Mark Shea was asked by a reader why complying with the HHS Mandate isn't the same as paying taxes that end up funding an unjust war. A great question.
Mark provides an excellent answer:
Our taxpayer dollars have been paying for all sorts immorality, including unjust wars, abortion and contraceptives, and the Church, though it urges a change of policy in such matters, has never mounted the sort of resistance we now see being directed against the HHS Mandate. Why? Because with taxes, the State, though it may mishandle money, nonethless has a legitimate role in providing for the common good that outweighs the inefficiency and corruption that often accompanies government. So Paul, for instance, urges, the Romans to pay their taxes -- even when the Emperor is Nero (Romans 13). But the HHS mandate is not taking from a fungible pool of tax dollars providing for the common good and spending it badly. Rather, it is ordering -- targeting, really -- Catholic institutions and commanding them to do something specifically repugnant to their conscience and threatening to destroy them financially and legally if they do not comply. The entire and sole point of the HHS Mandate is to make open and naked war against the Church and punish her for her beliefs about sexual morality. The Church has a duty to resist such an act of war against her teaching.
He's got more.
The attacks aginst the church, and the sophistication of the arguments used to substantiate those attacks, will increase.
We have to be prepared to defend her.
Still, it would have been nice if the hierarchy (and a high percentage of the men and women in the pews) of the Roman denomination in America hadn't been working hand-in-glove with the leftists for lo these past generations.
It makes it kind of hard to feel much fellow-sympathy with "the church" now that its compromised hierarchs have finally figured out that they were the glove (or sock-puppet), and not the hand, all along.
Posted by: Ilíon | Sunday, July 29, 2012 at 07:06 PM