USA - Catholic leaders lashed out at the Obama administration's decision to require religious employers' health plans to cover contraceptives, accusing the White House of betraying them on the issue.
The fight risks turning off Catholic voters—who helped put President Barack Obama in the White House—in the run-up to November's presidential election. Over the weekend, some priests blasted the decision while addressing their congregations during Mass.
Catholic leaders say they were surprised by new federal rules released Friday that require employers to provide all forms of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration without co-payments or deductibles for health-insurance policyholders. Most employers have to comply with the requirement starting in August.
The Obama administration gave employers with moral objections to birth control an extra year to comply, but it declined to expand an exemption to allow employers with a religious affiliation to opt out of the requirement. Religious groups say the exemption is so narrow that while it may include churches and other houses of worship, it won't include religious hospitals, schools or charities.
The rule has been characterized as a "literally unconscionable" attack on religious freedom by Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Archbishop Dolan, who will be elevated to the rank of cardinal next month, has urged Catholics to contact their lawmakers about it. Some Catholic Democrats, including Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, assailed the rule. Notre Dame University president Rev. John Jenkins, who hosted Mr. Obama as the school's commencement speaker in May 2009, also criticized the decision.
President Obama telephoned Archbishop Dolan on Friday morning to tell him of the decision, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The pair had discussed the issue during a November meeting, during which the archbishop "got the message that they could work together," said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh.
The issue was likely to form the "backdrop to future relations," she said. "It's too big to ignore... the elephant is tramping around in the sanctuary."
An administration official on Tuesday confirmed the call was made on Friday and reiterated comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the administration is committed to its partnerships with faith-based groups.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), a Catholic who supports abortion rights and access to contraception, said she thought the White House had handled the decision "very well" by being open to listening to religious leaders. "Contraception is about preventing unintended pregnancy," she said. "I think that they did what they needed to do."
Catholic organizations including hospitals, schools and charities had pushed the Department of Health and Human Services to recognize them as religious groups that should be allowed to opt out of the requirement, part of the March 2010 health-care overhaul law. Representatives of the organizations have said that they had believed from discussions with administration officials that their concerns over the issue had been met.
"There has been a taking advantage of the religious community," said Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. "It is clear that what was shared in private has not been followed through."
Paul Loverde, bishop of Arlington, Va., issued a statement Tuesday calling it a "terrible lapse of judgment" in which "an unprecedented and very dangerous line has been crossed."
Catholic leaders almost kept the health-care overhaul from passing when they objected to allowing plans sold inside the bill's federally subsidized insurance exchanges to cover abortion services. Lawmakers eventually struck an agreement, and several high-profile Catholic associations supported the final law.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opposed the law, clashed with the administration again late last year: The group's migration and refugee services office was denied a grant to help victims of human trafficking because the bishops declined to provide abortion services or contraception.
Catholic voters have been roughly evenly divided between Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in recent years, opting for Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000, George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004, and Mr. Obama in 2008, according to exit-polling data collated by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
James Salt, executive director of Catholics United, a group supportive of the health-care overhaul law, said the contraception debate "is an issue that rank-and-file or pew-sitting Catholics aren't spending a lot of time thinking about." But he said he expected the bishops to maintain vocal opposition to the decision, keeping the controversy alive during the 2012 campaign. "This has the potential to be a major distraction for Catholic voters," he said.
While most Catholic leaders oppose the use of birth control, Catholics themselves don't necessarily agree. About 98% of sexually active Catholic women use contraception, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York group that supports the use of contraception.