Baltimore — Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, in his final address as president of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, called on them Monday to take up the cause of Christians in places like Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and India who are persecuted and killed for their faith.
It was a notable shift in priorities. For the last two years the bishops have poured their time and resources into a campaign to fight what they saw as serious threats to religious liberty in the United States. Their prime concern has been a provision in President Obama’s health care overhaul that would force even some Catholic employers to provide contraception in their insurance plans, when Catholic teaching prohibits the use of artificial contraception.
But Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said that the struggles over religious liberty in the United States “pale in comparison” to the persecution of Christians abroad.
“Now we are being beckoned — by history, by our Holy Father, by the force of our own logic,” he said, “to extend those efforts to the dramatic front lines of this battle where Christians are paying for their fidelity with their lives.”
The shift in emphasis was the clearest sign that eight months after Pope Francis was elected, his priorities were beginning to trickle down to the organization that Cardinal Dolan leads, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Francis provoked widespread discussion in the church with an interview published in September in which he said that the church should not be so “obsessed” with issues like abortion, gay marriage and contraception — but should instead lead with the Gospel’s message of love and mercy.
He has said the church must be “for the poor,” and has visited with refugees and washed the feet of juveniles in prison, cameras in tow.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, told the bishops that he had met with Francis in June in the pope’s simple apartment in the Vatican, and that Francis “made a special point of saying that he wants ‘pastoral’ bishops, not bishops who profess or follow a particular ideology.”
Noting the church’s diversity, Archbishop Viganò added, “We must take care that, for us as a church, this diversity does not grow into division through misrepresentation or misunderstanding, and that division does not deteriorate into fragmentation.”
The bishops’ religious liberty campaign has put them in a direct and sustained confrontation with the Obama administration — contributing to criticism that the bishops’ conference has become enmeshed with the Republican Party. More than 70 lawsuits have been filed against the administration by Catholic universities, hospitals and other entities and by other Christian churches and institutions, as well as by private employers.
At a news conference, Cardinal Dolan said that the bishops are not abandoning the religious liberty campaign, and that it had been “very successful.” But he said that in the interest of justice and the bishops’ own credibility, the bishops should heed the pleas that they have heard from Christians overseas to turn their attention to those who are being killed and persecuted for their faith.
He said, “We don’t have tanks at our door, we don’t have people being macheted on their way home from Mass.”
In an interview, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, the chairman of the bishops’ ad hoc committee on religious liberty, said, “This doesn’t represent a backing away. It represents an amplification.”
He said that since the lawsuits have resulted in contradictory rulings by various courts, he hoped the Supreme Court would take up the issue. In the meantime, he said the bishops were pursuing “creative solutions” to the health care mandate that may be announced later.
The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior analyst for The National Catholic Reporter, a liberal Catholic newspaper and website, said he perceived Francis’s effect in the bishops’ new approach to religious liberty: “They’re not withdrawing that agenda item, but so far in this meeting, they’re just not obsessing.”
The bishops, however, did spend part of their afternoon session hearing an update on their efforts to stop same-sex marriage. One bishop asked whether it was possible to come up with a slogan sufficiently short and memorable to compete with the term “marriage equality” used by gay rights advocates.
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, the chairman of the bishops’ committee that works on marriage, said, “We speak about marriage as the union of one man and one woman. I don’t think we’ve come up with a two-word phrase.”
Several liberal Catholic groups held news conferences outside the bishops’ meeting, calling for a focus on poverty and economic injustice.
Fred Rotondaro, the chairman of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said, “I want to see the bishops take a role in fighting poverty and inequality in this country, and I don’t think they’re doing it.”