US Defense Spending and Cultural Imperialism

Posted on May 5, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

Whatever may be said about national defense against direct attack and the defense of American citizens against terrorist acts (two subjects which I will not address), I believe that American foreign policy tends to consistently violate both Catholic social teaching and prudence in three important ways:

Hedonistic Cultural Imperialism: The United States, along with the secular West in general, labors under a profound illusion that the proper—indeed the only—way to secure the common good is to eliminate the influence of tradition, religion and family so as to encourage a secular individualism which enables everybody to do exactly as he pleases. There are enormous flaws in our culture deriving from our blindness in these matters, all of which tend to break down many positive beliefs, habits and institutions which hold society together, foster strong intermediary organizations, strengthen the family, and promote virtue. Yet we export our own brand of individualistic hedonism everywhere we have cultural, economic or political influence. This is not only damaging; it also creates bitter enemies.
A World Safe for Democracy: The United States also believes that the only solution to the question of polity in any nation or region is the implementation of Western-style secular democracy as it has evolved in our own culture over the past thousand years. As a result, whenever we do enter a particular country militarily, we are reluctant to depart until we have remade that country in our own political and cultural image, short-circuiting modes of expression and organization common to the surrounding culture, and leaving people with a form of government they are unprepared to understand, let alone implement and sustain. Our idea of “stabilization”, therefore, necessarily involves massive transformations and long commitments to seeing that things are done our way—projects which extend far beyond whatever threat induced us to take military action in the first place.
Enforcing Our Own Self-Interest: While the United States seeks to portray itself as altruistic in its foreign policy (and may at times actually be altruistic), the justifications we offer for particular policies and interventions abroad are generally selectively implemented. For example, we may claim to act to eliminate some tyranny, but in fact we generally do not attempt to eliminate all tyranny but select as our targets those countries where some particular self-interest is at stake. Not only do these special interests often give the lie to any motives which might justify an intervention, but the overall impact is to display a remarkable hubris—an assurance that we are always sacrificing ourselves for the good of the rest of the world—which most people in most places find laughable, even on the occasions when it is at least partially true.

These three problems contradict Catholic social teaching in that they misconstrue the nature and ultimate good of the human person, they fail to respect both deeply ingrained human customs and religion itself, and they make of American power an excuse to police the world in ways which demean the equal rights of other peoples. Moreover, sometimes these failures result in a tortured use of just war theory to justify foreign adventures of an extremely dubious and imprudent nature. Finally, our hubris in these matters often causes our nation to overreach what it is really capable of achieving—to overreach, indeed, what any nation is ever capable of achieving.

Please note this important point. We are not wonderfully sensible, noble and good abroad and just the opposite at home, nor vice versa. The same tendencies which result in ill-considered utopian schemes at home lead to ill-considered utopian schemes abroad. The result is that we frequently increase enmity abroad in the name of friendship and support, while overburdening ourselves at home by investing far too much in situations which seem, to a more prudent intelligence, to be beyond our legitimate scope. I am very sad to note, as a Catholic, that too many conservatives in the United States have never met a war they did not like. I often wonder what friends we might have abroad if our foreign policy could be altered to have just the opposite effects!

I have painted these matters with a broad brush. I do not mean to oversimplify any question that arises out of the complexities of peace and security, any more than I mean in my discussion of domestic policies to oversimplify any question that arises out of legitimate human need here at home. Each issue must be examined on its merits. But in the United States, the economics of our perpetual spending on defense makes its own significant contribution to draining us dry. And to a large extent, I think the same argument applies that I have made about domestic concerns. Just as I am convinced we have arrived at a point when it will be almost universally wiser to cut back government intrusion here at home, so too am I convinced that the same is true of our foreign policy.

The world is not our oyster. And even if it were, an overweening, secular, hedonist America would only lose the pearl.

US Defense Spending and Cultural Imperialism.

A prayer for the Church and for Priests

Posted on April 28, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

A prayer for the Church and for priests, and a special examination of conscience for priests. This priceless letter for you here: Letter to Priests.

Federal Budget Choices Must Protect Poor, Vulnerable People, Says U.S. Bishops’ Conference

Posted on April 21, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

Recent letters echo bishops’ consistent message that federal budget must form

‘circle of protection’ around ‘the least of these’

WASHINGTON—As Congress began working on the FY 2013 budget and spending bills this week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) wrote several letters that repeated and reinforced the bishops’ ongoing call to create a “circle of protection” around poor and vulnerable people and programs that meet their basic needs and protect their lives and dignity. The bishops’ message calls on Congress and the Administration to protect essential help for poor families and vulnerable children and to put the poor first in budget priorities. The bishops’ letters oppose measures that reduce resources for essential safety net programs.

In the letters, Bishops Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, California, and Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, chairmen of the Committees on Domestic Justice and Human Development and International Justice and Peace, respectively, urged Congress to resist proposed cuts in hunger and nutrition programs at home and abroad saying that “a just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons.”

On April 4, Bishop Blaire cautioned that “at a time when the need for assistance from [affordable housing] programs is growing, cutting funds for them could cause thousands of individuals and families to lose their housing and worsen the hardship of thousands more in need of affordable housing.” He also reminded Congress that the Catholic community is one of the largest private, nonprofit providers of affordable housing in the country and is deeply involved in meeting the health housing and nutrition needs of families across the nation.

Bishops Blaire and Pates reaffirmed the “moral criteria to guide these difficult budget decisions” outlined in their March 6 budget letter:

1.Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.

2.A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.

3.Government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times…

Just solutions, however, must require shared sacrifice by all, including raising adequate revenues, eliminating unnecessary military and other spending, and fairly addressing the long-term costs of health insurance and retirement programs.

