Key Catholic Ally Jumps Sinking ObamaCare Ship

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Freedom Of Worship: A group representing Catholic hospitals says the administration's "compromise" on its contraception mandate is unworkable and fails to address the issue of religious liberty. The church is virtually unified in its opposition.

Premature as that may sound, the Catholic Hospital Association (CHA) on Friday pulled back the thin reed of religious support for ObamaCare the administration had been clinging to in insisting the Affordable Health Care Act, the constitutionality of which is about to be determined by the Supreme Court, was not a full-blown assault on our constitutionally guaranteed religious liberty.

The association had been conducting a review of the "compromise" offered by President Obama himself. Under that deal, the cost of providing birth control would be covered by insurance companies and not by the religious employers themselves. Yet many religious institutions are self-insured.

In a letter to Health and Human Services signed by the group's president, Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan, the hospital group said the compromise initially seemed to be "a good first step," but that examination of the details proved disappointing.

The plan would be "unduly cumbersome" to carry out and "unlikely to adequately meet the religious liberty concerns" of all its members, Keehan wrote.

CHA represents more than 600 of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and has more than 2,000 members, if you include nursing homes and other similar facilities. One in every six hospital patients in the U.S. receives medical care in a Catholic hospital.

President Obama now faces virtually united Catholic opposition — with the CHA lining up against ObamaCare alongside the 43 Catholic institutions in 12 jurisdictions, ranging from the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., to the University of Notre Dame, which have filed suit to protect the religious freedom they thought the U.S. Constitution already did.

These suits are separate from the case soon to be decided by the Supreme Court. The high court will decide whether the federal government can force individuals to buy a product, namely health insurance, simply because they are U.S. citizens.

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The Catholic groups object, as Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, recently said on Fox News, to what they consider the unprecedented attempt by the Obama administration to define what a church and religious institution are — the notion that you're a church if the government, in Soviet-style fashion, says you're a church.