Comments for Legal Persecution at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 40 out of 20 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:18:38 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8308 There is a difference between insurance paying for pharmaceutical products that are prescribed to treat an actual injury or disease (such as the situation Nora described) vs., those that are prescribed on a purely *elective* basis, that is, not to treat or prevent any injury or disease, but because the patient believes they will improve his or her life. Examples of the latter would be elective cosmetic surgery, (a nose job, skin peels, spot liposuction) and elective birth control. A burn victim who needs facial reconstructive surgery is not having *elective* cosmetic surgery like someone in Hollywood getting an eyebrow lift. In the case of someone with an actual injury or disease in the picture, few people would have a problem with the idea of health insurance paying for whatever is necessary to help the patient get their life back. Plastic surgery for accident victims to repair deformations to skin, cartilege, and bone, sure. Of course. Hormonal birth control to treat women with endometriosis that hasn't responded well to other methods of treatment, sure. Of course. But in general, fertility in and of itself is not a disease or an injury, and there is no *medical reason* to suppress it. This is no a debate about whether all should pay for treatments sought for actual *medical reasons.* This is about whether all should pay for *purely elective* costs on the part of the patient, especially where a large segment of taxpayers have *moral reservations* about the use of these products being used for *purely elective* - not medically necessary - reasons. You're injured, sick, or disabled? Catholics will be glad to help you out. You want a chemical peel to brighten your skin? Great! You pay for it. You want liposuction? Pay for it. You want birth control pills - not to treat an ongoing medical problem for which a certain type of birth control pills represent the treatment of choice - but because they're the form of birth control you prefer? Fine. You pay for that, too. It's called taking responsibility for your own personal choices. You don't want the Church in your bedroom? Well, the Church doesn't want you in our pocketbooks. - Marion (Mael Muire) Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:41:01 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8304 "...I had to be prescribed a version of hormonal birth control pills as part of treatment for a particularly debilitating medical problem. So I'm not allowed to have them covered because the Catholic Church says so." For the price of a root touch-up at the salon, Nora, you could have paid for your own medication. Why don't you pony up like a big girl and take care of your own private business without asking Mommy and Daddy (i.e., the taxpayers) to pay for it? Anticipated Question from Nora: You're saying I might have to go around with dark roots because you don't want to pay for my medications? Response from Marion: You're telling everyone else to be an adult. Why don't you walk the walk yourself and act like one? - Marion (Mael Muire) Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:50:22 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8303 So, because the government doesn't force others to act the way you want them to, that government is persecuting you? Wow. And padre, do you think you can lay off of the scare quotes? This reads like a junior high school homework assignment. - brian Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:33:14 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8299 Hmmm...I had to be prescribed a version of hormonal birth control pills as part of treatment for a particularly debilitating medical problem. So I'm not allowed to have them covered because the Catholic Church says so. Here's the truth: the overwhelming majority of private health insurance carriers already cover these things. You cannot legislate your morality on others. Catholics who follow the Church's teaching regarding non-NFP birth control will follow it regardless of what any insurance carrier covers. What's next? Is the Catholic Church going to lobby against breast augmentation because the majority of augmentation procedures are for strictly shallow and objectfying reasons? The thing about morality is you do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because some group lobbied to pass a law forcing others to follow their beliefs. Yes. The Church will be increasingly marginalized, and it will grow smaller and become more cultlike, and it will be the fault of Catholics like yourselves who think you can create a Catholic Taliban in which every citizen of this nation, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Evangelicals, et al., will be legilated into following Catholic teaching. And that's a good thing. That's where people like you belong -- in a marginalized, homogenized little cult compound somewhere. Then you can rant away about "those people" and how unfair it all is, wahwahwah, and we won't have to listen to your bratty, foot-stamping tantrums about how hard it is to live what you believe when other people don't have to do the same thing. Grow up