http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/13499

In today’s issue of The Tablet (the international Catholic weekly Founded 1840 – Britain’s oldest journal bar The Spectator), that publication’s characteristically hysterical Obamamania has been taken beyond all moral acceptability, orthodoxy, or any pretence of Catholic sensibility. This time its about healthcare, or “Obamacare”. I shall elucidate.

On political issues the Catholic Church has always been a bit split; prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) the Church mainly focused on critiquing liberalism, secularism, “Modernism” (a sceptical and anti-authoritarian outlook), socialism, Communism, in the 19th Century democracy itself, sexual liberalism, divorce and all the traditional thorny medical ethical issues – abortion, euthanasia, artificial contraception, etc. However, since Vatican II there has been an increasing focus on social issues, including “social justice”, workers’ rights, the evils of excessive capitalism, and re-focusing economics in such a manner that the human being is seen as the end rather than merely the means of economic activity. Laudable moral intentions, for sure, but often displaying a lack of awareness of how economics really works. How do we MAKE people care about each other? The answer to this is pretty unclear, other than everyone becoming Christians and being charitable towards one another voluntarily.

However, The Tablet chooses to interpret these moral imperatives solely according to a narrow, statist understanding. This is certainly a long way from Pius IX’s 1846 pronouncement that socialism is “a pest”, and reflects an uninformed and naive outlook. Having championed Obama during his election campaign, the (highly unorthodox) editorial of The Tablet  has proudly asserted from on high that “U.S. Bishops must back Obama.” The argument presented is dangerous and wrong – that the Church in America ought to shelve its problems with state-sanctioned abortion (in the Church’s view mass state infanticide) and all the other areas where monolithic healthcare systems, such as the NHS, trample over traditioanl Christian moral values, in order to pursue the “general principle of the common good”. In contrast to this “common good” of public healthcare, the issue of abortion is passed off as a “specifically Catholic issue”, and the editor attacks the Bishops for failing to “put the promotion of social justice above their churchly priorities.” Sorry, one issue, that of the moral imperative to heal the sick, cannot be so warmly lauded as “social justice” while an equally important imperative – not to kill the unborn – is given the mere rhetorical status of “their own churchly priorities”. This is unfair, un-Catholic, cheap and incredibly one-sided, and a Catholic publication ought to know better.

Furthermore, The Tablet presents the Obamacare issue as solely one of a distinction between people either having healthcare or not – it’s either given to them graciously from Their Lord Barack or denied them by greedy capitalists, apparently the “robber barons” of our age. The subtleties of the difficulties of state funding, the inefficiencies and abuses generated by a universal “free-at-the-point-of-use” principle, as weighed against the evil of people not having healthcare, are dealt with using one sweeping, blunt conclusion: the state must provide universal care, so saith the Lord, and the Bishops are obligated to pressure for this. All else, even the rights of the unborn, are secondary.

Even if one accepts that Church teaching on imperatives to heal the sick must translate directly into state-run healthcare (a highly contentious assumption), one must surely accept that this is less clear and more tenuous than Church teaching on abortion, which is thoroughly clear-cut. What’s more, the Church must fight the battle of attitudes: we in the West generally do not see any intrinsic evils in state healthcare, but are morally apathetic about abortion – the Bishops must draw a line in the sand and defend it, because once Obamacare is accepted in principle it is only a small step further to sanction state-funded abortion en masse. Even if you personally agree with abortion, or believe in the right to decide for oneself whether it is acceptable, then surely on the latter principle one must oppose the confiscation of taxpayers’ money to spend by the state on abortion “services” against the will of many of the taxpayers? Opposition to abortion in the US is widespread and many will be outraged to see their money spent in this way. The Bishops are entirely right to focus on this issue and the need to keep abortion out of the state system. This is not a “mistake” and The Tablet, if it makes any claim to retain the name of a Catholic weekly, ought to be ashamed of itself.