Back Alley Butchers Never Change Their Tactics

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Several articles on this site (Only Themselves to Blame and Dialectical Americanism, among others) have discussed the hysteria surrounding the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA) that has been languishing in one Congress after another for the past twenty-five and one-half years. Even the thoroughly pro-abortion Catholic Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, admitted earlier this year that the votes aren't "there" in the House of Representatives to pass FOCA, something that has yet to register in the brains of many Catholics who pride themselves on being "pragmatists" but who are utterly uninterested in the actual facts of political life in the United States of America.

That is, as I explained in Only Themselves to Blame seven months ago now, there are enough "conservative" or "moderate" Democrats in the United States House of Representatives who believe in their own political self-survival more than they believe in protecting unrestricted access to surgical baby-killing under cover of the civil law. There is a general consensus in this country that some "reasonable" restrictions on surgical baby-killing are "acceptable," and it has been the existence of this consensus that has resulted in the passage of laws in many states that attempt (emphasis on the word attempt) to restrict surgical baby-killing. The "conservative" or "moderate" naturalists in the House Democratic Party caucus who recognize this reality do not want to go on record voting for a piece of legislation that would strike down all state laws restricting surgical baby-killing.

These naturalists are not going to commit political suicide to advance the agenda of the most rabid pro-aborts. Even Caesar Obamus himself, who made a rhetorical promise two years ago to sign FOCA into law during the early stages of the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination campaign, conceded this reality shortly after his inauguration on January 20, 2009, that FOCA was not a "priority" for him. Barack Hussein Obama knows political reality. He also knows that there is no need for him to push futilely for the passage of FOCA when the "votes" aren't there to support such passage as he can accomplish via bureaucratic fiat many of FOCA's main objectives, including mandatory Federal funding for chemical and surgical baby-killing as part of his nationalization of the health-care system that would transfer decision-making on matters of life and death from the utilitarians who run our insurance companies to the utilitarians who will populate the bureaucracies that will administer ObamaCare.

Here is a very comprehensive report on how ObamaCar will "back door" abortion and serve as an effective repeal of most state laws that restrict surgical baby-killing to one extent or another:

Last fall there was great concern among the United States Bishops about the possible passage of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) and its threat to Catholic health care. President Obama had promised to sign FOCA during the campaign. If passed in the form it was most recently proposed, FOCA would have displaced current conscience legislation that protects Catholic hospitals from being forced to provide abortions. Some U.S. bishops indicated that passage of FOCA could result in the closure of Catholic hospitals.

FOCA was not passed, but the Obama administration has moved ahead with the rescission of the conscience regulations adopted in the waning days of the Bush Administration that reinforced current conscience clause protections. President Obama recently indicated to a group of Catholic leaders that he was in favor of robust conscience protection, but it is difficult to determine what this means in light of his actions. He has indicated that passage of FOCA is not a priority for him. And in fact there may be no need for a direct confrontation because he can achieve most of what FOCA would achieve by the passage of federal health care reform legislation.

President Obama is a remarkably adept politician who has skillfully marginalized the U.S. Bishops and pro-life Catholics through his Commencement address at the University of Notre Dame and his appointment of pro-choice Catholics to key health care posts in the administration. Unless there is specific language added to the current proposals to make them abortion neutral, the passage of the federal health care reform legislation backed by the Obama administration will eventually result in mandated coverage of abortion by all public and private health care plans and tax subsidies for abortions. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have rejected attempts to include specific language in proposed legislation that would rule out an abortion coverage mandate.

In addition, if the current legislation passes without amendment, we are likely to see more situations like the recent Caritas Christi case in Massachusetts. Caritas Christi, a Catholic health care system operating six hospitals in Massachusetts, entered into a for profit joint venture to offer a state-subsidized Commonwealth Care health plan to low income patients. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs), a set of norms adopted by all U.S. Bishops prohibits Catholic hospitals from providing direct abortions and from entering into arrangements to facilitate access to abortions. But this for profit health plan would have provided coverage for abortions with $50 co-pays. Indeed, all plans offered through the Commonwealth Care program are required to provide coverage for abortions.