In April 16 and April 17 letters to the House Agriculture Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee addressing cuts required by the budget resolution, Bishop Blaire said “The House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria.” Bishop Blaire also wrote that cuts to nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP- food stamps) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) will hurt hungry children, poor families, low-income workers and other vulnerable people. Additionally, he wrote that if cuts to the federal budget need to be made, savings should first be found in programs that target more affluent and powerful interests.

Federal Budget Choices Must Protect Poor, Vulnerable People, Says U.S. Bishops’ Conference (USCCB)

economic crisis reflects moral crisis

Posted on March 31, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

“Religious perspectives on the current financial crisis: vision for a just economic order” was the theme of the eleventh meeting of the Bilateral Commission of the Delegations of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, which was held in Rome from 27 to 29 March. The event was presided by Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, and by Cardinal Peter Kodwo Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

In an English-language joint statement issued at the end of the meeting, the two sides highlight that, “while many factors contributed to the financial crisis, at its roots lies a crisis of moral values in which the importance of having, reflected in a culture of greed, eclipsed the importance of being; and where the value of truth reflected in honesty and transparency was sorely lacking in economic activity”.

“At the heart of Jewish and Catholic visions for a just economic order is the affirmation of the sovereignty and providence of the Creator of the world with Whom all wealth originates and which is given to humankind as a gift for the common good”, the text adds. Therefore “the purpose of an economic order is to serve the well being of society, affirming the human dignity of all people, each created in the divine image”. This concept “is antithetical to egocentricity. Rather, it requires the promotion of the well being of the individual in relation to community and society”. It also “posits the obligation to guarantee certain basic human needs, such as the protection of life, sustenance, clothing, housing, health, education and employment”. The commission also identifies certain particularly vulnerable categories of people, among them migrant and foreign workers “whose condition serves as a measure of the moral health of society”.

Jews and Catholics: The Economic Crisis is a Crisis of Moral Values (VIS)

The statement recalls the obligation on countries with developed economies “to recognise their responsibilities and duties towards countries and societies in need, especially in this era of globalisation”. In this context the participants in the meeting recall “the universal destination of the goods of the earth; a culture of “enough” that implies a degree of self-limitation and modesty; responsible stewardship; an ethical system of allocation of resources and priorities”. They likewise mention the “partial remission of debts on national and international levels”, highlighting the need “to extend this to families and individuals”.

The members of the bilateral commission underscore the role that faith communities must play in contributing to a responsible economic order, and the importance of their engagement by government, educational institutions, and the media. Finally they note how “the crisis has revealed the profound lack of an ethical component in economic thinking. Hence, it is imperative that institutes and academies of economic studies and policy formation include ethical training in their curricula, similar to that which has developed in recent years in the field of medical ethics”.

Sophie Scholl and the The White Rose (weisse rose)

Posted on March 25, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

The White Rose (weisse rose), was named after a Spanish novel (Rosa Blanco). Sophie & Hans Scholl with Christoph Probst summer of 1942

In the early summer of 1942, a group of young men — including Willi Graf, Christoph Probst and Hans Schol formed a a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of a number of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943, that called for active opposition to the Nazis regime.

The group co-authored six anti-Nazi Third Reich political resistance leaflets. Calling themselves the White Rose, they instructed Germans to passively resist the Nazis. They had been horrified by the behavior of the Germans on the Eastern Front where they had witnessed a group of naked Jews being shot in a pit.

___

The core of the White Rose consisted of five students — Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans Scholl, Alex Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Christoph Probst, all in their early twenties — also members were Hans and Sophie’s sister Inge Scholl, and a professor of philosophy, Kurt Huber. Between June 1942 and February 1943, they prepared and distributed six different leaflets, in which they called for the active opposition of the German people to Nazi oppression and tyranny. Huber drafted the final two leaflets. A draft of a seventh leaflet, written by Christoph Probst, was found in the possession of Hans Scholl at the time of his arrest by the Gestapo, who destroyed it. The White Rose was influenced by the German Youth Movement, of which Christoph Probst was a member. Hans Scholl was a member of the Hitler Youth until 1936 and Sophie was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel. The ideas of d.j.1.11 had strong influence on Hans Scholl and his brothers and sisters. d.j.1.11 was a youth group of the German Youth Movement, founded by Eberhard Koebel in 1929.

The sixth leaflet (flyer)

Willi Graf was a member of Neudeutschland and the Grauer Orden. Neudeutschland is a catholic youth association. The group’s members were motivated by their Christian beliefs. They had witnessed the atrocities of the war, both on the battlefield and against the civilian population in the East, and sensed that the reversal of fortune that the Wehrmacht suffered at Stalingrad would eventually lead to Germany’s defeat. They rejected fascism and militarism and believed in a federated Europe that adhered to principles of tolerance and justice.

The Leaflets

During early summer of 1942, Alex Schmorell and Hans Scholl wrote four leaflets, copied them on a typewriter with as many copies as could be made, probably not exceeding 100, and distributed them throughout Germany. These leaflets were left in telephone books in public phone booths, mailed to professors and students, and taken by courier to other universities for distribution. All four were written in a relatively brief period, between June 27 and July 12. As far as is known today, Hans Scholl wrote the first and fourth leaflets, Alex Schmorell participated with the second and third.

All leaflets were also sent to the members of the White Rose, in order that we could check whether they were intercepted. Significantly, of the first 100 leaflets, 35 were turned over to the Gestapo.

By turning the leaflets over to the secret police one hoped to be beyond suspicion. It might even have entered one’s mind – and it certainly would not have been unthinkable – that such leaflets could have actually been produced and mailed by the Gestapo in order to test one’s loyalty to the party and state

On three nights in February 1943 — the 3rd, 8th and 15th — Hans, Alex and Willi conducted the most dangerous of all the White Rose activities. The three men used tar and paint to write slogans on the sides of houses on Ludwigstrasse, a main thoroughfare in Munich near the University. They wrote “Down With Hitler”, “Hitler Mass Murderer”, “freedom”, and drew crossed-out swastikas… this while policemen and other officials patroled the streets of Munich. It was, by far, the most public, blatant and dangerous of their activities.

