Yesterday, the Senate held a floor vote on a proposal to allow employers to decline to provide health benefits which conflict with their religious beliefs. With a twitch of their collective noses, Catholic bishops – each one appointed by the head of a foreign nation - have generated two Congressional hearings, legislation introduced in the House with 190 cosponsors and the Senate with 29, a lawsuit by seven state attorneys general and the support of three of the four GOP presidential candidates. After losing yesterday’s vote by only a 51 to 48 margin, House Speaker Boehner vowed to continue the fight. “It’s important for us to win this issue,” Boehner said.
A similar mandate is already required by 28 states with nary a peep from any religious leader because (like the federal mandate) no one is being forced to buy, use, prescribe or administer a contraceptive. So this is neither about birth control nor religious freedom. As Catholic Congressman Bart Stupak noted after arduous negotiations with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to get their support for the health care reform act in 2010: “Ultimately, what stings the most… is that people tried to use abortion as a tool to stop health-care reform, even after protections were added.”
Actually, it’s about a foreign government with global financial interests flexing its muscle to elect a pro-business government. Prelate of Wall Street and president of the USCCB, Timothy Dolan, just returned from Rome after being elevated to prince of the Holy Roman Church.
Forbes Magazine (“Information for the World’s Business Leaders”) named Pope Benedict XVI fifth on their 2010 list of the World’s Most Powerful People. He slipped to number seven in 2011, (the Koch brothers were number 45). His listing in the top ten is an acknowledgement not only of the pope’s political power but also the inestimable wealth controlled by the Catholic Church around the world, most of it hidden from public scrutiny, tax-free and providing tax deductions to its donors. One of the Vatican’s financial advisers is Master of the Universe Peter Sutherland, former chairman of BP Oil, chairman of Goldman Sachs International and the Trilateral Commission, a member of the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee, vice chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists and adviser to at least one of Opus Dei’s business management “feeder” schools for transnational plutocrats.
Both Putin and Medvedev have met with Ratzinger as have dozens of other world leaders. As reported by the Italian newspaper La Stampa in their English edition of “Vatican Insider,” British Prime Minister Cameron recently sent a delegation to discuss with Vatican officials the situation in the Mideast, including Syria and the Iran/Israel confrontation. Spain’s last election was won by the conservative party with backing from the Catholic Church and Catholic support is reported to be strong enough to influence the upcoming French election. Bishops are still able to sway elections and influence government policy in Eastern Europe, Croatia and Latin America. The Vatican has held high-level talks with Hanoi, Havana and Beijing.
Mario Monti, within days of being asked to form a new Italian government, was on the tarmac to extend his good wishes to Benedict beginning his second trip to Africa to bolster the Church’s authority in that oil-rich continent. The premier and pope have met several times since.
Our last corporatist president, George W. Bush, went to Rome five times to meet with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also made several visits. On one trip, Rice was asked by the Vatican’s secretary of state to intervene in a U.S. lawsuit naming the Holy See as the defendant in a sex abuse case. "It's obvious and reasonable that the Holy See would present its positions as a sovereign entity to the American State Department, and recall the immunity for its acts that international law anticipates," a Vatican official explained.
When Benedict arrived in the U.S. during the last presidential election year, Bush went out to Andrews AFB to greet him, an honor accorded to no other head of a foreign government before or since. After all, it was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself who had given the order to deny communion to the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, in 2004, thereby assuring the Catholic - and deciding vote - for Bush’s reelection.
Nativist Evangelicals and Tea Partiers refuse to acknowledge that Catholic bishops are not elected by their congregations or chosen by any group of Americans but they should know what to expect when they vote a Republican into office.
(P.S. Although loving my country should be enough, I will state that I am a cradle Catholic educated in Catholic schools because I will be attacked as being anti-Catholic, a charge always leveled against those who want to expose the Church as primarily a political/financial institution.)
(Betty Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America (Clarity Press, 2009))