In order to get approval of their plan from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Caritas Christi joint venture agreed to facilitate access to abortion as well as other family planning services through a 24 hour telephone line. Thus although abortions were not to be performed in Catholic hospitals, Caritas Christi apparently agreed to provide referrals for abortion. The President of the Catholic Health Association, Sister Carol Keehan, supported this arrangement arguing that it was justified as a matter of social justice. The Caritas Christi joint venture was to begin offering its health plan on July 1, 2009. Cardinal O’Malley sent the planned joint venture to the National Catholic Bioethics Center for its recommendations, but when they couldn't find any way to redo the arrangement to make it consistent with the ERDs he pulled the plug on the joint venture.

The Massachusetts health care system that provides the context for the Caritas Christi case has emerged as a model for federal health care reform. Massachusetts requires coverage of abortion as part of the standard package of health insurance benefits. Similarly, it is likely that abortion will eventually become part of the standard insurance benefit package in all private health plans as a result of federal health care reform. This will make it impossible for Catholic providers to offer a health plan without violating the ERDs. And offering a health plan or being a partner in a health plan is financially beneficial because it increases the flow of patients into your hospitals.

So there will be financial pressures on Catholic hospitals to become involved in providing insurance coverage and services in violation of the ERDs even if there is not a direct mandate in the law that they provide abortions. And undoubtedly some health plans will pressure Catholic hospitals to facilitate access to abortions in order to participate as providers.

As Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., of Rice University prophesied, calls by Catholics for social justice in health care have been translated in secular terms as a plea for universal access to abortions. The Catholic Health Association has supported President Obama’s health care reform efforts on the basis of social justice. Indeed, appeals to social justice by some leaders in Catholic health care in advocating for a more expansive federal government role in health care have become commonplace despite the potential threat that a unitive system poses to the moral foundations and the mission of Catholic hospitals. Their support for a government run system ignores the traditional emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching. And it is possible to reform health care and achieve universal access without a vast expansion of federal power. Long ago, Friedrich Hayek foresaw the potentially mind-numbing effect of such appeals and their threat to freedom. He stated:

The appeal to ‘social justice’ has nevertheless by now become the most widely used and most effective argument in political discussion. Almost every claim for government action on behalf of particular groups is advanced in its name, and if it can be made to appear that a certain measure is demanded by ‘social justice’, opposition to it will rapidly weaken. …[T]he prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization…I believe that ‘social justice’ will ultimately be recognized as a will-o’-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which have inspired the development of civilization…[L]ike most attempts to pursue an unattainable goal, the striving for it will also produce highly undesirable consequences, and in particular lead to the destruction of the indispensable environment in which traditional moral values can flourish, namely personal freedom.

It is particularly important to those who support the continuation of a distinctive Catholic health care system based on the ERDs, that federal health care reform legislation not lead to mandated abortion coverage. None of the proposed reforms explicitly mentions abortion. But the Senate Health Committee would set up a Medical Advisory Council that will determine standard benefits for private and public health plans. In the Obama administration, the standard benefit package will undoubtedly include abortion. The Senate Health Committee rejected an amendment that would have prevented any governmental plan from paying for abortions. Similarly the House legislation, HR 3200 will require most insurers to provide a package of “essential benefits” that are to be delineated by a Health Benefits Advisory Committee. In addition, it requires the appointment of a Health Choices Commissioner who is empowered to set the standards for private health plans. Clearly, in the Obama administration these “essential benefits” will include abortion.

