HHS will grant an exemption to the mandate in exchange for having the final say about the meaning of Catholicism.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is mandating that all health insurance plans include contraceptive and abortion inducing drugs. To qualify for an exemption, an organization must have as its purpose the inculcation of religious values and its employees and clients must share its religious tenets.

American religious liberty is based on keeping the government out of religion. The First Amendment begins with the words, “Congress shall make no law.” The present HHS exemption simply tramples on that restriction on government power; it mocks our religious liberty.

To benefit from the exemption, Catholic organizations would need to send HHS a profession of faith by each employee. People coming to Catholic hospitals or Charities would have to fill out forms giving name, address, medications they are taking, and then declare if they attend Mass regularly and if they believed in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and the infallibility of the Pope.

Sounds ridiculous, but how else can the government evaluate if employees and clients share the tenets of the Catholic Church?

The Framers of the Constitution banned religious tests, but the granting of this exemption depends on such a religious test.

The government can and should grant an exemption to Catholic institutions, but it cannot involve itself in matters of religious belief and practice. If health care is a priority for this Administration, then avoiding disrupting or destroying one of the largest private health care systems in the country is surely a good reason for granting an exemption to religious institutions that object to the Mandate.

The issue here goes far beyond accommodating the religious teachings of Catholicism. It goes rather to the nature of American religious liberty, one of the truly great gifts of America to the world.

The issue here goes far beyond accommodating the religious teachings of Catholicism. It goes rather to the nature of American religious liberty, one of the truly great gifts of America to the world.

James Madison saw clearly that without checks and balances a Bill of Rights would be little more than a “parchment” barrier against determined power holders. The actions of HHS indicate that it regards the Bill of Rights as no more than such a paper barrier. It is imposing its own “orthodox” belief and theology, i.e., that some Catholic institutions are religious and some are not, that a parochial schools fits within its view of religious but a Catholic hospital does not. It is moreover conditioning the operation of a law on government imposed religious conditions and definitions.

These are the ills Americans in the past fought against so tenaciously in their struggle for religious liberty. The issue here is not a Catholic one; it is an American one. Liberty lies in restricting government, not in giving it absolute power as HHS wants to do. Catholics are only echoing what James Madison declared more than two centuries ago, that there is “not the shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion.”

Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry is the Santa Barbara Region bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He holds a master's degree in history from Loyola Marymount University, and a doctorate in constitutional history from Claremont Graduate School, specializing in the English and American background to the First Amendment. His books include “The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment” (Oxford University Press, 1987) and “Farewell to Christendom: The Future of Church and State in America” (Oxford, 2001).

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