On Thursday, February eighteenth, 1943, Sophie and Hans distributed the pamphlets personally at the university. They hurriedly dropped stacks of copies in the empty corridors for students to find when they flooded out of lecture rooms. Leaving before the class break, the Scholls noticed that some copies remained in the suitcase and decided it would be a pity not to distribute them.

They returned to the atrium and climbed the staircase to the top floor, and Sophie flung the last remaining leaflets into the air. This spontaneous action was observed by the custodian Jakob Schmid. The police were called and Hans and Sophie were taken into Gestapo custody. The other active members were soon arrested, and the group and everyone associated with them were brought in for interrogation.

Sophie and Hans were questioned for four days in Munich, and their trial was set for February twenty second. They, along with Christoph, were arrested. Within days, all three were brought before the People’s Court in Berlin. On February 22, 1943. The trial was run by Roland Freisler, head judge of the court, and lasted only a few hours, they were convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Only hours later, the court carried out that sentence by guillotine. All three faced their deaths bravely, Hans crying out his last words,

“Long live freedom!”

The graves of Hans & Sophie Scholl

Later that same year, other members of the White Rose — Alexander Schmorell (age 25), Willi Graf (age 25), and Kurt Huber (age 49) — were tried and executed. Most of the other students convicted for their part in the group’s activities received prison sentences.

Prior to their deaths, several members of the White Rose believed that their execution would stir university students and other anti-war citizens into a rallying activism against Hitler and the war. Accounts suggest, however, that university students continued their studies as usual, citizens mentioned nothing, many regarding the movement as anti-national. Their actions were mostly dismissed, until after the war when their efforts were eventually praised by the German consciousness.

Sources:

Students Against Tyranny: The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich, 1942-1943

White Rose, The (pamphlet) Franz J. Muller,et al., White Rose Foundation, Munich 1991

At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans & Sophie Scholl Inge Jens, ed., Harper & Row, 1987 USHMM

_________++++++++++++_________________++++++++++++

On 22 February 1943, Scholl, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. They were all beheaded by executioner Johann Reichhart in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison only a few hours later, at 17:00 hrs. The execution was supervised by Walter Roemer, the enforcement chief of the Munich district court. Prison officials, in later describing the scene, emphasized the courage with which she walked to her execution. Her last words were:^[6]^[7]

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?

Fritz Hartnagel was evacuated from Stalingrad in January 1943, but did not return to Germany before Sophie was already dead. He later married Sophie’s sister Elizabeth. +++ THE LEAFLETS Quoting extensively from the Bible, Aristotle and Novalis, as well as Goethe and Schiller, they appealed to what they considered the German intelligentsia, believing that they would be intrinsically opposed to Nazism. At first, the leaflets were sent out in mailings from cities in Bavaria and Austria, since the members believed that southern Germany would be more receptive to their anti-militarist message.

WHERE EVER YOU READ “NAZI GERMANY” IN THIS POST, TRY SUBSTITUTING “OBAMA AMERICA”.

“	Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?	”
— From the first leaflet of the White Rose

“	Since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way … The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals … Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!	”
— From the second leaflet of the White Rose.

Alexander Schmorell, who penned the words the White Rose, has become most famous for having spoken, so much so that he is now an Orthodox saint after his martyrdom. Most of the more practical material —calls to arms and statistics of murder— came from Alex’s pen. Hans Scholl wrote in a characteristically high style, exhorting the German people to action on the grounds of philosophy and reason. At the end of July 1942, some of the male students in the group were deployed to the Eastern Front for military service (acting as medics) during the academic break. In late autumn, the men returned, and the White Rose resumed its resistance activities. In January 1943, using a hand-operated duplicating machine, the group is thought to have produced between 6,000 and 9,000 copies of their fifth leaflet, “Appeal to all Germans!”, which was distributed via courier runs to many cities (where they were mailed). Copies appeared in Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Hamburg, Innsbruck, and Berlin. The fifth leaflet was composed by Hans Scholl with improvements by Huber. These leaflets warned that Hitler was leading Germany into the abyss; with the gathering might of the Allies, defeat was now certain. The reader was urged to “Support the resistance movement!” in the struggle for “Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states”. These were the principles that would form “the foundations of the new Europe”. The leaflets caused a sensation, and the Gestapo began an intensive search for the publishers. On the nights of the 3rd, 8th, and 15 February 1943, the slogans “Freedom” and “Down with Hitler” appeared on the walls of the University and other buildings in Munich. Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl and Willi Graf had painted them with tar-based paint (similar graffiti that appeared in the surrounding area at this time was painted by imitators). The shattering German defeat at Stalingrad at the beginning of February provided the occasion for the group’s sixth leaflet, written by Huber. Headed “Fellow students!”, it announced that the “day of reckoning” had come for “the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured”.”The dead of Stalingrad adjure us!” Shortly after the capture of the members of the White Rose, Leaflet No. 6 was smuggled out of Germany and later copied by the Allies and dropped from aircraft as propaganda over Nazi Germany.^[1]

QUOTATIONS:

