The religious left’s campaign

Biblical ideas and language is ever-evolving and emerging in the battle over health care in America.

People of faith in the pro-life movement are preparing this year’s ’40 Days for Life’ campaign wholeheartedly with community organization, action and prayer.

40 Days for Life takes a determined, peaceful approach to showing local communities the consequences of abortion in their own neighborhoods, for their own friends and families…

The mission of the campaign is to bring together the body of Christ in a spirit of unity during a focused 40 day campaign of prayer, fasting, and peaceful activism, with the purpose of repentance, to seek God’s favor to turn hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life, thus bringing an end to abortion in America.

Now, the religious left has applied that sort of activism to a different cause: ’40 Days for Health Reform”, which Fr. Robert Sirico calls out as

a massive effort by the Religious Left to muster support during the congressional summer recess for the Obama administration’s nationalization of America’s healthcare system. Liberal Christians and Jews even recruited the president on August 19 for a nationwide call-in, which was said to draw 140,000 listeners. If the ministers, rabbis, and lay “community organizers” in the churches and synagogues succeed, we’ll all be wandering in the parched wilderness of socialized medicine—and for a lot longer than 40 days.

That nationwide call-in was a dueling retort to the historical nationwide webcast on July 23 by a coalition of pro-life organizations (including Democrats for Life) who warned that the health care reform as it stands will de facto include taxpayer funded abortion, unless it’s explicitly excluded.

Back to Fr. Sirico’s article in the American Enterprise Institute’s journal…

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has argued that healthcare is a human right that should be available to all. “The Bishops’ Conference believes healthcare reform should be truly universal and it should be genuinely affordable,” wrote Bishop William F. Murphy, the chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, in a July 17 letter to Congress. Now, Catholics can agree or disagree with the bishops’ advocacy for universal healthcare—that’s a question of prudence not dogma. Tellingly, Bishop Murphy’s letter did not cite Scripture, the catechism, or any papal encyclical. It was argued from a basis in policy and motivated by the bishop’s honest desire for improvement in a system where one in six patients in the United States is cared for in Catholic hospitals.

(Though Sirico notes in previous paragraphs how the religious left has been citing Scripture, selectively, and using it against opponents of Obama’s plan for reform.)

But note also what the Catholic bishops did. They issued a clear and forceful call for a reformed health policy that “protects and respects the life and dignity of all people from conception until natural death.” That non-negotiable insistence on the respect for life is, by and large, missing from the Religious Left’s campaign. What we get instead are bland assurances, parroted from White House and congressional talking point memos, that “life and dignity” would be forever safe under ObamaCare. I am not persuaded.

What else is missing?

There is little or no recognition that other key institutions—the family, the Church, local civic associations—might also have a role to play in shaping reform. Certainly, no recognition for those civic and social groups that have a healthy distrust of an invasive state. Instead, we get the constant demand from the Religious Left that Washington must act. It is a sort of idolatry—the worship of Big Government as the solution to all of our problems.

Sirico concludes with some tough love.

Faith communities should recognize the Religious Left’s “40 Days” campaign for what it is: a politically driven “community organizing” effort that aims to expand a bloated state and make Americans evermore dependent on politicians and bureaucrats, not doctors, for healthcare. As people of faith, we need to speak up against this dishonest affair. After all, it’s our “prophetic” duty.