and stop whining. Life isn't fair. God never promised you it was going to be easy. I have ZERO sympathy for whingers and whiners who can't do the right thing unless it's easy. None. You priests, especially -- what do you know about how hard life is? When did you ever have anything at stake? You're not husbands, you're not fathers -- you're responsible for very little in this world. Shut up and stop crying like a pack of babies. - Nora Wed, 28 Sep 2011 05:27:01 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8293 Yes. All this goes directly against Jesus' teaching that his followers were to receive special treatment. - Mark R Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:52:14 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8287 But Ann-- Catholics have lived in cultures more hostile and repugnant than ours. Think Ancient Rome. Yet they never resorted to the Amish-type retreat from larger society. That's no way to be salt and light. - Margaret Tue, 27 Sep 2011 08:23:03 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8286 Father, this is a brilliant post. I comment on it and expand upon it at my own blog: Theater of the Word Incorporated - Kevin O'Brien Tue, 27 Sep 2011 08:06:19 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8284 I always think about the Amish during these types of discussions. They live way outside the mainstream of society and have managed to keep their faith and ways. However, again, they live OUTSIDE of society, and they know that. They don't fight it, they don't clamor for political power. They stay quiet and only ask to be left alone. I do think things are going to change, and faithful Catholics will move into a more Amish-like place in our society. And this will include, as someone above mentioned, ceding all social services work to anyone outside the religion. But I am also optimistic that the general protections of freedom of religion will stay in place. - Ann Tue, 27 Sep 2011 06:33:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8269 What about the old "anti-science" approach. Is there anything more anti-science than pro-abortion stances? - Stanley Mon, 26 Sep 2011 04:35:27 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8260 Father Schall thank you for your trenchant analysis, proclamation, and call to all Catholics to awake from our secular unholy slumber. As Father Robert Barron has suggested, perhaps the darkest era in the Church, from its founding in the U.S. to the mid 20th century was the civil persecution it suffered from various political anti-Catholic factions and parties, as well as the attendant burning of parish churches and convents. Our forbears were no stranger to this persecution and endured, organized, and overcame with faith, hope, and love in the Church and the Holy Trinity in the face of terrible, personal and political tragedy. As their progeny, we have foolishly squandered their hard won spiritual capital like selfish trust fund babies. We must throw off our assumed, primarily temporal identity as catholic Americans and penitently put out into the deep, as Blessed Pope John Paul II exhorted, and become what we are, american Catholics. Father Robert Barron, a priest from the Archdiocese of Chicago, once trenchantly quoted a Yale co-religionist /theologian Stanley Hauerwas who intoned, “That we who worship a crucified God, have become mainstream, is the tragedy.” Certainly the clerical sexual abuse scandal dwarfs the external persecution of the 18th and 19th centuries, both because it was from within instead of without, and because of the heinous nature of the sin. However, again as Father Barron heralds: Jesus Christ the incarnate God/man, the apostles, the faithful laity and the resulting Roman secular persecutions; the faithful theologian / Church fathers / faithful bishops in the face of 4th and 5th century heretics and schismatics; the 5th century monastic revival in the face of the collapse of secular civilization; the flowering of the medieval mendicant orders in response to widespread clerical corruption; the outgrowth of the universities and medieval culture in its art, literature, and science with the attendant technological innovation and economic development of the Renaissance; the defensive military containment of the militant ambitions of the jihadist Islam of its time at Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna; the Catholic counter-Reformation; and the missionary evangelization in the New World simply CANNOT be reduced to the clerical sexual abuse scandal and the inept episcopal pastoral mishandling. Despite our marked and warranted lack of confidence we need to focus in on our own sloth as unfaithful laity: contraceptive use and divorce is as high in the Catholic laity as the secular culture of death, and I suspect the abortion correspondence isn't far behind (considering 53 million people have been murdered by abortion and easily another 53 million person's conception was contracepted from being; our 14 trillion dollar debt would be virtually nonexistent to take the least significant problem as an example). Much ink is spilled about the dirth of clerical vocations, but have we been encouraging our children to be faithful lawyer Catholics, faithful corporate executive Catholics, faithful venture capital Catholics, faithful journalist