If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer. (From Leaflet 1, urging immediate initiative by the reader. Nemesis of course punished those who had fallen to the temptation of hubris.)
Why do German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? … The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals….[The German] must evidence not only sympathy; no, much more: a sense of complicity in guilt….For through his apathetic behaviour he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do…. he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each man wants to be exonerated ….But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!… now that we have recognized [the Nazis] for what they are, it must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts. (From Leaflet 2)
…why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanised state system presided over by criminals and drunks? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right – or rather, your moral duty – to eliminate this system? (From Leaflet 3)
…every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present “state” in the most effective way, how he can strike it the most telling blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt. (From Leaflet 3)
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace! (Leaflet 4′s concluding phrase, which became the motto of the White Rose resistance.) “We will not be silent” has been put on t-shirts in many languages (among them Arabic, Spanish, French, Hebrew, and Persian) in protest against the U.S. war in Iraq. This shirt, in the English-Arabic version, led, in 2006, to the Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar‘s being prevented from boarding a Jet Blue airplane from New York to his home in San Francisco, until he changed his shirt.^[13]
Last words of Sophie Scholl: …your heads will fall as well. There is, however, some dispute over whether Sophie or Hans actually said this; other sources claim that Sophie’s final words were God, you are my refuge into eternity. The film Sophie Scholl, The Last Days shows her last words as being The sun still shines (however, these are probably fictitious).
Last words of Hans Scholl: Es lebe die Freiheit! (Long live freedom!).
Now my death will be easy and joyful. These were the words of Christoph Probst after a Catholic priest conditionally (sub conditione) baptized him and had heard his first Confession.
Hitler and his regime must fall so that Germany may live. This is from an unpublished leaflet written by Christoph Probst.
When you have decided, act. Another quote from Christoph Probst‘s unpublished leaflet.
I always made it a point to carry several extra copies of the leaflets with me whenever I was walking through the city – specifically for that purpose. Whenever I saw an opportune moment, I took it. Another Sophie Scholl quote.
I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.

Contraception, the Debate

Posted on March 10, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

In the weeks since President Obama proposed a compromise on his plan to mandate free contraception coverage, the nation’s Catholic bishops have appeared unified and galvanized in their thorough rejection of the accommodation.

For the hierarchy, it’s been an invigorating change after years of playing defense during the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

“What (Obama) offered was next to nothing,” a confident New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Catholic News Service.

Other prominent churchmen were even more derisive. They blasted Obama’s olive branch of having insurers — rather than employers like Catholic hospitals and universities — pay for birth control coverage under a separate policy as an “accounting gimmick.”

Though the White House has convened meetings with USCCB staff and consulted with various bishops in a bid to reach a final compromise, Dolan has accused the administration of negotiating in bad faith and said the talks are “going nowhere.”

Yet as the U.S. hierarchy stakes its claim as the first and final arbiter of the Catholic position in this hotly contested battle, the bishops are also facing a number of internal challenges. If not addressed, they could undermine the bishops’ position and weaken their future standing if they are seen as losing their face-off with the White House.

For all the strong talk from the bishops, the window of opportunity is closing, and the nearly 300 active bishops in the conference are still debating the best approach to the negotiations — or even whether to negotiate at all.

Some are arguing for a take-it-or-leave-it strategy with the White House. Even if that hard-line approach fails, they say that it will draw such a stark contrast between Obama’s agenda and the bishops’ interests that Catholics will rally to the church and help to defeat Obama in November.

Others, however, think the bishops should temper their rhetoric and keep a place at the table. That would give the bishops a better chance of securing an acceptable deal — especially if Obama wins a second term. This pragmatic approach says the hierarchy needs to build bridges to help avert future confrontations and to foster cooperation on shared political goals.

“I don’t think at the present time that they have a strategy,” said Russell Shaw, a former spokesman for the USCCB who writes frequently about the church and politics.

The main reason for the lack of focus, Shaw said, is the bishops’ premium on operating by consensus, and consensus is difficult to achieve when you are dealing with hundreds of individual bishops, many with strong egos and even stronger opinions, who meet together just twice a year.

That’s why Shaw believes that next week’s (March 13-14) closed-door meeting of the USCCB’s administrative committee — a gathering of about 40 or more leading U.S. bishops — will be “of crucial importance” in developing a more effective political response, if indeed it’s not too late.

Privately, several bishops and church insiders agree.

“We have got to pull together,” said one bishop, a self-styled “hard-liner” who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the sensitivity of the USCCB’s position. “The real problem is, in between meetings, how do we operate? We are at a disadvantage, there’s no question about it.”

What do the bishops want? And can they get it?

The bishops also have to figure out what they want. While it seems like an obvious question, there are many answers.

Initially, the bishops signaled they were simply seeking a broader exemption from the contraception mandate for religious institutions. But USCCB leaders have increasingly expressed a desire to roll back the entire regulation.

At the same time, they are also pushing for passage of a bill that would provide broad conscience protections to groups that oppose paying for contraception.

The bishops’ top lawyer, Anthony Picarello, went a step further when he proposed passage of what has come to be known as the “Taco Bell rule,” arguing that individual business owners also should be exempt because “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate.”

The problem is none of those options has a realistic chance of getting past Congress or the White House; the Senate already rejected a bill to provide a wider conscience allowance. And the courts are a roll of the dice. Yet the bishops are still pursuing all avenues, and without a clear road map for success.

“In many ways (Obama’s Feb. 10 compromise offer) solved little and complicated a lot,” as Dolan wrote his fellow bishops in a March 2 letter that reflected the bishops’ dilemma as well as their resolve. “We now have more questions than answers, more confusion than clarity.”

The bishops, however, are not the major stakeholders in this fight. Obama’s compromise would mainly affect Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies that employ and insure the hundreds of thousands of people covered by the mandate; churches are already exempt.

From the beginning, those Catholic agencies have been far more willing to negotiate. “A welcome step,” is how the Rev. John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, characterized Obama’s compromise.

Other Catholic universities echoed that view, and Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association that represents a sprawling network of Catholic hospitals, also hailed the accommodation.

Without the church’s institutional muscle solidly behind them, the bishops are in a much weaker negotiating position.

“If the bishops reject this deal, they don’t have a lot of options,” Shaw wrote in Crisis Magazine, a conservative Catholic outlet. “Closing down thousands of Catholic institutions and programs isn’t likely. Remedial legislation pending in Congress has little chance of becoming law with Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. As for simply refusing to obey the … rule, it’s a last resort.”

