by Eric Giunta

This past
Sunday, bishops around the United States delivered to their congregations
a
short pastoral letter urging prayer, fasting, and legislative
lobbying against the Obama administration’s announcement
that all employers, most religious institutions included, will soon
have to subsidize their employees’ contraceptives, sterilizations,
and abortion-inducing drugs.

Given the terribly
low expectations most Catholics have of their bishops, it is no
surprise that many of my co-religionists, surveying the now-daily
condemnations by clerics and laymen (on both the orthodox
“right” and the dissenting
“left”) speak of a proverbial “waking”
of “the sleeping giant.” But I’m afraid a dose of
ecclesiastical realism is in order. All indications are that the
bishops’ approach to these events is woefully off the mark and cannot
but backfire against them in the long run.

In short: the
bishops themselves bear a significant share of the blame for these
latest actions by the administration, and in some respects the Catholic
faithful are receiving their just desserts.

Let me be clear:
the bishops are absolutely on-target when they insist that
the new regulations are both constitutionally dubious and morally
atrocious, and that because these executive rules are unjust laws
(an oxymoron if there ever was one) civil disobedience is the only
legitimately Christian response to them.

But where they
fail most miserably is in realizing why these regulations
are wrong. To this writer’s knowledge, not a single bishop
has spoken out against the inherent immorality of the federal
government forcing any employer to provide any particular
benefit to prospective employees. Furthermore, in seeking exemptions
solely for religious institutions the Church is neglecting
to defend the conscience rights of for-profit employers whose
Christian or other moral convictions would otherwise preclude them
from complying with these regulations with a clean conscience.

In the interests
of space, I cannot possibly give a detailed exposition of why it
is that the only political philosophy that is compatible
with the Gospel and the immutable core of Catholic social teaching
is in fact some species of libertarianism. That’s libertarianism,
not libertinism. At its core, libertarianism is nothing more
than the political realization of the non-aggression principle,
i.e., that the only time force is ever a proportional reaction to
another’s evil is when that other has himself first resorted to
violence and so must be punished and defended against. This means
that the state can never morally resort to force (and yes, all
government rules and regulations are exercises in force) in order
to impose Caesar’s subjective determination of the precise contours
of so-called positive rights; rather, the state must limit itself
to employing force only to defend the innocent from violent aggression
against their negative property rights (“property” defined
as one’s life, liberty, and possessions).

Most Catholics,
including most “conservatives,” confuse libertarianism
with libertinism. They mistakenly believe that libertarians are
social atomists who deny the real existence of objective moral obligations
to the weak and the indigent. I do not personally know a single
libertarian that believes such; doubtless there are some who do,
but not because they are libertarians. A libertarian may
or may not be a social atomist; but suffice it to say no Catholic
libertarian can be one.

Thoughtful
Christian libertarians do not deny that charity is positively mandated
by both the natural law and the Gospel. We do not deny that
justice demands that we give of our time, talent, and treasure
to serve the needs of those materially and spiritually worse off
than we are. We do deny that there follows from these premises
a moral right on the part of any man, democratically elected
or not, whether he call himself Caesar or citizen,
to impose at gunpoint his subjective determination
of just how much superabundant time, talent, and treasure one man
owes another.

The Church
has not yet embraced a properly Christian libertarianism and made
it her own, but several Catholic intellectuals and activists
have (from Tom Woods and Jeffrey Tucker to Dorothy Day and Peter
Maurin), and they are no less Catholic for it. Unfortunately, neither
the US Bishops nor the Holy See have caught up to the lessons of
history, and neither has taken to its logical conclusion the fundamental
premises of their own Church’s social teaching.

It took the Church several centuries to definitively
disavow her acquiescence (since the late Middle Ages) to the
notion that the state had a moral right and obligation to violently
enforce a man’s positive religious obligation to embrace the true
religion and worship God according to the approved rites of His
Church. For centuries, the Church, as ferociously as the most pious
Islamist, endorsed the putting-to-death of apostate Catholics and,
where feasible, the political subjugation of all non-Catholics besides,
this in the hopes of encouraging the latter to embrace her true
faith. This is an awfully truncated summary of a very complex history
that must be understood with an appreciation of unique historical
circumstances, and without anachronistically imposing present moral
standards on our cultural forbearers; and it is worth noting to
my readership the little-known fact that Protestants down through
the 18^th century and beyond almost unanimously
endorsed these same policies. Nevertheless, this is a substantially
accurate summary of a tragic history, and one that no amount of
ahistorical pop-apologetic will do to mollify.

I bring this
up not to re-open old wounds, but to make a point: The Church learned,
through centuries of political trial-and-error, that it does not
follow from the objective immorality of irreligion that the state
has a moral right or duty to exercise coercive force to impose Catholic
orthodoxy on an unwilling person. Besides being wrong in itself,
religious persecution of non-violent “heretics” and “infidels”
has had disastrous real-world consequences for the freedom of the
faithful and the spread of the Gospel. For example, it is no accident
that the same nations which once produced the Sun King, the Spanish
Inquisition, and the conquistadors gave the modern era the Jacobin
Reign
of Terror, the Spanish Red
Terror, and the Mexican Cristero
War respectively. From Nazi
death camps to Communist
gulags, a common moral confronts
the Church of the 20^th and 21^st centuries:
whatever Caesar can do for the Church, he can and will
do to her, and with a vengeance!

Sadly, the
United States bishops have failed to apply this lesson to their
full-throated endorsement of the modern welfare state under
the Orwellian rubric of “social justice”. Rather than
devoting their time and resources to transforming Catholic parishes
into real power-houses of real social justice for their local
communities, the bishops have adopted a model of social polity that
can, without much exaggeration, be reduced to the formula: God
+ Socialism = Catholic Social Teaching. Activism, that would
be better and more evangelically spent pooling the resources of
every practicing Catholic in every parish to provide near-comprehensive
social services that would make Catholics (and others, but let’s
begin at home) less dependent on Caesar and an immorally ungrateful
entitlement mentality, is expended every year, to the tune of millions
of dollars, lobbying state and federal legislatures to expand Caesar’s
power and overreach.

What right
do we Catholics have to be shocked and indignant at the latest show
of religious persecution from the Obama administration and the Democrat
Party? For decades our bishops have insisted, well beyond
their competencies as successors to the Apostles, that the state
must provide “basic health care” to its citizens, and
they have raised no objection to that same state requiring private
employers to provide such for their employees. Are we really
surprised that Caesar, having been handed the Catholic imprimatur
for these powers on a silver paten, has now decided that abortions,
contraceptives, and sterilizations constitute “basic health
care”? Every sensible libertarian, and many a mainstream
“conservative,” saw this coming: why didn’t any of
the bishops?

Just about
everything I’ve written above can be said of many an Evangelical
leader, and to varying degrees, but I hope my Catholic brothers
and sisters will forgive my taking the time to take the log out
of our own eye before examining the specks in others. Prayer, fasting,
and repentance are certainly called for as we resist the latest
moves of the Obama administration, but I would humbly suggest the
bishops take a sincere look at how their own disastrous political
prescriptions have contributed to the present crisis.

Thankfully,
Lent is just around the corner, and this year’s penitential season
is as good a time for serious political metanoia as any.

February
1, 2012

Eric Giunta
[send him mail] is a recent
graduate of Florida State University College of Law, where he served
as president of that school’s chapter of the nation’s premier fellowship
of conservative and libertarian law students.

Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.