Catholics, faithful college professor Catholics, faithful school board Catholics, faithful Hollywood Catholics. If we want to change the world we have to look at ourselves and quit pointing the finger at the 1 pope, the 193 cardinals, 5100 bishops, and 410,593 priests. There are 1 BILLION Catholics worldwide. That is nearly 2,500 lay people to every one priest. Jesus set the world on fire with 12 apostles. I would wager that Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. would have given their left index finger to have a core group of 2,500 per leader. Martin Luther King Jr could call for as many boycotts and marches as he wanted but without a TURNOUT of the people: NO RESULTS. Gandhi could call for as many boycotts and marches as he wanted but without the TURNOUT of the people: NO RESULTS. WE are TOO complacent, TOO complicit, TOO relativistic, TOO self rationalizing, TOO materialistic, TOO disintegrated to point any fingers but at ourselves in the mirror. - Michael Sun, 25 Sep 2011 14:59:36 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8259 On page 175, World Almanac 2011 gives us the Number of Legal Abortions in the US 1970-2006. Maximum is at 1990 (1,429,247), but from 1998 the figure is below a million; down to 820,000 in 2005. Notes for these years : ’Without estimates for California, New Hampshire' and other states. Below is a table ’Reported Abortions by Age, Race and Marital Status 2006’. Note: Excludes CA, LA and NH that did not report data, and 13 states/areas (AZ, CT, DC, FL, IL, MA, NE, NV, NM, RI, UT, WA, WY) for which race by age was not reported. You see, abortion figures are not very important. - Staffan Sun, 25 Sep 2011 12:00:35 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8258 What is written here is all very true as far as it goes. However, it is essential that faithful sons and daughters of the Church resist the temptation to engage in "Us vs. Them" thinking, setting themselves apart from The Other, who is the Enemy, as the Sons of Thunder did, when they asked the Lord, "Shall we call down destruction upon this village that did not hear us, Rabbi?" And Jesus rebuked them. God is a merciful God, slow to anger, and of great kindness. He patiently awaits the conversion of sinners, and expects each of us to show mercy to sinners by speaking the truth, yes, and remaining firm in righteousness, yes, but always with patience, gentleness, and with humility - that is, with our hearts and minds fixed on the goodness of Our Father and on His love for all men, and not either on ourselves and how outraged we may feel, nor on "The Enemy" (meaning our fellow sinners) and how they have outraged us. Why should we stand astonished and indignant that the world has rejected us, and that some of His former disciples have turned their backs on His Church? Should we expect to be treated in a manner different to the one meted out to The Master? Let us imitate Him, and His disciples after the Pentecost by girding our loins, taking our staff in hand, continuing boldly to proclaim the word, and keeping our eyes on the prize, running swiftly so as to gain the victory. No more pointing fingers, complaining, or venting like so many hissing kettles. We are warriors! We are men! (Even those of us who are women, are to have the hearts of men - Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastatia, Maria Goretti, pray for us!) - Marion (Mael Muire) Sun, 25 Sep 2011 07:25:14 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8254 The US is, one can say, two different countries. Abortion in 2005 according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute; highest and lowest states: 1. DC 49.9% 2. NY 38.8% 3. NJ 35.0% 4. MD 33.4% ... 49. UT 6.6% 50. KY 6.4% 51. WY 1.0% (In New York, Bronx had 48.5% abortions.) In Sweden, Kramfors had 40.1% abortions in 2010. For Sweden as a whole, the figure was 2.6% in 1960. But then something happened, and in 1979 the figure was 26.4%. Nowadays, 25% is the norm. Every fourth little child is taken away. Today as a ”Scandinavian” I am always in the minority, here in Norrköping… - Staffan Sat, 24 Sep 2011 11:39:52 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8253 We are rapidly approaching a point where the Church in the USA should contemplate a total shutdown of social services. After the federal government it is the Catholic Church which provides the greatest number of social services in the United States. If suddenly all Catholic adoption agencies, all Catholic hospitals, all Catholic schools (including colleges and universities), all Catholic charitable institutions, in short, all Catholic institutions except those directly involved in the Church's liturgical and sacramental practices, were to suddenly no longer be there, might that work as a wake-up call to those in power that the Church is inextricably involved in the day-to-day operations of a "just" society. If the Church were to also bring into such a shutdown those charitable bodies in the more conservative Protestant denominations (I don't include the mainstream Protestant denominations - they ceased being Christian generations ago), if suddenly all those institutions ceased to function, there would be chaos, a chaos that would reflect adversely upon those who are doing what they can to eliminate Christian influences in the body politic and society at large. A more extreme action could also be considered, one that would involve every true Catholic (how many of those we see with us at Mass on Sundays, particularly those we see only on certain high feastdays - Christmas-Easter Catholics, or some variation of such, should properly be viewed as non-entities as far as the active Church is concerned?