One Friday morning there was a news feature carried on some public radio outlets regarding the apparently surprising
revelation that the United States Congress of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) would not allow certain clauses in the new health care legislation which mandated that Catholic hospitals should give out artificial birth control of various kinds even though this policy would not not be in line with Catholic teaching since they are believed to be destructive forces in the world, damaging to family and damaging to women. Yet the Congress was criticized, not so much for holding to Church doctrine, but for having the nerve to impose this doctrine on others via the way Catholic hospitals minsters to the patients. Now hospitals don't impose on people, except in so far as they try to serve the best interests of the whole human person. And Catholic hospitals especially try to serve the human person in such a way as to promote the greatest human flourishing. Their patients are not all Catholic of course, and this is generally the point of Catholic witness - come one come all. Yet certain media outlets were outraged that they hospitals would not break their rules about handing out birth control pills or abortifacients for the patients who did not hold to the beliefs that these things are bad. This is not who hospitals work. The patients don't run the hospital. If you don't like the fact that the Catholic hospital rejects the idea that birth control pills are bad for people and society, you can go somewhere else. You can't very well criticize a Catholic hospital for holding to ....Catholic principals. You would never say that a hospital should not impose cancer screening on patients who do not believe in its efficacy. They were criticized for having employees who don't hold to these doctrines. This is not the point. The Catholic Church is itself a hospital for sinners more so that a museum of saints. Believing and knowing what's right and doing what is right are connected (one should lead to the other) but many times we get tricked by lies or we trick ourselves by selfish deceit into adopting behaviors which are unloving and destructive. It's members are not perfect, but they do have an idea of human perfection - a saint. They want all human beings to follow towards that exemplar. Likewise they cannot control what a person does or does not do, they can only serve in the best way they know how. The government should respect their freedom of conscience to do that, just as patients who disagree with their ethics can go elsewhere. But the Catholic Church or the USCCB cannot be responsible when people substitute the gifts of fertility and the flourishing of the human family for cheap and hollow sexual thrills. Rendering women as lust objects and submitting many to the slavery of trafficking, pornography , abuse and prostitution while culminating in the social apocalypse that is abortion - which is back up birth control. That is why the Catholic Church and her hospitals are against birth control. Perhaps if we dropped the euphemisms for a bit, we might be able to see how we have ben deceived by this term 'birth control'. 'Birth control' does not control births any more than a rain mack controls dampness. It prevents births. But try to find a newspaper that will print that headline - 'Federal law mandates birth prevention'. Now, it starts to sound much more like the personal eugenics program that it really is. G. K. Chesterton wrote in his essay "I despise Birth-Control": G.K. Chesterton on Babies and Distributism (From The Well and the Shallows, From Ignatius Insight.) - I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. .... It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control..... the very word Birth-Prevention would strike a chill into the public, the instant it was blazoned on headlines, or proclaimed on platforms, or scattered in advertisements like any other quack medicine".
