Yesterday, Cardinal Timothy Dolan led 43 Catholic groups in filing 12 federal lawsuits against the White House's birth control mandate, requiring religious institutions' insurance plans to cover birth control. Today, Dolan appeared on CBS This Morning to further his case that the White House is "strangling" them.
Dolan said of the compromise, which shifts the cost of insurance to the insurer, rather than the institution, "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... We're like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry."
He also had some thoughts about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius speaking at Georgetown, a Jesuit school, last week: "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. When they would invite someone that is so dramatically at odds with one of the central tenets of the faith, that does bother us." Sebelius's speech also attracted an anti-abortion protester who yelled at her and then a lawsuit from Georgetown alum and Exorcist author William Peter Blatty.
Dolan's statement about the lawsuit emphasizes, "Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now. 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."