} in a truly life and death situation (spiritually), and that is an interdict, laid down by the Vicar of Christ himself, which would deny all sacramental activity in the United States until full freedom of conscience be recognized as a fundamental part of religious activity in this nation. The time is rapidly approaching when such actions may not only be contemplated, but actually mandated, if the Church is to continue its designated mission. And such a time may be much closer than we think. On so many fronts the Church is being challenged by the secularists, who encouraged by the secularist fellow-travelers in the administrative hierarchy of the Church in this country, think that now is the time to strike a mortal blow against the Bride of Christ in the USA (might we be tempted to describe it as a rape of the Bride of Christ?). The times are grave, as grave as at any time since the so-called Reformation, or, indeed as grave as any time since the persecutions of the Roman emperors. I'm not one of those fundamentalist Protestants who subscribe to all the latest fads and fancies regarding the End-Times, since we are admonished in Scripture not to speculate on such issues, but I will say that if we aren't actually entering into those times, we are once again entering into a rehearsal of those times. - Michael from NE Sat, 24 Sep 2011 04:34:44 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8251 I'm still waiting for one bishop to ask each so-called "Catholic" hospital and medical practice in his diocese to begin drafting contingency shutdown plans for the day the government requires all health care providers to commit abortions. Until that happens, the secularists and their collaborators will not take our bishops' protests (even if the bishops do start speaking louder and more sternly) seriously. The secularist camp considers Catholics to be pushovers. And so far they've been correct. - Micha Elyi Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:01:24 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8248 Don't people realize that ever since it was created in the late 60's the Bishops arrive at each USCCB Conference and are spoon fed position papers that reflect the skewed views of the 350 or permanent staff who after all live in "the belly of the beast" in DC and who are just like our Congressmen lobbied endlessly by the enemy? Would not the Church be better off if these Conferences were held only every 4 or even 10 years and these resources used to help Evangelize and in other similar useful ways? Would we not be better off if the only papers written were actually initiated and written ONLY by an individual Bishop and NEVER initiated or written by Anonymous staffers. This was the Catholic way for almost 2000 years. - veritas Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:35:27 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8244 How many members of the US Supreme Court are Catholic? I'm as Right as the next person, but c'mon, to even suggest some future Catholic persecution in America is absurd, and paints Right-thinking people as paranoids. - howeecarr Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:55:33 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8243 Isn't this just a bit overwrought? The desire to pose as a victim is understandable, considering how much mileage the self-designated "minorities" get out of the Cult of Self-Pity, but let's resist the temptation, shall we? The Catholic Church is still widely respected and admired. Most people express their disagreement with Church doctrine civilly. The media, for all their hostility, treat the Church cautiously. There are no lions and this isn't the Colosseum. Knock off the whining. It's embarrassing. - resh galuta Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:37:42 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8242 It is common to think the de-culturalization in our country is a benefit to the mass media and politicians pushing a liberal agenda. The herd of the masses will follow. That we are doomed to go down the Chinese/Russian road. The one positive note may be that the current vanguard, unlike a century ago, is as uneducated as the sheep they are leading. Their ideas and arguments so spurious as to be laughable. Thanks to the likes of Fr. Schall, the ammunition is available. - Stanley Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:37:54 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/legal-persecution.html#comment-8239 I wouldn't vote for Rick Santorum if you put a gun to my head. He BETRAYED the Pro-Life movement in PA when he supported Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey in the Republican primaries many years ago. We have a name for that kind of person. TRAITOR!!! Three times married Newt Gingrich??? Puuuuuuuuuuulease!!!!!!! Can't we get some real Catholics for a change???? - Edward Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:26:15 +0100