficult choices. Today, there are serious debates underway about the direction of our country – debates about the size and role of government, about America’s role as a global economic and military leader, about the moral and economic imperative of providing health care to all our citizens. People have deeply-held beliefs on all sides of these discussions, and you, as public policy leaders, will be called on to help move these debates forward.
These are not questions with quick and easy answers. When I was in junior high, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was running for president. I wasn’t old enough to vote, but it was the first national campaign I really remember. Some of then-Senator Kennedy’s opponents attacked him for his religion, suggesting that electing the first Catholic president would undermine the separation of church and state, a fundamental principle of our democracy. The furor grew so loud that Kennedy chose to deliver a speech about his beliefs just seven weeks before the election.
In that talk to Protestant ministers, Kennedy talked about his vision of religion and the public square, and said he believed in an America, and I quote, “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against us all.”
Kennedy was elected president on November 8, 1960. And more than 50 years later, that conversation, about the intersection of our nation’s long tradition of religious freedom with policy decisions that affect the general public, continues.
Contributing to these debates will require more than just the quantitative skills you have learned at Georgetown. It will also require the ethical skills you have honed – the ability to weigh different views, see issues from other points of view, and in the end, follow your own moral compass.
These debates can also be contentious. But this is a strength of our country, not a weakness. In some countries around the world, it is much easier to make policy. The leader delivers an edict and it goes into effect. There’s no debate, no criticism, no second guessing.
Our system is messier, slower, more frustrating, and far better. It requires conversations that can be painful and it almost always ends in compromise. But it’s through this process of conversation and compromise that we move forward, together, step by step, towards a “more perfect union.”
Looking out on you this morning, I feel very optimistic about the future of that union. If you hold on to your idealism, resist complacency, take chances, and engage thoughtfully with the difficult challenges of our time, you will succeed. And I can’t wait to see what you will accomplish.
Congratulations and good luck!

By Kathleen Sebelius  |  12:56 PM ET, 05/18/2012

>>>With all the build up and uproar, I thought it important to post the actual speech.  So here it is.  Again, as Catholics we are called to be faithful. 

 

Outrage indeed! A Catholic University defies the Bishops, and the teachings of the Church

Outrage!! Georgetown Chooses Sebelius For Commencement

Georgetown University has taken sides against the Catholic Church, there is no other way to interpret it.

While the US Catholic Bishops are pulling out all the stops trying to repeal the anti-Catholic and anti-Constitutional HHS Mandate requiring Catholic institutions provide free access to contraception, abortofacients, and sterilization, Georgetown University has chosen the author of the horrible mandate as this year's commencement speaker for Georgetown University Public Policy Institute.

There is no other way to interpret this other than as a direct challenge to the authority of th Catholic Bishops and as clear statement as to which side the University is on in this crucial standoff.

This afternoon, Georgetown announced the speakers for each school’s commencement address. Here is the list:
David Simon, creator of the critically acclaimed television dramas “The Wire” and “Treme” will be speaking to the College.

Dr. Mark Green, senior director of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and former ambassador to Tanzania is the speaker for the School of Nursing & Health.

Ela R. Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association, the largest union in India, and a consultant for UNICEF, will address the School of Foreign Service.

Tim O’Shaughnessy (B ’04), CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial will be speaking to the McDonough School of Business.

The speaker for the senior convocation is Helen O’Really (F ’03), current judicial clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

List of speakers for other Georgetown schools:
...
Former governor of Kansas and current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, will be addressing the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.

This is an outrage and a direct challenge to the Bishops. Cardinal Wuerl, Cardinal Dolan,and the whole USCCB needs to immediately revoke Georgetown's status as a Catholic University.

In this crucial debate, you are either with us or against us. Georgetown has taken the other side. If there was any question left about whether Georgetown was still Catholic, that question has now been answered.

HHS Secretary(a Catholic)defends the attack on the Catholic Church

Kathleen Sebelius defends contraception rule

The rule doesn't affect a 'woman’s freedom to decide not to use birth control,' Sebelius said. | AP Photo

By TIM MAK | 2/6/12 6:33 AM EST

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius argued Monday that a new rule that requires many religious employers to cover birth control in employee health plans respects those with “deeply held beliefs opposing the use of birth control.”
“We specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith. This exemption includes churches and other houses of worship and could also include other church-affiliated organizations,” wrote Sebelius in an op-ed in USA Today

The policy put forward by the Obama administration exempts Catholic churches but doesn’t carve out other religious institutions such as Catholic hospitals and universities.

Sebelius stressed that 28 states already require contraception to be covered by insurance, a point that Obama administration has been making in recent days to defend their policy.
Sebelius also noted that the rule continues to protect “conscience protections” that allow doctors to decline to provide prescriptions for contraception.
“It’s important to note that our rule has no effect on the longstanding conscience clause protections for providers, which allow a Catholic doctor, for example, to refuse to write a prescription for contraception. Nor does it affect an individual woman’s freedom to decide not to use birth control. And the president and this administration continue to support existing conscience protections,” the HHS secretary wrote.
The Obama administration has been taking fire on this issue during the past two-and-a-half weeks.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida introduced legislation in late January that would greatly expand the ability of religious and faith-based organizations to opt out of the requirement to provide employees with insurance coverage that includes birth control.
“This is a common-sense bill that simply says the government can’t force religious organizations to abandon the fundamental tenets of their faith because the government says so,” Rubio said in a statement at the time.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72489.html#ixzz1lfBjQf00