In addition to the coverage mandate in private plans, adopt of the current health care reform proposals will result in taxpayer subsidies for abortions. Recently, on Fox News Sunday, White House budget director Peter Orzag was specifically asked by Chris Wallace: “Are you prepared to say that in a government public-funded, taxpayer-funded public health insurance plan that no taxpayer money will go to pay for abortions?” Orzag replied: “I am not prepared to say explicitly that right now. It’s obviously a controversial issue, and it’s one of the questions that is playing out in this debate.” Catholic health care leaders should call upon pro-life Democrats and Republicans in Congress to insist on the specific exclusion of an abortion coverage mandate and taxpayer subsidies in both private and public health plans as a pre-condition for their support of any reform legislation. (The Devil in the details of Obama healthcare)

 

What the author of this article, Leonard Nelson III, does not understand or accept, of course, is that the hospitals he believes to be under the auspices of the Catholic Church are actually in the control of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, which has shown itself to be all to willing to make compromises on the practical level in order to retain access to social benefits provided by the civil state.

Indeed, there was the infamous case in the 1980s of the then conciliar "archbishop" of New York, John "Cardinal" O'Connor, who had promised to withstand pressure from the administration of his buddy, the then Mayor of the City of New York, Edward Irving Koch, to provide information on contraceptives to children in the foster-care program administered by the Archdiocese of New York. "Cardinal" O'Connor huffed and puffed. In the final analysis, however, he caved into the pressure exerted upon him by the Koch administration, agreeing to a "compromise" whereby children in the archdiocese's foster-care program were to be sent to a "third party," who would provide them with information about contraceptives (and with the contraceptives themselves).

Moreover, even though Sean "Cardinal" O'Malley, the egregious conciliar "archbishop" of Boston who has been as obsequious with the ancient enemies of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as has the false "pontiff," Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI (see No Crime Is Worse Than Deicide), found that the proposed arrangement between Caritas Christi and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts could not be "reconciled" with the Ethical and Religious Directives" (ERDs) of the it is indeed quite telling about the state of apostasy and betrayal upon us at this time that O'Malley even had to make the inquiry that he did. You mean to tell us that a putative "cardinal" has to make an inquiry as to whether an immoral arrangement in full violation of the Fifth Commandment's absolute prohibition against making possible the direct, intentional taking of any innocent human life? Shameful. The back alley butchers who gave us abortion on demand by butchering the truth as well as babies made allies in the ranks of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

"Cardinal" O'Malley's "inquiry" notwithstanding, however, the actual truth of the matter on the level of medical praxis is that administrators of and medical practitioners in Catholic hospitals in conciliar captivity find all manner of creative ways to circumvent the Fifth Commandment's absolute prohibition against any participation, direct or indirect, in facilitating surgical abortions and are equally creative in ways to circumvent the Sixth Commandment's prohibition against any participation in the frustration of the first end of marriage, the procreation of children. Formerly Catholic hospitals in conciliar captivity are no more "Catholic" than former Catholic schools and universities and colleges and seminaries and chancery offices and parishes that are now in conciliar captivity.

A large percentage of Catholics who work in the corrupt, apostate bureaucratic support contraception and abortion and the entire panoply of the agenda of those who are steeped in unrepentant acts of perversity against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. Fidelity to the Marxist-trained and, most likely, Kenyan-born Barack Hussein Obama is what defines their lives, not fidelity to the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church for Its eternal safekeeping and infallible explication. Indeed, these Catholics have a hatred for the Deposit of Faith. They believe in statism and moral relativism and utilitarianism, content not only to participate in the slaughter of the preborn but to justify the removal of food and water from living human beings whose only "crime" consists of being images of the suffering Christ who are in need of our caring for them as we would care for Our Lord Himself. The back alley butchers who gave us abortion on demand by butchering the truth as well as babies made allies in the ranks of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. They are still hard at work butchering the truth now as they were four and one-half decades ago.