Perhaps most importantly, the bishops can’t count on even a majority of the nation’s 67 million Catholics to support their position — whatever it turns out to be. Surveys show that U.S. Catholics — including the most devout — do not heed the bishops’ teachings against artificial birth control, and framing the issue as a threat to religious freedom hasn’t moved Catholics to mass opposition.

In reality, the state of the economy, not birth control or religious liberty, is likely to determine the outcome of the election, and that is out of the hierarchy’s control.

Caught in the middle of all of this is Dolan. As one of the most visible and influential leaders in this hemisphere, Dolan’s natural instincts are to craft a deal, and that’s his job as leader of the USCCB. But a fragmented hierarchy and uncertain allies make Dolan’s task immeasurably harder.

“In his struggles with the Obama administration, Dolan isn’t looking for a war, but he is looking for a win,” Catholic columnist Michael Sean Winters wrote in The Daily Beast.

A victory may be hard to come by, however, and the bishops may not have the firepower for a war.

Senate Vote To Set Aside Conscience Act Marks Chance To Build Bipartisan Support, Seek Judicial Remedies For Religious Freedom

Posted on March 3, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

March 1, 2012

WASHINGTON—The Senate’s 51-48 vote March 1 to table the bipartisan Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (S. 1467), sponsored by Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) and 37 other senators, impels the Church to strengthen its resolve to support religious freedom.

“The need to defend citizens’ rights of conscience is the most critical issue before our country right now,” said Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bishop Lori chairs the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). “We will continue our strong defense of conscience rights through all available legal means. Religious freedom is at the heart of democracy and rooted in the dignity of every human person. We will not rest until the protection of conscience rights is restored and the First Amendment is returned to its place of respect in the Bill of Rights.”

“I am grateful today to Senator Roy Blunt and the 47 other Senators who cast a bipartisan vote reaffirming our nation’s long tradition of respect for rights of conscience in health care,” said Bishop Lori. “We will build on this base of support as we pursue legislation in the House of Representatives, urge the Administration to change its course on this issue, and explore our legal rights under the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

Freedom of conscience has been in the forefront since the Obama Administration issued a regulation under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act forcing most employers, including religious institutions, to provide coverage for sterilization and contraceptives, including abortion-inducing drugs, even when they violate church teaching.

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Keywords: Sen. Roy Blunt, Bishop William E. Lori, U.S. bishops, USCCB, conscience rights, religious liberty, contraception, sterilization, abortifacients

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A Charge to Revive the Role of Faith in the Public Square

Posted on February 25, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

By Rick Santorum

University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas
Publication Date: September 9, 2010

Three pictures hung in the home of my devoutly Catholic immigrant grandparents when I was a boy and I remember them well — Jesus, Pope Paul VI and John F. Kennedy. The president was a source of great pride and a symbol to Catholics that all barriers had finally been broken. What my family and maybe even candidate Kennedy at the time didn’t realize was that in a key moment in that election of 1960 right here in Houston, Kennedy began the construction of another, even more threatening wall for our society — one that sealed off informed moral wisdom into a realm of non rational beliefs that have no legitimate role in political discourse.

Fifty years ago this Sunday JFK delivered a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to dispel suspicions about the role the papacy might play in the government of this country under his administration. Let’s make no mistake about it — Kennedy was addressing a real issue at the time. Prejudice against Catholics threatened to cost him the election.

But on that day, Kennedy chose not just to dispel fear, he chose to expel faith.

Let me quote from the beginning of Kennedy’s speech:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.

The idea of strict or absolute separation of church and state is not and never was the American model. It was a model used in countries like France and until recently Turkey, but it found little support in America until it was introduced into the public discourse by Justice Hugo Black in the case of Everson v. The Board of Education in 1947. (Black, by the way, was a Catholic-hating former member of the KKK who ironically enough advocated this strict separation doctrine to keep public funds from Catholic schools.)

While the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, the concept of keeping the government apart from religion does.

The first part of the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a state church, such as existed in England and in some of the states in 1791, and from discriminating for or against particular faiths. The founders were determined to ensure that the new national government had no jurisdiction over matters of religion, in large part to insure that each American would be free to pursue the religion of their choice without state interference. Far from reflecting hostility toward religion, our founders, rooted in their own faith convictions, knew that faith was not just an essential element, but the essence of civilization and the inspiration of culture.

The second reference to religion in the First Amendment guaranteed the free exercise of religion and in conjunction with the prohibition of established churches, these two concepts were to work together to ensure that religion and people of faith had powerful constitutional protections of their right to not only worship as their conscience dictated, but to be free to bring their religiously informed moral convictions into the public discourse.

The phrase “wall of separation” used by Black comes from a letter written by a founder who didn’t even attend the constitutional convention, Thomas Jefferson. After he was elected president he mentioned the phrase in a response to a letter written to him by the Danbury Baptists. The Baptists had expressed concern to him about the right of the government to interfere with the religious pursuits of the people, not the right of the people to engage their government with religiously informed moral judgments. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was describing how the First Amendment was designed to protect churches from the government and nothing more. Note that the Sunday following the day he wrote the letter, Jefferson attended religious services in the Capitol building — so much for the founders’ hostility or indifference to religion. But Kennedy’s misuse of the phrase constructed a high barrier that ultimately would keep religious convictions out of politics in a place where our founders had intended just the opposite. Kennedy continued:

I believe in an America … where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act… where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.

Of course no religious body should “impose its will” on the public or public officials, but that was not the issue then or now. The issue is one that every diverse civilization like America has to deal with — how do we best live with our differences. Our founders’ vision, unlike the French, was to give every belief and every believer and non-believer a place at the table in the public square. Madison referred to this “equal and complete liberty” as the “true remedy.” Admittedly our country hadn’t always lived up to that ideal — in particular with respect to Jews and Catholics, thus the legitimate reason for Kennedy’s speech. But what JFK advocated sounded more like Ataturk than Madison — that religious ideas and actors were not welcome in public policy debates.

