James Taranto has an article in the Wall Street Journal from this weekend where he distills an interview with Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Encapsulating and clarifying the Church’s position, Dolan says:
“We’ve grown hoarse saying this is not about contraception, this is about religious freedom,” he says. What rankles him the most is the government’s narrow definition of a religious institution. Your local Catholic parish, for instance, is exempt from the birth-control mandate. Not exempt are institutions such as hospitals, grade schools, universities and soup kitchens that employ or serve significant numbers of people from other faiths and whose main purpose is something other than proselytization.
“We find it completely unswallowable, both as Catholics and mostly as Americans, that a bureau of the American government would take it upon itself to define ‘ministry,'” Archbishop Dolan says. “We would find that to be—we’ve used the words ‘radical,’ ‘unprecedented’ and ‘dramatically intrusive.'”
It’s sad that so many Americans don’t understand how scary this is, and in fact attack the Catholic Church for being obstinate. It seems freedom is complex; many people just don’t get it.