restless hippo

“If someone a year ago had told me that Catholic social service agencies in Illinois would be forbidden by law to arrange adoptions or place children in foster homes, I would have said that he or she could not be serious. If others had said that a well-established Catholic college in the archdiocese would be told by a government agency that it is no longer Catholic, I would have thought that impossible. If two years ago I had been told that Catholic hospitals and universities and other institutions that are securely part of the church’s ministry would have to insure their employees for medical “services” that are immoral, I would have thought that we were still protected against a decree that would force our institutions to close or to secularize themselves. If I had imagined that the church could not go to the aid of women who have been trafficked or of refugees needing care without offering them “the full range of reproductive services” (including abortion and sterilization), I would have dismissed the thought as a mere fantasy. If the thought had occurred that the U.S. government would attack in court the right of a church to determine who are its properly recognized ministers and who are not, it would have been dismissed as pure fancy. Similarly fanciful would have been a law, actually introduced in a State legislature, revising the church’s internal governance, taking it from priests and bishops and vesting it in committees dictated by State law. These developments have made me anxious. The church’s work with the poor and the disadvantaged, the sick and the uneducated, the hungry and the homeless has never been threatened before. Loss of these ministries, as well as a weakening of our right to govern ourselves and to worship God in an orderly and regular fashion, will affect not only Catholics but also our whole society.”

- Cardinal Francis George