DETROIT — Archbishop Allen Vigneron said last week that the issue
Preaching June 24 at the Fortnight for Freedom Mass at the Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament, the archbishop framed the issue in stark terms.
“We are faced with a variety of laws and ordinances which would force us to enter into actions and become partners in actions which we judge contrary to God’s plan for us,” he said.
“We want to be saints, we want to do right, we want to live according to God’s plan. And it’s wrong for others, no matter what their status or pedigree or power, to ask something other of us,” he told the congregation of more than 500 people.
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The Mass was the principal archdiocesan event in the June 21 to July 4 “Fortnight for Freedom,” the two-week period of prayer, fasting and witness the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops requested to protest what the bishops see as threats to religious liberty.
The protest was sparked chiefly by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ requirement that most Church-sponsored institutions provide insurance that includes coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, which the Church teaches are sinful.
A proposed accommodation to the mandate by the Obama administration would have shifted the cost for the services from Church agencies to the insurance providers themselves, but many bishops have pointed out problems with that approach.
For one thing, they said, it was unlikely insurance companies wouldn’t indirectly recover the costs from the Church under the form of higher premiums and fees. Even more problematic, though, is that some Church-sponsored agencies are self-insured, meaning the Church itself is the insurance provider. Under such scenarios, the Church would still be required to pay for the services it teaches against, the bishops say, which violates its religious liberty.
While the HHS mandate is the most visible, the USCCB has also raised other threats to religious liberty, such as requirements forcing Catholic social service agencies in some states to withdraw from adoption or counseling services over same-sex issues, and proposals that would make it illegal for Church agencies to provide assistance for undocumented immigrants.
“The mission of the Church is to teach right from wrong, to help people understand — not because we think this is what we want to do, but because Christ told us to do this — to teach how we ought to live according to God’s plan,” Archbishop Vigneron said in his homily. “And how can we be the Church of Jesus Christ, if we should be forced by our actions to betray our witness, to be seen to say one thing, but to be seen to do another?”
He said religious liberty is a right that belongs to people by their very nature as human beings, not at the whim of the government. “We recall every Fourth of July that ‘all men are endowed by their Creator’ — not by Congress — we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.
“Nobody can take them away from us, and religious liberty is the first of those rights, Blessed John Paul reminded us, because it’s based on our very identity as God’s creatures. And nothing should or can get in the way of us responding to that duty,” the archbishop said.
Archbishop Vigneron tied his remarks to the readings of the day, the feast of St. John the Baptist, and to other aspects of the scriptural account of the saint’s birth.
“John the Baptist is the herald and witness, given by God, that God’s gift of freedom has come. We celebrate God’s fidelity, and we celebrate what He has accomplished,” he said.
“In every year, this is the Church’s prayer on the 24th of June. But in keeping, this year, the feast day of the birthday of John the Baptist, we are right particularly to notice how the Baptist’s coming, the work of God through the arrival of the Baptist, is about liberation, about the gift of freedom,” the archbishop said.
Among those in the congregation for the Mass were Karen Dudek and her three daughters — Mary, Jessica and Sarah — members of St. Mary of the Hills Parish in Rochester Hills.
“We’ve been following this HHS mandate issue ever since it first came up, and we’re really happy the bishops are united on this,” Karen Dudek said.
She added that she was glad to see more and more Catholics getting involved in the opposition to it.
Mary Dudek, 18, who is entering the University of Michigan as a freshman this fall, said she hopes to help her fellow students to
understand the threat to religious liberty.
Jerry Dywasuk, a member of St. Joseph the Worker Parish in Lake Orion, said he, his wife and brother- and sister-in-law were there to support the archbishop and all the bishops on the religious freedom issue.
“We tend to take these things for granted, but with what the government is doing, we have to defend it. Whoever would have thought that we would have to do this in the United States?”