Although leaders of a number of groups are urging Catholics to write to members of the Congress to urge them to make sure that abortion mandates are excluded from any health-care nationalization legislation, now stalled (as it was during the first years of the William Jefferson Blythe Clinton administration) as a result of objections raised by "conservative" "blue dog" Democrats, we can be absolutely assured that any version of ObamaCare legislation that is passed by the two Houses of the Congress of the United States of America will empower Obama's national health care agency that will indeed make possible the imposition of a British-style system of socialized medicine whose goal will be the elimination of "undesirables," including the preborn and the brain-damaged and, quite possibly, people like us who dissent from the glories of statism by the systematized denial of health care, if not the mandating of proactive measures designed to kill living human beings in the name of "compassion" and "economic justice." (A brief examination of the reasons for our "health care system" problems can be found in Lost in the Trees Without A King to Lead Them, which was published on October 23, 2008.)

Some form of ObamaCare is going to get passed at some point during the term of the current administration. Powers over matters of life and death, now exercised unjustly by hospital administrators and insurance company executives, will be transferred to a bureaucracy composed of men and women who are at war with the true Faith, people who are intent on creating the "brave new world" of social engineering as the masses continue to be diverted by their bread and circuses (will the Mets fire Omar Minaya and/or Jerry Manuel, was Michael Jackson killed by his doctor, will Sarah Heath Palin get her own talk show, will the fifth season of Ironside be released on DVD soon, will the leaders of the New York State Senate be featured in next year's version of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus with photographs of the late State Senator Vito Battista and the late Comptroller of New York City, Mario Procaccino, how will Nolan Ryan, who started his career with the Mets in 1966, be received at Citi Field the first time that he attends a reunion of his 1969 World's Champion teammates, questions like that, you see).

Yes, most Catholics, diverted by their bread and circuses, have made their own accommodations with the spirit of the world. They are quite content to surrender their lives to Caesar Obamus and his band of grim utilitarians. The accommodations made by most Catholics to the spirit of the world mirrors that of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, whose semi-official newspaper has praised Caesar Obamus and John Lennon and Michael Jackson and Harry Potter and John Calvin and whose official radio station has praised the late Walter Cronkite despite his support for abortion and perversity (see Walter Cronkite's Push for Abortion and Perversity) and whose head, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, praises one false religion after another as he "invites" them to use their false "values" to help to build the "better" world.

There is only one way to build the "better" world, Catholicism, as Pope Saint Pius X made very clear in Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910:

Here we have, founded by Catholics, an inter-denominational association that is to work for the reform of civilization, an undertaking which is above all religious in character; for there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact.

 

Care to dissent?

Behold the "better" world that is the logical result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry. As I noted eight months ago now, Apostasy Has Consequences, the falsehoods of Modernism have made more possible the triumph of the naturalistic, anti-Incarnational falsehoods of Modernity. The only way out of this mess runs through Our Lady's Fatima Message and the perfect fulfillment of her request for the collegial consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by a true pope and all of the world's true bishops.

We must, of course, pray for our country. We must pray that hideous laws will be thwarted by the intercession of Our Lady, who is the Patroness of this country under her title as the Immaculate Conception. More importantly, however, we must make reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.

Our Rosaries of reparation will help to unite us more fully to the mysteries of salvation upon which we meditate when we salute Our Lady as Saint Gabriel the Archangel did at the Annunciation and proclaim her to be blessed as Our Lady herself spoke in the Magnificat, asking her to pray for us now and at the hour of our deaths. Each Rosary we pray, especially before her Divine Son's Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament, will help us to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and to be more willing therefore to plant some seeds for the conversion of men and nations, including our own nation of the United States of America, to the true Faith, outside of which there is salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

Consecrating ourselves as always to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, may we see beyond the crises of the moment in order to be calm and still in the crossing of Our Lady's arms and in the folds of her mantle. She will help us to get home to Heaven as we seek to be more zealous in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of herself, Our Immaculate Queen, especially as we continue to participate in Bishop McKenna's Rosary Crusade.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon, a triumph that will be heralded by unceasing shouts of:

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint James the Greater, pray for us.

Saint Christiana, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints