Now, the latest response of Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of the most influential see in America as well as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to the United States Government on the "contraception and abortifacient mandate" question, issued last Friday in a letter directed to his brother Bishops, was quite encouraging. But there is a curious point that, though correct as an assessment, leaves any attentive reader, particularly a non-Catholic one, puzzled:
"Instead, they ['the White House staff'] advised the bishops’ conference that we should listen to the 'enlightened' voices of accommodation, such as the recent, hardly surprising yet terribly unfortunate editorial in America. The White House seems to think we bishops simply do not know or understand Catholic teaching and so, taking a cue from its own definition of religious freedom, now has nominated its own handpicked official Catholic teachers."
Well, the wiliness of politicians is a fact of life - but should the White House really be blamed for choosing an institutional venue that is identifiably Catholic, in this case, the Jesuit weekly America, the self-described National Catholic Weekly?Last September, we mentioned the fact that, while "Progressives" rail constantly against the "Institutional Church", nothing is more institutional than these vipers's grasp of most institutions within the contemporary Church. At that time, we mentioned an outrageous "Pontifical" university in Brazil and Eureka Street, the unbelievably anti-Catholic Jesuit periodical and website in Australia.
Surely the Archbishop is right: the Catholic Church is a Church of Bishops. Its marks are unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity - not universities, journals, hospitals, and publishing houses. But outsiders, including the White House, are not to blame for the fact that almost all of these Catholic "institutions" are completely outside the control of the hierarchy - or, even worse, that a considerable proportion of bishops (in America and throughout the world) actively support or at least turn their eyes away from institutions undermining the Church, spreading heresy, and destroying the faith of millions. It is quite understandable that a politician would thus make use of the "hardly surprising" position of America and identify the dissenting views friendly to him as representing the Church at large. The fact that this public dissent is "hardly surprising" should be a breathtaking scandal for all the hierarchy, unacceptable and in need of immediate correction and suppression.
The schizophrenia of America is the fault of the Bishops of America. And that is the case for all other "institutional Catholic" venues. If the Bishops wish to be taken seriously by outsiders, then they had better fix their house first: as the Lord said (and a U.S. President famously repeated later), "a house divided against itself cannot stand" (cf. Mk iii, 25).
