Especially government money.
Via Scott at Romish Graffiti comes the story of a Catholic agency in Boston--administered by the Archdiocese, no less--that has made a deal with the devil: They were awarded a state contract to provide medical services to the poor. One of the conditions of the contract was that they provide "access" to abortion. "Access" means a phone number to call to find someone to kill your child and transportation if necessary.
Just a short time before, Cardinal Sean O'Malley had insisted that the agency would never "direct any patients to providers of abortion or in any way...participate in actions that are contrary to Catholic moral teaching..." One hardly knows what to say. One hopes Cardinal O'Malley simply didn't know the facts. But if so he should get his skates on and find some way to get the agency out of this mess.
I've hypothesized elsewhere that threats of withdrawing government money would be one way to enforce participation in abortion. The Boston agency apparently is getting this as a new contract, which means they were not already dependent on the money. That means they could not under any reasonable construal be said to be acting under duress. No one forced them to seek this contract. But the arm-twisting will be all the more blatant if in the future organizations already dependent on government funds are threatened with losing such funds if they do not agree to such conditions.
In related news, here is Wesley J. Smith on President Obama and federal conscience protection law.
Comments (2)
Cardinal Sean O'Malley asserted:
One thing everyone has to understand is that these Cardinal-Archbishops of Boston are serpents -- every single one of them, right back to Cardinal Cushing, who was the patron of JFK, the first Irish-Catholic-apostate president of the United States.
Is Cardinal Sean lying here? Who knows? But I will say one thing: I don't trust his word -- not even a little bit.
Posted by George R. | March 20, 2009 5:56 PM
See, I didn't know anything about the Boston cardinals. (That sounds like a baseball team...)
But didn't the Church leaders in Boston lead them in closing down the adoption services rather than place children with homosexual couples? That sounds so principled, and just the opposite of this. So I don't know what to think about the Catholic hierarchy in Boston.
Posted by Lydia | March 20, 2009 9:54 PM