Ultimately Kennedy’s attempt to reassure Protestants that the Catholic Church would not control the government and suborn its independence advanced a philosophy of strict separation that would create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths. He laid the foundation for attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech by the secular left and its political arms like the ACLU and the People for the American Way. This has and will continue to create dissension and division in this country as people of faith increasingly feel like second-class citizens.

Kennedy took words written to protect religion from the government and used them to protect the government from religion. It worked — in the years following this speech the concept of an absolute “separation of church and state” gained wider and wider acceptance due to its inculcation in the academy. When I was in the senate I used to question student groups by asking them which phrase was in the constitution “separation of church and state” or “the free exercise of religion”? Separation always won usually by a wide margin. Another consequence is the debasement of our First Amendment right of religious freedom. Of all the great and necessary freedoms listed in the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion (not just to believe, but to live out that belief) is the most important; before freedom of speech, before freedom of the press, before freedom of assembly, before freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, before all others. This freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, is the trunk from which all other branches of freedom on our great tree of liberty get their life. Cut down the trunk and the tree of liberty will die and in its place will be only the barren earth of tyranny.

This first freedom has now been placed on the lowest rung of interests to be considered when weighing rights against one another. The fruits of this misguided idea are increasingly evident. For example:

The ACLU is currently pushing HHS to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions under the emergency care mandate of Obamacare.

A University of Illinois professor hired to teach classes on Catholic doctrine was fired because he taught (well…) Catholic doctrine.

Religious organizations are increasingly excluded from Public Universities unless they deny their deeply held religious beliefs. This year, the Supreme Court affirmed that The Christian Legal Society can be barred from the Hastings College of Law because they insist on holding their leaders accountable to Christian standards of sexual ethics.

In 2006, Catholic Charities of Boston was forced to abandon adoptions due to a state law requiring that they assist homosexuals in adopting children.

Kennedy’s error also unleashed a new form of censorship that would make vows to the Almighty a constitutional offense, rob clergy of their First Amendment rights and deprive our leaders and our country of their inspired wisdom and guidance.

When I served in the US Senate I often looked to the moral wisdom found in the writings of such religious figures as Augustine, Theresa of Avila, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas More as well as from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel.

Mother Teresa’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, spoken with a humility that made her quiet voice a loud alarm in our hearts, moved me to take a leading role in an issue that pulled at the moral fabric of our country: partial birth abortion. And it was Pope John Paul II and other Christian leaders’ call for the biblical concept of absolving debt at the Jubilee year of 2000 that motivated me to join Sen. Joe Biden to reduce third world debt. Should I have rejected the instructions from the clergy to relieve debt because it was inspired by the word of God? Did Kennedy reject desegregation because black ministers like the Rev. Martin Luther King arguing from a Biblical premise advocated it? Thank goodness he didn’t.

There’s a long list of Americans moved by faith who took on great causes for the nation they love: Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin shook a nation to war; Jeremiah Evarts, who defended American Indian rights; and Susan B. Anthony, who was inspired by Jesus’ radical view of women as equal to men. What would our nation look like had the spirit not moved in them?

If there were any doubts about Kennedy’s intent to devalue faith’s role in shaping public discourse his concluding words erased it:

Whatever issue should come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject I will make my decision … in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates.

So pressures or dictates from labor unions or environmental groups are smiled upon, and only the religious ones see a frown. To justify this suspicion toward the legitimate claims of faith, notice that Kennedy and his subsequent followers have invoked their conscience as their guide. All well and good. I too use my conscience as a guide, but you are not born with a competent conscience; it is formed and continues to be formed by something and reflects that formation. If faith in objective and eternal truths is no longer going to inform your conscience what moral code will? And where does that code come from? And what is the basis of its authority? Doesn’t the public have a right to know? Yet Kennedy’s followers never tell us.

What they do tell us is clear: that their consciences are not rooted in faith and as such they can be permitted to freely apply their ideas in making laws and deciding cases. On the other hand, consciences rooted in a belief in God are free to apply their ideas to personal matters, but if your beliefs, in the words of my former senate colleague Chuck Schumer, are “deeply held beliefs” that impact your public positions — they must be excluded.

Writing in the nineteenth century, whose conflicts were prelude to ours, John Henry Newman said: “Conscience has rights because it has duties; but in this age … it is the very right and freedom of conscience … to be independent of unseen obligations. It becomes a license to take up any or no religion … to boast of being above all religions and to be an impartial critic of each of them.” Without some objective moral touchstone, conscience is no more than self indulgence — “I can do what I want simply because my conscience tells me to do it.” A major political offshoot of Kennedy’s philosophy, sometimes referred to as the “privatization of faith,” was best illustrated by Mario Cuomo’s speech at Notre Dame in September 1984. There he espoused his nuanced position on abortion: that, as a result of his religious convictions he was personally opposed to abortion. But he then applies Kennedy’s thesis and refrains from imposing his values upon others whose views, because the truth is indiscernible, are equally valid. A virtual stampede of self-proclaimed Catholic politicians followed Cuomo into this seemingly safe harbor and remain there today. This political hand washing made it easier for Catholics to be in public life, but it also made it harder for Catholics to be Catholic in public life.

Cuomo’s safe harbor is nothing more than a camouflage for the faint of heart — a cynical sanctuary for concealing true convictions from the public, and for rationalizing a reluctance to defend them.

Kennedy, Cuomo and their modern day disciples on the secular left would resolve any conflict between religion and politics by relegating faith to the closet. I see it as a healthy tension that Jesus dealt with directly when he said, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” The early church under Pope Gelasius pronounced the two swords doctrine defining two realms, the realm of the sacred and the realm of the secular. Our founders understood that the secular realm of positive law would be at times unjust and that is why the more important sacred realm would arm people with, as one of our founder’s James Wilson put it, a “principle of revolution” to strive to set things right.

