The Catholic faculty at Georgetown University is not backing down from its invitation to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, prompting a rebuke from the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and setting the stage for a good ol'-fashioned Catholic-off.
L'history: in January, Georgetown invited Sebelius to speak at commencement after students in the policy school expressed a preference for her. This makes, like, sense, as Sebelius is one of the most important policy figures in the country. Perhaps too important: immediately after the invite, she was embroiled in a drama over a mandate that employers, including religious-affiliated institutions, provide contraception through company health plans, a requirement that is anathema to Catholic teaching. After an uproar, Sebelius and the Obama administration crafted an "accomadation," putting the onus of contraception coverage on the insurance companies. Many religious groups backed down after the compromise, but the sizable conservative contingent of Catholic Bishops is still unhappy.
Sebelius was the architect of this mandate, making her public policy enemy #1 to conservative Catholics. Georgetown is a Catholic university, shake well, here we are.
On Tuesday, Georgetown President John DeGioia reminded everybody that the invitation occurred prior to the mandate dust-up, and anyways, G-town is a university, which tends to be committed to the "free exchange of ideas." It's hard to find fault with DeGioia on this point: last month they hosted American Psycho stand-in Paul Ryan, and though the faculty circulated a petition objecting to his budget, they didn't kick him off campus. The emphasis was entirely on the communication of ideas, not the silencing of them.
This line of thinking gets nowhere with Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who issued a statement in response to DeGioia emphasizing that the problem is not contraception, nosiree, but "the selection of a featured speaker whose actions as a public official present the most direct challenge to religious liberty in recent history." Back during the mandate debate, PoliticOlogy argued that the Bishops had a point in their religious freedom objection, but that it was hard to take that argument seriously when they didn't ameliorate their criticism even after the Obama administration's compromise, which relocated the morally objectionable elements of the mandate off of Catholic institutions. If religious freedom, and not women poppin' hanky-panky pills, really was the issue, it should have been mostly solved; instead, Wuerl himself continued to object to the mandate, showing the type of ideological obstinance usually associated with a certain political party.
PoliticOlogy thinks the real problem is contained in this line: "The real issue for concern...[is] the apparent lack of unity with and disregard for the bishops and so many others across the nation who are committed to the defense of freedom of religion." Georgetown has already made headlines once with its petition against Ryan's budget, a move that did not go down well with conservative Catholics. Now they're doing so again with Sebelius. I believe Wuerl when he says this isn't about contraception; it seems much more about uniformity of belief, something that does not dovetail with the mission of a university, Catholic or not. Under this theory, the very fact that we're discussing this issue means Georgetown has already won.
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Related: The Catholic Conservative's Guide To Cognitive Dissonance
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