As a senator, whenever I was confronted with an immoral law that was unjust or harmed society, I had an obligation to respect the law, but an equal obligation to work toward changing it to comport with what is moral. I agree with the founders that there is a natural law which can be known through the exercise of reason against which the positive or civil law must be measured and if needed amended.

Martin Luther King laid out his approach for ordinary citizens in a Letter from a Birmingham Jail. He wrote: “There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. … How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. ”

That said it’s important to exercise prudence in such matters, particularly concerning matters of private personal behavior. Not all immoral conduct should be illegal. There are many good reasons not to fight such behavior with the coercive tools of criminal law. With the common sense of his classical tradition, Thomas Aquinas said that law “does not forbid all the vices, from which upright men can keep away, but only those grave ones which the average man can avoid, and chiefly those which do harm to others and have to be stopped if human society is to be maintained, such as murder and theft and so forth.”

So as long as this immoral behavior is not done in public or has significant public consequence it should stand outside civil sanctions. Aquinas was clear and practical: “The purpose of human law is to bring people to virtue, not suddenly, but step by step.”

An illustration of this dichotomy is the issue of laws pertaining to certain sexual practices and what is called same sex marriage. In 2003 I expressed concern about the court’s decision in a case challenging a Texas sodomy statute. I did so not because I would have voted for the Texas law; following St. Thomas’ wisdom I would have opposed the Texas law.

I raised concerns about the consequences of the legal reasoning the court gave for invalidating the statute. They created a new constitutional “right” to consensual sexual conduct. I warned such a right would be used as a basis to create new a right that could have profound public consequences — same sex marriage.

I have been criticized in the media for daring to speak out on these sensitive moral issues. So be it. I’ve tried, not always successfully, to approach these issues with the appropriate passion for the important matter at hand, with respect for the other point of view, without malice toward my opponent and with the humility that my judgment in some cases may be in error.

As it has been pointed out to me on numerous occasions, there are moral issues where I have differed from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and even the pope — welfare reform, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some immigration policies. While all of these issues have profound moral underpinnings none of them involve moral absolutes. War is are not always unjust; government aid is not always just or loving. The bishops and I may disagree on such prudential matters, but as with all people of good will with whom I disagree, I have an obligation to them and my country to listen to their perspective and perform a healthy reexamination of my own position. Let me be clear; I am not arguing here that I have, or our country should, be governed on the basis of religious revelation — that we should for example have laws against murder, stealing, abortion and polygamy only because the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob decreed it so. I wholehearted agree with C.S. Lewis who said “I love God, but I detest theocracies.”

Obviously, not everyone shares the Judeo-Christian moral convictions. All of us have an obligation to justify our positions based upon something that is accessible to everyone irrespective of their religious beliefs. We owe the public arguments based upon reason grounded in truth.

In the Encyclical, Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II wrote as his opening sentence:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women can come to the fullness of the truth about themselves.

The principle of the harmony of faith and reason is a crucial contribution that the Catholic Church brings to the debate. Those of us who are Catholic along with a majority of Protestants and Jews believe that God reveals himself through his creation and, as such, moral truths that should govern a just society are accessible to all — believers and non-believers alike.

At the same time, of course, we must hold fast to our convictions of what is right and what is wrong according to our faith, and not fall into the trap of idolizing our own intellects, or trying so hard not to offend that we succumb to a watery political correctness. It should not make us uncomfortable to call something evil if that’s what it is.

Having convictions doesn’t mean that we don’t understand the complexity of the world — it means that we are able to prioritize the pursuit of truth and justice and call evil what it is.

Our American civilization has reflected a most healthy union of faith and reason. From long experience, we know that faith for its own sake, apart from love of truth is only a sentiment, and that reason for its own sake withers into rationalism. Neither is autonomous. If I have faith only in myself, I belong to a very small religion. And as for the right use of reason, let’s remember what G. K. Chesterton said: “A madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

In his Regensburg address, Pope Benedict XVI contrasted the Judeo-Christian revelation with the concept of God held by some outside of the Judeo-Christian world as aloof from reason. He also discussed those societies which would attempt to live without God, as in secular Europe or Communist China. In the secular West, he said,

… the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.

The movement in our country to fly on “one wing,” reason alone, will ultimately undermine the very foundation of our country — freedom.

America is rooted in the founders’ belief that free people, whose God-given rights are protected by a government that allows the individual to pursue their dreams and reap the fruits of their labor, would build the most just and prosperous society in the history of man. They were right; freedom was the key ingredient in the American experiment.

Our founders understood it was relatively easy to establish freedom in our Constitution, the harder task was to create a system that would maintain it against the corrosive force of time. The author Os Guinness describes how they accomplished this as the Golden Triangle of Freedom: “Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith and faith requires freedom and around again.”

That freedom requires virtue was explained by the political philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites … Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Virtue requires faith because faith is the primary teacher of morality. That is not to say that one cannot be virtuous without faith, but for society as a whole faith is the indispensable agent of virtue.

Faith requires freedom. Why has America remained a deeply religious country averting the road to secularism traveled by our European brothers and sisters? Again Madison’s “true remedy,” the combination of “free exercise” and no religious state supported monopoly, has created a vibrant marketplace of religions extolling everywhere the word of God to inspire people to fulfill His special plan for each of us.

Our founders’ inspired brilliance created a paradigm that has given America the best chance of any civilization in the history of man to endure the test of time. Time, this time now in American history is putting that to the test.

I will conclude with a final consequence of what started here 50 years ago by bringing in one of the Catholic Church’s foremost American advocates for religious freedom, John Courtney Murray. He advised us that the first two articles of the First Amendment are “not articles of faith, but articles of peace.” What was Murray getting at?

E Pluribus Unum — out of many one. Our founders believed that if they fostered religion and the Judeo-Christian moral code we would achieve something that was never before seen in a country with so many competing faiths — a truly tolerant, democratic and harmonious public square.

On June 12, 1775, Congress’ first act was to urge a national day of “public humiliation, fasting and prayer” for which it commissioned “ministers of the gospel of all denominations” to participate.

On the assigned day, Congress attended services at an Anglican Church in the morning and a Presbyterian meetinghouse in the afternoon. The following year they convened at Philadelphia’s “Roman Chapel” and later a Dutch Lutheran Church. This is the vision. A vibrant, fully clothed public square; a marketplace of believers and non-believers where truth could be proffered and reasoned, and differences civilly tolerated.

One of my favorite sayings is: We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. For over 200 years we have been blessed with a country often described as a melting pot. The fire that helped to gently melt us together into a country where people of different faiths and cultures come together in our dynamic democracy to peaceably find common ground — is that first freedom — the true remedy.

What the movement spawned here 50 years ago seems to disregard is that repressing or banishing people of faith from having a say in government creates alienation which could lead to disaffection and conflict as we have seen in other countries around the world. Think about all of the people in this country from different cultures who if they lived in their native country would be sworn enemies. Yet when they come to America they are inoculated with something that enables them to work together on the school board and neighborhood associations.A key ingredient in that inoculation is the freedom of conscience that ameliorates the fear, frustration and mistrust that comes from repression.

Kennedy’s speech was historic because it did offer a teachable moment. In the short term it accomplished a great good by helping to put an end to Catholic bigotry. Unfortunately, its lasting impact not only undermined the essential role that faith has successfully played in America, but it reduced religion to mere personal “belief” and helped launch a cultural revolution, proclaiming loudly that on matters of moral consequence, reason has no truths it can discern, nothing of moral significance it can claim to know, much less contribute to the public debate.

That’s the “faith” that is being offered by those who want to change the time tested Golden Triangle of Freedom. You’ll see it in the public square today, and it’s popular because it pretends to impose nobody’s values on anybody. Yet it’s an illusion because it uses a cloak of “neutrality,” “objectivity” and “rationality” that results in the imposition of secular values on everybody while marginalizing faith and those who believe as moralizing theocrats.

Kennedy concluded his Houston speech by saying he did not “intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.” The sad fact is he could have stood by his beliefs and won; he chose not to. Instead he charted a course that has won many elections, but has put American civilization at risk. I have always felt comfortable to be on the path our founders took, the one that is now less traveled and invites the most criticism. I do so because I believe we all have an obligation to be good stewards of this great inheritance that generations of Americans created with their last full measure of devotion.

That’s why we should feel so blessed to be here at a time when the land that God has so richly blessed is being put to the test. Many generations are never called to do great things, make great sacrifices to maintain liberty. We are the fortunate ones who have the opportunity not only preserve but build on the founders’ vision of freedom supported by virtue which in turn is supported by a vibrant faith — a mutually strengthening interface of church and state that with our collective effort will keep America that beacon of hope that shining city on the hill.

Bless you and may God continue to bless America.

Obama repentant? …or just politically stupid

Posted on February 11, 2012 by John Brian Schuettler

Meeting with his top advisers in the Oval Office last week amid rising anger from Catholic Democrats, liberal columnists and left-leaning religious leaders — a fed-up Mr. Obama issued an order meant for Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. Ms. Sebelius and agency lawyers had initially told the president they needed a year to work out a compromise that had seemed obvious to some in the administration from the start: make the new rule more like that offered by the State of Hawaii, where employees of religiously affiliated institutions obtained contraceptives through a side benefit offered by insurance companies.

But in difficult internal negotiations, a group of advisers had bested Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others and sold the president on a stricter rule. Now the political furor surrounding it was threatening to consume signs of economic improvement giving a boost to the White House and put the Obama re-election campaign on the defensive.

Time was up, Mr. Obama told his advisers, according to officials in the meeting. Ms. Sebelius, a Catholic who, along with the president’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes, had pushed hard for the new rule, was not there, but the message came through: Figure out a way to make something like the Hawaii model work.

In announcing the shift on Friday, Mr. Obama sought to quell the brewing rebellion. Not unexpectedly, the Catholic bishops issued a statement renewing their call for “legislative action on religious liberty,” and calling rescission of the mandate the “only complete solution.” And Speaker John A. Boehner’s spokesman on Friday promised that House Republicans “will continue to work toward a legislative solution.”

What had not been anticipated enough, despite warnings from Mr. Biden; the former chief of staff William Daley; Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Bruce Reed; and the deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, administration officials said, was that allies would be furious, too.

Tim Kaine, a Virginia Senate candidate and former head of the Democratic National Committee, echoed the concern of Sister Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, that it went too far. So did some liberal-leaning Catholics in the news media, like Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” who called the rule “frightening,” and E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist, who wrote that Mr. Obama had “utterly botched” the issue.

Meanwhile, Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a group founded by nuns decades ago to lobby on social justice issues, warned White House officials that nearly 500 Catholic activists would be in Washington this weekend for a conference, and that if no compromise had been reached by then, all of them would return to their parishes fired up about the contraception mandate.

“We were getting killed,” one administration official said Friday. The White House picked the deputy chief of staff Nancy-Ann DeParle to talk to Sister Keehan about ways the rule could be made palatable. Meanwhile, administration officials were hearing from women’s rights organizations, particularly Planned Parenthood, who warned that they would oppose any compromise that made employees pick up the tab.

“After the many genuine concerns that have been raised over the last few weeks, as well as, frankly, the more cynical desire on the part of some to make this into a political football, it became clear that spending months hammering out a solution was not going to be an option,” Mr. Obama said on Friday.